Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

nexus of commerce and power for which the Dutch would subsequently become famous? These
are the central questions that motivate the dissertation that follows.
Answering them requires a careful re-examination of politics within the WIC and a
radical reassessment of the collapse of Dutch Brazil that began in 1645. The dissertation
proceeds in an unconventional fashion: focusing tightly on negotiations in the Heren XIX in
Middelburg over a period of only six weeks, it offers an intimate look at how policy was made
and recovers the worldview of the company's directors at the height of their power, on the
precipice of a disaster that they still believed could be averted. 15 This is made possible by the
survival of detailed minutes for the meeting—one of the only complete sets of minutes that
escaped fire and rag merchants in the nineteenth century, and the only meeting for which
scholars can consult both ordinary and secret minutes. Read in conjunction with surviving
minutes from other meetings of the Heren XIX, as well as notes, letters, reports, memoranda, and
the diaries or memoires of individuals who participated in the proceedings, these minutes offer
an important alternative to the printed record as a source for reconstructing company politics.
Self-consciously, and perhaps somewhat unfashionably, the dissertation examines imperial
history from the perspective of a corporate boardroom. This perspective reveals actors, such as
the nobility, who have been overlooked in the history of Dutch overseas expansion, and
connections, such as that between debates over free trade and slavery, that have either escaped
notice or been misunderstood in earlier accounts. And it offers an alternative explanation for why
15 Linda Colley and Emma Rothschild have recently pioneered a new perspective on empire that draws on the
intimate experience of, respectively, women and families in the eighteenth century. While quite different from this
approach, this dissertation draws inspiration from their concern with reconstructing a coherent, intimate view of
empire. Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (New York: Pantheon, 2007);
Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2011).
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