Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

eported to have said; any money sent there “might as well be thrown into the water.” 6 His
conclusion would doom the WIC and what had been a thirty-year effort to cultivate Brazil as the
centerpiece of a Dutch empire stretching from the New World to West Africa. Dutch forces
would withdraw from Brazil in defeat in 1654 and the States General finally relinquished any
claim to the colony as part of a peace agreement with Portugal signed in 1662. 7
In retrospect, the failure of the “Brazilian adventure” appears inevitable: we have come to
think of the Dutch as merchants, rather than conquistadores or settlers. Countless visitors to
Dutch cities in the seventeenth century commented on the soundness of their financial
institutions, the range and quality of goods available for sale, and the “order and exactness” with
which the Dutch conducted their business. 8 William Temple observed that among the Dutch,
“profit [is] more in request than honor,” while a hundred years later Adam Smith concluded that
in Holland, “it is unfashionable not to be a man of business.” 9 Historians—both in the
Netherlands and abroad—have followed suit, focusing on trade to the exclusion of any other
activity. 10 To take but one of many examples, the historian Anthony Pagden writes that
The Dutch, although they became an object of intense scrutiny by the British, were never until the
nineteenth century an imperial power in any meaningful sense, nor ever regarded themselves as
such. The claim by English royalists in the 1660s that the Republic of Holland was seeking a
Universal Monarchy of the sea was an oxymoron. As every imperialist knew, ‘empire’ implied
rulership, and that, on the British and Dutch understanding of the law of nations, could not be
exercised at sea. 11
6 Copye vande Resolutie van ve Heeren Burgemeesters ende Raden tot Amsterdam. Op’t Stuck van de West-Indische
Compagnie (Amsterdam, 1649). A manuscript copy can be found in the Library of Congress, mm 82004179, no. 3.
The original text reads: “ick niet bevroeden datter ijets goedts aff komen sall, ende sall alle t geldt in t water
gesmeten sijn.”
7 Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624-1654, 253.
8 The last phrase is taken from one of the most famous observers of Dutch society, Sir William Temple,
Observations upon the United Provinces of The Netherlands, ed. George Clark (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972).
9 Ibid., 97; Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Homewood, Illinois:
Richard D. Irwin, 1963), 76. The original edition was published in Edinburgh in 1776.
10 Otto van Rees pointed out this tendency as early as the 1860s. See his, Geschiedenis der Staathuishoudkunde in
Nederland tot het einde der Achttiende Eeuw, vol. 2 (Utrecht: Kemink en Zoon, 1868), 1.
11 Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500-c. 1800 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). On English fears of a Dutch "empire of the sea," See also Steven C. A. Pincus,
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