Holland, the Netherlands, was a major trading partner in the European commerce that connected the Isle of Man with Continental markets. Dutch goods featured among the foreign merchandise imported into the Island during the smuggling era, and Manx commercial and cultural contacts with the Low Countries date back to the medieval period.

Tea was the trade that mattered. The East India goods brought into the Island in the years before the Revestment consisted predominantly of tea, and it could be had more cheaply from the Dutch and Danish East India Companies than from the English one. Governor Wood reported to the Duke of Atholl in the early 1760s that the Manx merchants, and John Taubman above all, were major importers of it, and that it arrived in large vessels from Holland. Taubman ran it on from the Island to Great Britain and Ireland, and the fourth Duke of Atholl afterwards blamed him for the British government's decision to force the Revestment on the family.

The Dutch fisheries were a British grievance in the same waters. In 1608 the Dutch were compelled to pay an acknowledgment for the liberty of fishing on the British coasts, a source of revenue that later reigns tried to enforce more fully.