Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

Dutch Brazil failed based on close analysis of negotiation as a method for studying politics. Just
as in the ball park or the cock ring, much of the Dutch Republic surfaces in the boardroom. 16
2. The West India Company and the Dutch Atlantic
The WIC, and the broader Dutch commercial world of which it was part, emerged during a
transitional period in European history, what Eric Hobsbawm famously called the “crisis of the
seventeenth century.” 17 The rise of the United Provinces coincided with the relative decline of
Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese influence, political and religious strife in England and France,
and warfare, economic stagnation, and demographic collapse in Germany and Central Europe as
a result of the Thirty Years’ War. Despite fighting their own protracted conflict against the
Habsburg Monarchy from 1568, and hosting a large refugee population in the main cities of
Holland and Zeeland, the United Provinces became substantially wealthier and increasingly
politically assertive. 18 The Union of Utrecht in 1579 created a military alliance between the
seven rebellious provinces and rapidly transformed the States General into a standing instrument
of government. 19 By the first decade of the seventeenth century, Amsterdam’s population had
grown three-fold and the city had overtaken Antwerp as the center of global commerce and
finance—a position it would retain until at least the early 1670s, if not considerably longer. 20 In
16
The allusion is of course to Clifford Geertz’s analysis of the cock fight: "As much of America surfaces in a ball
park, on a golf links, at a race track, or around a poker table, much of Bali surfaces in a cock ring." See “Deep Play:
Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 417.
17
E. J. Hobsbawm, “The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century,” in Crisis in Europe, 1560-1660: Essays from Past and
Present, ed. Trevor Aston (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), 5–58.
18
Oscar Gelderblom, Zuid-Nederlandse Kooplieden en de Opkomst van de Amsterdamse Stapelmarkt, 1578-1630
(Hilversum: Verloren, 2000).
19
Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477-1806 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
20
Ibid.; Jan de Vries and A. M. van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of
the Dutch Economy, 1500-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Carlo M. Cipolla, ed., The
Economic Decline of Empires (London: Methuen, 1970).
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