Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

However narrowly one defines “meaningful sense,” Pagden's assertions that the Dutch neither
exercised rulership nor ever regarded themselves as an imperial power can only be sustained by
casting the long shadow of the 1660s back onto the first half of the seventeenth century. 12 During
this period—in effect the heart of the Golden Age—companies chartered by the States General
seized and attempted to govern the world's richest sugar colony and quite self-consciously
pursued strategies of either conquest or settlement in places as diverse as the Caribbean, southern
Chile, the Hudson and Delaware Valleys, the West Coast of Africa, the Cape of Good Hope,
Ceylon, and the Indonesian Archipelago. 13 In the Atlantic, at least, this strategy ultimately failed,
but erasing the ambitions that lay behind it makes it difficult if not impossible to understand the
competing interests that animated Dutch overseas expansion in the first place and why, even in
1649, more than half of Amsterdam's city council disagreed with Bicker and argued in favor of
spending the city’s money to save Dutch Brazil. 14
What were the company’s aims in Brazil? Who were the men gathered around the table
in Middelburg in the fall of 1645? What models did they draw on in formulating their plans, and
how did they reach collective decisions on commercial and imperial policy? What assistance did
they draw from the Dutch state—or, posed somewhat differently, how did a joint stock company
and a decentralized republic notorious for its particularism share the responsibilities of governing
an overseas empire? Finally, what might this relatively brief episode be able to tell us about the
Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650-1668 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996); David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000).
12 Here I follow Boxer, who argued that the failure of Dutch Brazil was hardly inevitable, or at least that it hardly
appeared so to contemporaries in the early 1640s. See Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624-1654, 109.
13 C. R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600-1800, (New York: Knopf, 1965). See also Henk den Heijer, De
Geschiedenis van de WIC (Zutphen: Walburg, 2002); Femme Gaastra, The Dutch East India Company: Expansion
and Decline (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2003).
14 Of the 36 members of the Amsterdam city council, 17 voted in favor of rescuing Brazil, eleven voted against, and
eight were either absent on the day of the vote or had deceased. See Copye vande Resolutie van de Heeren
Burgemeesters ende Raden tot Amsterdam. Op’t Stuck van de West-Indische Compagnie.
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