Historians of the Dutch commercial empire have long assumed that it was a resolutely secular business. Charles Boxer cited an Amsterdam merchant in 1638 who avowed that if he could make a profit by sailing through hell, he would risk burning his sails to do so (The Dutch seaborne empire, 1600–1800, London 1965, 113). Two years later, the Dutch East India Company accepted a treaty allowing them to trade with Japan, whose terms forbade them from any observance of Christianity at all while in Japanese waters, with all religious texts to be kept in sealed chests and Sundays not to be marked by so much as a change of clothes.

But for a few years now scholars have been nibbling away at what Charles Parker calls the ‘unsupported judgement in older scholarship’ that Dutch Calvinism was not interested in cross-cultural religious encounters. Danny Noorlander’s outstanding Heaven’s wrath: the Protestant Reformation and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic world (Ithaca, NY 2019) made the case that the West India Company was a much more assertively religious entity than has been recognised. That book was a warm-up act for this one, Parker’s long-awaited and definitive account of Dutch Calvinism’s global adventures in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Parker’s argument, informed as it is by decades of archival research in the Netherlands and in Indonesia, is subtly nuanced. He is not claiming that the Dutch sphere was a Calvinist equivalent of the Catholic empires of Spain and Portugal, although he does want to write Calvinism into the story of what he calls ‘a global movement of proselytization in the early modern period’, Islamic as well as Christian. Indeed, he is wary of talk of the Dutch having an ‘empire’ at all. This was not an age of hegemonic European imperialism, at least not in the Old World. The Dutch, like their Portuguese and English rivals, were primarily building chains of entrepots instead of colonies, and maintained tenuous control only over the small amounts of territory needed to secure their trade. Unlike their European rivals, the Dutch were emissaries of a republic forged in a generational struggle against imperialism, and knew in their bones that they were on the side of liberty, ready to help oppressed indigenous peoples across the world stand against the depredations of the Spanish-Portuguese Antichrist. They continued to believe this even when building their trading networks involved massacre, devastation and enslavement. None of that, in their eyes, was conquest, which was what Catholics did; Grotius convinced the Dutch that bringing the benefits of free and unfettered trade to the world, by any means necessary, was universally permitted by natural law. What’s more, he argued, the very fact that the Dutch chose to come to trade freely, treating their partners with scrupulous honesty regardless of religion, was itself the most effective way to allure them to the Calvinist gospel.

That perspective provided a pervasive Calvinist underpinning to Dutch global trading networks in two distinct ways. First, it gave meaning to the astonishing growth of a Dutch commercial empire whose sudden materialisation could only be providential. The Reformed Church had been given an ‘open door’ to the heathen world – the expression became a cliché; naturally, it was the Dutch people’s responsibility to make use of it before the door was shut again, and they were judged by God for their negligence. The ‘primary fruit’ of global commerce, wrote the minister Godefridus Udemans in 1640, ‘is the conversion of the poor heathens’, and if that is neglected, the whole Dutch maritime miracle will fail. So the East India Company’s stated intention, in its first church order of 1624, to ‘bring heathens, Mohammedans, and other blind nations’ to the faith was merely the tribute the Company owed to the God who had granted it such success. When the Company’s governors described themselves as ‘foster-fathers’ to the Church, they were not joking. Secondly, and more importantly, if these religious initiatives nested inside the trading companies’ commercial rationale, that rationale itself was nested in a larger religio-political purpose. The companies were created by the Dutch States General as means of waging economic war on the forces of Antichrist: indeed, the trigger for the creation of the West India Company was the expiry of the Twelve Years’ Truce with Spain in 1621. Ministers abroad complained, as missionaries always do, that they were under-resourced and had only lukewarm political support, but in fact the companies, required as they were to be self-funding, ploughed enormous resources into religious projects.

Dutch religious ambitions overseas, then, were different in scope and nature from those of their Catholic rivals, but were no less real for all that. The central insight of Parker’s book is that, naturally enough, the Dutch in Asia and the Americas worked with the religious norms that they had developed at home in the Netherlands, norms that often did not translate well into new settings. Whether at home or abroad, the early modern Dutch were proud of not forcing consciences, but insistent on rigorous tests of doctrinal knowledge and moral rectitude for full church membership. Yet the much-vaunted Dutch tolerance had sharp limits. The Reformed Church was granted a monopoly on public religion. Hence the 1642 ordinance in Batavia (modern Jakarta) insisting that ‘no other religion could be imparted or propagated in secret or in public’, and repeated efforts by preachers and (half-heartedly) by Company governors to suppress open religious celebrations ranging from Catholic processions through Hindu dancing festivals to – a particularly sore point – funerary rites of all kinds.

Instead of compelling conversion, however, the distinctively Dutch approach to building a Reformed Church overseas was to create the structures in which a Reformed community might grow up, and wait for it to happen. This was what had been done with Catholic populations who fell under Reformed rule in Europe, and so it was expected to work abroad too. The recipe was this: designate baptised Catholics (of whom there were thousands in Dutch Batavia, Ceylon and Brazil) as ‘Christians’; compel or encourage their children to attend schools; maintain tight controls on actual church membership; and wait. As Parker points out, this focus on ‘community formation’ rather than individual conversion was at odds with contemporary anglophone Protestantism and with modern evangelicalism, but was absolutely in line with the norms of the Dutch Reformation. It failed, but perhaps not as absolutely as it might seem. In the early eighteenth century around 5 per cent of the supposedly Christian population of the spice island of Amboina were full church members. By 1790 that had risen to 14 per cent – which still may not sound like much, but in some regions of the Netherlands the proportion of church members was little higher. Calvinists always expected that many would be called but few chosen.

What did it all add up to? Perhaps not very much, although if you go to the lively Protestant communities of modern north Sulawesi, the whole experience may seem a little less quixotic. And in any case, as a window into how one religious culture navigated an age of global encounters, it is a remarkable and important story – although readers could be forgiven for feeling that Parker skates over the exploitation and sometimes genocidal brutality that punctuated the Dutch imperial experience. In the end, however, he concludes that these encounters changed the religious perspective of the Dutch more than that of the regions they colonised. A pair of chapters at the end of the book mount the intriguing case that the colonial experience gave Dutch religion a more cosmopolitan, comparative flavour than its Calvinist heritage might imply. ‘Perhaps even Enlightenment’, he ventures in the book’s last line, owes something to global entanglements: a characteristically cautious and shrewd conclusion to a work of rock-ribbed scholarship.