The Company's Chinese Pirates: How the Dutch East India Company Tried to Lead a Coalition of Pirates to War against China, 1621–1662^*

TONIO ANDRADE
Emory University

IN THE EARLY seventeenth century, the Dutch East India Company stormed into Chinese waters, intent on doing business in China. Their demands for free trade, however, were rebuffed by Chinese officials, who distrusted the "red-haired barbarians" and their powerful ships. Yet these same officials often granted prestigious posts to Chinese pirates in order to persuade them to abandon their lives of crime. As the Dutch watched one pirate after another make the transition to respectability, they grew frustrated. Why, they wondered, should pirates be rewarded for their crimes while the company was ignored? Reasoning that "the Chinese pirates ... can amply show us how and in what manner the empire of China might be pressured," the Dutch decided to implement a cunning plan: to unite the pirates and attack China, after which, they imagined, the "mandarins" would agree to grant them free trade.1	1
The pirates, however, were a restless lot. Usually organized in small, competitive cells, they sometimes banded together into large coalitions to attack shipping in China's busy sea lanes. 2 At times they were happy to work with the Dutch, but in this rough-and-tumble world an ally might at any time be replaced by an upstart. The company's pirate coalition therefore proved unstable, and the pirate wars were instead won by Zheng Zhilong (), a pirate-turned-official who had once worked for the Dutch as a translator. He, like the Dutch, struggled with pirates, but thanks to official and local ties he managed to gradually gain control over the Taiwan Straits. 3 When his son, Zheng Chenggong (), inherited his organization, pirates became freedom fighters, working to restore the recently fallen Ming dynasty. Zheng fils created a Chinese maritime state that eventually captured the Dutch East India Company's colony of Taiwan, one of the few European colonies to fall to a non-European power.	2
Our pirate story thus sheds light on a basic question of global history: how pirates and their interactions with states may help us to understand European expansion. From a pan-Eurasian perspective, European states were unusual in their willingness to use privateers to further strategic and economic interests abroad. European seamen enjoyed state support and were therefore better able to project a lethal combination of maritime force and economic enterprise than were most of their Asian counterparts.4 The Dutch East India Company was the largest, best-capitalized privateering enterprise in the world. It was able to outstrip its East Asian competitors so long as they had little state support. The rise of Zheng Chenggong's maritime state, however, changed the balance of power, and the company lost out to the former Chinese pirates.	. . .