Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

Netherland, as the prelude to a full-length biographical treatment. 50 These new works are already
changing the way we think about the WIC, but there is still much work to be done to tie together
the various threads and provide a coherent synthesis.
Except for two now dated works on Willem Usselincx (1567-1647), the early advocate
for creating a Dutch company for the West Indies, almost no research has been done in the field
of intellectual history. 51 Benjamin Schmidt’s excellent study of the relationship between anti-
Spanish narratives and the evolution of Dutch images of the New World is an important
exception. 52 In a subsequent article Schmidt has argued for an alternative approach to Atlantic
history that asks
not if the term and circumstances of an Atlantic system apply, but if they were applied at the
time. Here the issue is not so much whether the Atlantic world of trade and expansion existed, but
whether an idea of the Atlantic existed and how this idea might have articulated a distinctly
Dutch (in this case) sense of Atlantic space. 53
This approach has the virtue of referring back to the categories of the actors themselves: while
Schmidt uses it to explore representations in printing and map-making, it could equally be
applied to the outlook of the company’s board of directors, for whom the Atlantic existed in the
concrete form of the boundaries delineated in the company’s charter. 54 The question is how they
conceived of this space as a commercial and imperial resource, what if any moral dilemmas and
50
Janny Venema, Kiliaen van Rensselaer (1586-1643): Designing a New World (Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren,
2010); Johannes De Laet, Suiker, Verfhout & Tabak: Het Braziliaanse Handboek van Johannes de Laet, 1637, ed. B.
N. Teensma (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2009); Jaap Jacobs, Petrus Stuyvesant: Een Levensschets (Amsterdam:
Bakker, 2009).
51
J. Franklin Jameson, Willem Usselinx: Founder of the Dutch and Swedish West India Companies (New York: G.
P. Putnam’s Sons, 1887).; Catharina Ligtenberg, Willem Usselinx (Utrecht: A. Oosthoek, 1914).
52
Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570-1670 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001).
53
Benjamin Schmidt, “The Dutch Atlantic: From Provincialism to Globalism,” in Atlantic History: A Critical
Appraisal, ed. Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 164.
54
For thinking about the relationship between agency and historical method, see William H. Sewell Jr., Logics of
history: social theory and social transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
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