Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

provides an intimate look at the rhetoric used to encourage potential candidates, and, along with
Alexander van der Capellen’s memoires, some of the factors candidates may have considered,
Trouwers’ case gives a sense of what the company was hoping to achieve. Trouwers left behind
no diary and records of his life are scarce, but a document in the collection of the States General
from this period shows exactly the skills the company thought he might bring to bear in Brazil. 74
In 1642, after a separate, and equally long, set of deliberations, the WIC had created a
Generaal Rekenkamer (General Accounting Office) to coordinate the activities of the chambers'
individual accountants and to advise the company on matters of finance and trade. 75 This office
had, among other responsibilities, the difficult task of reconciling the company's books at the end
of each year. According to the WIC charter, the chambers were to participate in the company in a
set proportion—Amsterdam 4/9, Zeeland 2/9, and the other three chambers each 1/9—but every
chamber remained responsible for provisioning its own ships and auctioning the goods that
returned from abroad. In the abstract this meant that the company would operate like a modern
cartel consisting of five independent companies, with the important exception that at the end of
each period the total expenses and profits were to be redistributed consistent with the proportions
laid out in the charter. 76 This required a Herculean effort in bookkeeping and coordination
between the company's ever-suspicious chambers. The new Generaal Rekenkamer was designed
to simplify this process, both practically and politically, by centralizing the company's financial
work in one office. Its first director was Abraham Trouwers.
74 NA 1.01.07 inv.nr. 12564.17, Consideratien van de generale Reeckencamer aende Ed. vergaderinge der xix van t'
gene alhier te Lande mitsgaders in Brasil ende andere conquesten van die Comp. souden kennen Jaerlyx
gemenageert worden, overgegeven den 22 Juny 1645.
75 NA 1.01.05 inv.nr. 9410.
76 See Eli F. Heckscher, Mercantilism, trans. Mendel Shapiro (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1955), vol. 1, 364.
For a review of the history of financial institutions in the Netherlands, see Jacobus Thomas de Smidt, Van Tresorier
tot Thesaurier-Generaal: zes Eeuwen Financieel Beleid in Handen van een Hoge Nederlandse Ambtsdrager
(Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, 1996).
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