History of the Cape Colony before 1806 Reinet. The Netherlands fell to the French army under the leadership of Napoléon Bonaparte in 1795. Reacting to the weakness of the Dutch East India Company holdings, a British army under General Sir James Henry Craig set out for Cape Town to secure the colony for the Stadtholder Prince William V of Orange against the French. The governor of Cape Town refused at first to obey any instructions from the prince, but after the British threatened to use force, he capitulated. The boers of Graaff Reinet did not surrender until an army had been sent against them, and in 1799
Surinam (Dutch colony) autonomy and self-rule. This was eventually accomplished by the proclamation of the Charter for the Kingdom of the Netherlands on 15 December 1954, which constituted a Kingdom in which the Netherlands, the Netherlands Antilles, and Suriname participated in on a basis of equality. In 1975, Suriname left the Kingdom of the Netherlands to become the independent country of Suriname. From 1683, the colony was governed by the Society of Suriname, a company composed of three equal shareholders, being the city of Amsterdam, the family Van Aerssen van Sommelsdijck, and the Dutch West India Company. Although the organization and administration was