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HolonZeias — Former Dutch colonies in East Asia in 2020

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Published: 2020-07-16 13:04:50 +0000 UTC; Views: 4050; Favourites: 67; Downloads: 7
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In 1644, Maarten Gerritsz Vries, one of the first Europeans to visit the region, decided to found an outpost on Sakhalin island, knowadays known as Nieuw Harlingen. The locals proved to be quite into trade with the following generations of Dutchmen, and the Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689) assured Dutch hegemony over the Sea of Japan and the Strait of Tartary, between Sakhalin and the mainland.

The Russian advancements in the late 18th and early 19th century triggered a new wave of Dutch, but also Luxembourgish, French, Scandinavian and Italian settlers arriving into these wide, barely touched lands. Unequal treaties between Qing China and the Netherlands cemented the area's status as Dutch territory, and, after the Russo-Dutch War of 1858, due to which the Russian Empire had to cede lands above the Amur river, active expansion at the cost of the Dutch ceased.

The island of Ezo meanwhile became the place of two wars between the Dutch and the Japanese (1823 and 1867), after which most of the territory North of Sapporo went to Batavian hands. Japanese resentment against the Dutch grew after the huge losses of land considered part of the Japanese Empire. With the 1902 Treaty of Akkernij however, the Netherlands accepted to hand over the island of Iturup to the Japanese Empire.

After World War I, Dutch East Asia became a target of the new Soviet Union, as it was known as a haven for White army soldiers and other people critical towards the new communist state. Soviet destabilisation programs became the norm for the rest of the Soviet Union's existence, until well after the region's independence.

In mid-1940, during the Second Sino-Japanese War (and Second World War), the Japanese Empire invaded Dutch East Asia extensively, incorporating the insular regions directly as Japanese core regions, while the mainland became known as East Manchuria, to be annexed by Manchukuo later. With the end of the war, peace came back for the colony, but only for a short period: The 1960s and 1970s became known as the Black Years, where the Dutch government deeply mishandled the locals' call of independence, leading to the Dutch East Asian civil war (1964-1974).

The region became independent in 1974 under the name of Calmcust (also known under its Dutch form Kalmkust), but the vastly different social and ethnic makeups of the different regions - while the mainland was almost virtually of European descent and highly depedent on natural ressources, the islands were more often than not populated by equal parts of Europeans and indigenous peoples, mostly Ainus and Nevkhs, and had a strong economy, in part thanks to extensive trade agreements with Japan. Specific to the island of Ezo were also the autonomous region of Newkorn (or, in Luxembourgish, Neikuer), of which 65 percent of the population claimed Luxembourgish descent, along with another 25 percent of people identifying themselves as Ainu.

Peace didn't follow until 1984, when Newkorn became independent, and 1989, when Moseere (or Mosierië in Dutch) followed.

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SamBiswas95 [2022-05-25 03:08:32 +0000 UTC]

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