Sugar, Credit, and Fragile Power: The Dutch Colonies of Essequibo and Demerara, 1771–1777

Between 1771 and 1777, the Dutch colonies of Essequibo and Demerara stood at a pivotal crossroads, economically buoyed by an influx of Amsterdam capital, politically reorganised under the influence of the West India Company (WIC), and socially strained under the weight of plantation violence and contested legality. The expansion of Dutch credit marked this period, the ambition of metropolitan financiers, and the quietly complicated lives of colonists like Jacob Bogman and Sara Thibou, whose day-to-day struggles reflect the broader dynamics of an empire in flux.

Bartholomeus Van den Santheuvel Jr., a merchant and financier from Amsterdam, was at the heart of this colonial transformation. In 1771, he established a mortgage fund to inject liquidity into the cash-hungry plantation economies of Essequibo and Demerara. Operating through his firm, Bartholomeus van den Santheuvel & Son, he raised 1.4 million Dutch guilders from investors, packaging colonial land and sugar production into a bond-like financial instrument that was pioneering for its time. By 1777, this fund had financed at least thirty mortgages, including for Van den Santheuvel’s plantation, Zorg-en-Hoop.

But the fund, like many colonial enterprises, was built on ambition rather than prudence. Van den Santheuvel frequently exceeded authorised lending limits, issuing advances to planters well beyond the agreed security of their estates. This led to increasing discomfort among the fund’s non-executive directors—men in Amsterdam who had invested their capital but were growing wary of its use. In response to these concerns, the board removed Van den Santheuvel from his executive role in 1777. He was sent to Demerara to serve as Opper-Agendaris, or chief agent, for the fund—effectively demoted but still entrenched in the very world he helped expand. He died in Demerara in 1793, indebted to the fund for a combined total of 267,000 guilders, and owning the plantations Zorg-en-Hoop and Catharina Sophia.

He was replaced in Amsterdam by Jan Heemskerk Jr. and Jan Willem van Arp, who took over executive management of the fund in 1777. Their tenure marks a transition toward more structured oversight, though Van Arp resigned in 1789, leaving Heemskerk as the sole director. Heemskerk’s interests, however, extended beyond plantation credit. He was also a founding executive and major shareholder of the Assurantie Compagnie 1771, an early insurance venture that had raised a million guilders in capital. Notably, many of the stakeholders in this company, including Van den Santheuvel and Dirk Wernard van Vloten, also held roles in mortgage-backed plantation funds. This meant that the same merchant class who financed plantations also insured the ships carrying sugar and slaves, and even underwrote the value of the financial instruments they issued. It was an early form of financial vertical integration—risk and return kept in-house.

Meanwhile, in the colonies, 1771–1777 was a period of political realignment and personal negotiation. Following the retirement of Director-General Laurens Storm van Gravesande in 1772, the colonies entered what contemporary observers called a “new era.” Zeeland’s longstanding monopoly over the Guianas ended, and the WIC took formal control of Essequibo and Demerara from 1773 onward. Administrative reforms introduced local councils and attempted to professionalise governance, although they also muddied the relationship between the two colonies. In Demerara and Berbice, where trade had been opened to all Dutch citizens, the number of shipping arrivals surged, bringing not only goods but also capital, overseers, enslaved labourers, and new conflicts.

Legal reforms followed, albeit on paper more than in practice. In 1771, the Council of Policy in Essequibo passed a by-law forbidding unnecessary punishments and Sunday labour for enslaved people. In 1773, a similar law was introduced in Demerara. These regulations are notable for their pious tone—slavery was to be carried out with “a Christian mind”—but in practice, they were little more than performative gestures aimed at preserving order amid growing unrest.

Against this backdrop, Jacob Bogman and Sara Thibou came into view, not as grand figures of finance or governance, but as representative actors in the tangled social fabric of the colonies. Bogman appears in dozens of records during these years: applying for marriage to Thibou in 1773, submitting bills of exchange for goods to the plantation ’t Leary, requesting land grants for himself and his son Carel, and participating in legal disputes over property and inheritance. Thibou, notably older than Bogman and previously married to Cornelis Leary, brought her legacy and land interests to the union.

Together, the Bogmans managed a web of plantation interests, legal challenges, and financial obligations. In 1776, they drew a bill of exchange for over 3,400 guilders to pay an overseas creditor, John Wilson. That same year, Bogman was involved in a court case concerning ownership claims on the Leary plantation, likely tied to Sara’s inheritance. In 1777, the couple sought legal authorisation to act as curators over Sara’s son Louis Leary, further entrenching their position as players in the estate system.

Their lives are a microcosm of the colonial experience: constantly negotiating between land, law, labour, and legacy. They also contrast the detached capital of Amsterdam—Bogman was not just signing papers; he was working land, managing debt, and, at times, contesting the very institutions that governed him.

Behind them, and every planter, lay the broader machinery of the Dutch Atlantic. From 1769 to 1777, Dutch mortgage credit to the Guianas soared to over 21 million guilders, 46% of all credit registered in the sixty years between 1740 and 1800. Appraisal values of plantations climbed, and so too did speculation. The WIC attempted to regulate land ownership, mapping territories, and organising relationships with Indigenous groups via officially recognised “Captains,” which started formally in 1778 but was influenced by earlier arrangements.

Globally, the period was one of uneasy quiet before the storm. The American Revolutionary War broke out in 1776. While its direct impact on the Dutch colonies came later, it signalled a growing instability in Atlantic trade. Spain, increasingly assertive in neighbouring Guayana, incorporated the province into the Capitanía General de Venezuela in 1777. France began its second Boni War in neighbouring Cayenne. These movements and rising tensions in Europe set the stage for the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780–1784), which would see British forces occupying the very colonies discussed here.

In the short term, however, the appearance of growth defined 1771 to 1777: more ships, more sugar, more loans, more land. Yet beneath the surface, the contradictions were growing. Van den Santheuvel’s demotion was a warning. The colony’s laws against cruelty rang hollow. Planters like Bogman juggled fragile finances. The Dutch Republic’s internal divisions—between Amsterdam and Zeeland, between reformers and monarchists—reflected the same fracturing visible across its colonial project.

What remained consistent was the reliance on a system that converted land and people into credit and then exported both risk and reward across the Atlantic. That this system persisted as long as it did is a testament to the machinery of empire. That it eventually collapsed under its contradictions is a reminder that all empires, however well-insured, are only as strong as the truths they choose to ignore.