Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

involved in privateering or which aimed to discover new sea routes or establish settler colonies. 19
Indeed, Rabb argues that gentry investors differed in important ways from their merchant
counterparts: whereas merchants were, in general, more consistent and diligent in applying
themselves to the business at hand, and more focused on profits, members of the gentry appeared
more willing to sustain losses for the sake of enterprises that might enhance national (and thus
also their personal) power and prestige. 20 Their significant contributions up to 1630 were critical,
Rabb concludes, to pushing past the difficult and risky early phases of colonization and thus
helped lay the groundwork for England's subsequent imperial expansion. 21 The involvement of
the gentry, and the leading role played by the royal family itself, in colonial ventures after the
Restoration is well known, and suggests that the basic contours of Rabb's analysis carry well into
the seventeenth century.
Although scholars have identified similarly important contributions by noblemen in
Portugal, France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, and elsewhere, the United Provinces always appear as
an exception. As Fritz Redlich put it in a special issue of Explorations in Entrepreneurial History
dedicated to this subject a half-century ago, “there was no European country which did not
experience at one time or another the phenomenon of aristocratic business leadership, except
Holland and Switzerland, countries in which feudal institutions had never found fertile
ground.” 22 In light of Van Nierop's study of the Dutch nobility this conclusion needs to be re-
examined. The previous chapter examined the role of the nobility in discussions over the
composition of the WIC's board of directors. This chapter considers the conspicuous role that
19
Theodore K. Rabb, Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575-
1630 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967).
20
Ibid., 38-41.
21
Ibid., 69.
22
Fritz Redlich, “European Aristocracy and Economic Development,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History 6,
no. 2 (December 1953): 78-91. The quotation is taken from page 78.
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