Hanauish-Indies

The Hanauish Indies (Hanauisch-Indien in German) was the name of a contractually agreed, but never realized, colonial project by the county of Hanau in what is now French Guiana, Suriname and northern Brazil.[1]

Map of Planned Hanau-Indies, 1669

In July 1669, on behalf of Friedrich Casimir of Hanau in Amsterdam, the Hanau Privy Councilor Johann Joachim Becher signed a contract with the Dutch West India Company to take an area of 3,000 square miles (100,000 km²) from it as a fief.[2] The aim was to achieve a positive trade balance with a colony in order to compensate for the financial problems of the County of Hanau (mercantilism).[3] The plan was to found the Kingdom of Hanaui India there and to make the Native Indians into a "friendly and civilized" people. The contract provided for extensive rights for the Dutch West India Company, such as a transport monopoly for traffic with the colony.

The area of the planned colony was by far larger than the county of Hanau itself which had an area of 44 square miles (1,500 km²) . From the beginning there was a lack of opportunities to fund such a project and there was a lack of colonists. The project ended in a financial fiasco for the county of Hanau. An attempt to sell it to the King of England in 1672 did not meet with approval. The project finally failed with the beginning of the Franco-Dutch War in the same year.

See also

References
  1. "By Ajab Mohamed".
  2. Gisela Graichen, Horst Founder: German Colonies - Dream and Trauma . Berlin, 2nd edition 2005, p. 23; and: Hahnzog: Hanauisch-Indien , p. 21.
  3. "Historiana : Case Study : European Colonial Settlement in the Caribbean: Duke Jacobus of Courland's Colony in Tobago".
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.