Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

For the remainder of 1645, De Laet and his fellow director in the Amsterdam chamber,
Jacques Specx, would be deeply involved in the company’s lobbying campaign for money to
crush the revolt and save the colony, a campaign that would ultimately spill into and beyond the
peace talks at Münster and the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the 80 Years’ War. 9 Although the
acuteness of the situation focused minds in The Hague that winter, the outlines of the company’s
message were largely unchanged from the preceding year. Although it possessed a potentially
lucrative empire in Africa and the New World, the company was out of money and could raise
no more additional private capital. The survival of Dutch Brazil, the company itself, would
require substantial financial support. The case for this support was built on unstable ground: the
company needed to prove its worth, despite its empty coffers, and it needed to convince
magistrates, the merchant community, and a public exhausted by war that an organization
devoted during most of its history to piracy and conquest could profitably secure and administer
its new possessions, to the benefit of the Republic, in a time of peace. Advancing these
arguments required more than lofty rhetoric; it required concrete evidence of the company’s
value to the state.
But how could this be measured? What was the New World really worth—or, more
prosaically, what was it worth to the Dutch Republic, and by what metric could the question even
be assessed? This chapter looks at two very different efforts to answer these difficult questions,
both from the period just before the outbreak of the revolt. It argues that the decision to send
relief to Brazil in the spring of 1646 was based on a determination that the colony was valuable
was accurate or merely credible, the fact that he presented in the States of Holland and that it was included in the
formal minutes suggests that it should be taken seriously. The problem of determining the value of the Republic's
investment in Brazil is the topic of this chapter. On the Amsterdam sugar industry, see Arjan Poelwijk, “In Dienste
vant Suyckerbacken”: De Amsterdamse Suikernijverheid en haar Ondernemers, 1580-1630 (Hilversum: Verloren,
2003).
9 Kluiver, De Souvereine en Independente Staat Zeeland.
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