Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

defend the colony. 42 Economic interests and constraints, in other words, were far more important
than ideology or faction in explaining the company's failure.
More recent studies have echoed these themes, but in line with historiographical trends,
especially in the United States, they have shifted to exploring the company's fate in an Atlantic
context. 43 While this has brought Dutch expansion history into a productive conversation with
the histories of other European powers over the longer period 1500-1800, it has diverted
attention away from the company itself. In a special issue for the Dutch journal Itinerario,
published in 1999, Pieter Emmer and Wim Klooster argued provocatively that there never had
been a Dutch Atlantic. 44 “A real Dutch empire incorporating an integrated set of colonies and
trading forts on both sides of the Ocean,” they wrote, “only existed for a period of fifteen years,
between 1630 and 1645.” Both before and after, Dutch merchants focused on trade, but the
cultural, demographic, commercial, and political impact of Dutch activities was quite limited. In
the face of growing English naval superiority, the Dutch could never impose a coherent Atlantic
system. 45 This interpretation, in turn, has been criticized by Victor Enthoven. Whereas Emmer
and Klooster argued that cooperation between Dutch merchants and other Europeans was
evidence for the absence of a genuinely “Dutch” Atlantic, Enthoven interprets this as evidence
for the ubiquity of Dutch merchants and their influence as middlemen and brokers, especially in
the Caribbean and Virginia. The WIC, which “played no role whatsoever” in the trades in
tobacco and sugar, two of the most important Atlantic commodities, “was never a big player in
42
Van Dillen, “De West-Indische Compagnie, het Calvinism en de Politiek,” 168-70.
43
For a recent summary review, see Victor Enthoven and Martine Julia van Ittersum, “Review Article: The Mouse
that Roars: Dutch Atlantic History,” Journal of Early Modern History 10, no. 3 (2006): 221-230.
44
Pieter C. Emmer and Wim Klooster, “The Dutch Atlantic, 1600-1800: Expansion Without Empire,” Itinerario 23
(1999): 48-69.
45
This interpretation may be convincing for the eighteenth century, but it hardly serves to explain the Dutch failure
to build an Atlantic empire in the first half of the seventeenth century, up to and including the Second Anglo-Dutch
war, when the Dutch navy under Cornelis Tromp and Michiel de Ruyter scored numerous important victories over
both England and Spain. C. H. Wilson, Profit and Power: A Study of England and the Dutch Wars (London:
Longmans, 1957).
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