Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

appeared in the late 1630s in the context of the debate over free trade to Brazil. The sharp
disagreement between Amsterdam and Zeeland and its allies stimulated what Artichewski
described as literally hundreds of pages of text and calculations, focused primarily on
determining profit under alternative monopoly policies. 107 Although estimates differed widely,
and Artichewski himself questioned their credibility, after the late 1630s it appears to have
become more difficult to make a credible argument about commercial policy without furnishing
quantitative information to back it up. By the mid-1640s we find calculation at the heart of the
company's campaign to lobby the States of Holland and the States General. Even if the
relationship between accounting and government can be traced back to Simon Steven's lessons
for Prince Maurits in the 1590s, or earlier, it appears that an important threshold was passed in
the early 1640s. 108
4. Conclusion
Given De Laet’s immersion in Leiden's scholarly community, where Cartesian science already
had become controversial, and Specx’s connections by marriage to the Huygens family, there is
good reason to see in their respective work examples of early experimentation with new methods
in mathematics and statistics, and their application to realms of inquiry and argumentation that
previously had been qualitative in character. Quantification in an emerging field of political
economy, in other words, was almost exactly coincident with quantification in other branches of
107 Artichewski, “Missive van den Kolonnel Artichofsky aan Graaf Maurits en de Hoogen Raad in Brazilië, 24 Juli
1637,” 227.
108 Soll, “Accounting for Government: Holland and the Rise of Political Economy in Seventeenth-Century Europe,”
223–224.
256