In South America, the Dutch managed to conquer part of Portuguese Brazil and in North America the Dutch settled the area along the Hudson River. This chapter discusses the establishment and the demise of these two colonies in the context of fierce imperial competition and difficult exchanges with the indigenous populations. In both cases, tensions with the administrators in the Dutch Republic were unavoidable. The regional interests of the cosmopolitan court of the Orange prince Johan Maurits in New Holland (Brazil) and a true settlement colony in New Netherland (later New York) clashed with the commercial objectives of the West India Company.

This chapter surveys the fiscal policies and practices in the Portuguese African colonies of Mozambique and Angola from the 1850s to 1970s. It explores the fiscal implications of a long history of trade relations and cultural exchange, including early forms of colonial settlement (merchants, missionaries, prazeros), which were moulded into a relatively late and severely contested occupation wave in the late nineteenth century. It discusses the constraints to revenue centralization and fiscal unification and shows how spending policies prioritized security, administration and infrastructure over welfare services. I argue that local conditions, including this specific ‘pre-colonial’ history of Portuguese-African relations, limited possibilities of fiscal modernization, while major ruptures in metropolitan politics (e.g. the Salazar dictatorship) were key in the reorganization of imperial finances.