Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

the area in which the company was best able to make the transition from piracy and conquest to
trade. It may be interesting in this context to revisit Arthur Weststeijn’s argument and in
particular a quotation he takes from the abbé Raynal, who wrote that the Dutch had to
part with a conquest [northeastern Brazil] that might have become the richest of all the European
colonies, and would have given the republic a degree of importance it could never acquire from
its own territory. But, in order to keep it, the government ought to have undertaken the
administration and defense of it; and to make it prosper, it should have enjoyed full liberty. With
these precautions, Brazil would have been preserved, and would have enriched the nation, instead
of ruining the company. Unfortunately, it was not yet known that the only way to make lands
useful in America was to clear them, and that this could not be done with success, unless a free
trade were opened to all the inhabitants under the protection of government. 168
Weststeijn uses this quotation to establish Raynal’s debt to Pieter de la Court and his belief that
Dutch Brazil failed because it had never enjoyed “full liberty.” But emphasis might be put on
another portion of the quotation, in which Raynal argued that the Dutch state should have taken
full responsibility for the colony’s defense and administration. The debate over free trade was in
part about commercial liberty, but it was also about how to fund colonial expansion precisely in
the absence of direct public support. With the onset of the Portuguese revolt over the summer of
1645 and the company’s finances in disarray, this became the dominant question in discussions
between the WIC and the States General: would the States General commit money and men to
save Dutch Brazil?
168 Cited in Weststeijn, “Dutch Brazil and the Making of Free Trade Ideology,” 1.
222