Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

settlements in the Americas. 19 The argument for commercial freedom, Weststeijn contends, “was
perhaps the most important ideological legacy of the rise, decline and fall of Dutch Brazil.” 20
This chapter will suggest a very different legacy of the debate over free trade, namely the
WIC's decision to enter the trade in slaves. Although scholars have long recognized that the
company's first forays into the slave trade were in 1636—the same year that the States General
re-imposed a monopoly on trade to Brazil—and that slaves were listed as one of only three items
excluded from free trade in the States General's resolution that lifted the monopoly in 1638, there
has been no effort to explain what relationship, if any, there was between these two highly
significant, essentially contemporary developments. 21 By looking closely at the negotiations
themselves, rather than the rhetorical arguments found in printed pamphlets, the chapter tries to
tease out this relationship and to show its importance for our understanding of both company
politics and the longer-term evolution of Dutch participation in the slave trade. This requires
methodically re-examining the debate over free trade to Brazil and connecting it to the debate
over free trade to Angola that began only four years later. It also requires focusing more
carefully on the mediators, rather than the antagonists, and on the give and take and compromise
of practical politics. In particular, it requires being sensitive to the ways that seemingly discrete
and un-related issues can suddenly become contingent during the course of negotiations.
The chapter argues that the debates over free trade—to both Brazil and Angola—were
primarily debates over colonial politics, rather than trade, and that successive decisions to open
19
Ibid., 11. Smith's quotation is taken from vol. 2, book IV, chapter 7. See Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and
Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 117.
20
Weststeijn, “Dutch Brazil and the Making of Free Trade Ideology,” 12.
21
Boxer treats these two issues sequentially, but does not analytically connect them. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil,
1624-1654, 75–84. Richard Tuck remarks on the coincidence of the two issues in Grotius' De Jure Belli et Pacis,
published in 1625: “It is significant that the first major public expression of a strong rights theory to be read in
Protestant Europe should have contained both a defence of slavery and absolutism and a defence of resistance and
common property in extremis.” Natural Rights Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 80. Cited
in Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 194.
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