Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

anxieties it generated, and what plans they made to profitably integrate and govern its various
parts.
A better understanding of these problems will help to inform not only Dutch history, but
also broader debates about the diffusion of ideas and practices within seventeenth century
Europe. Especially important here is England, where Joyce Appleby has taught us that the Dutch
served as a major “source of evidence” for merchants’ analysis of economic problems and where
proposals for a West India Company on the Dutch model were floated repeatedly in Parliament
from the late 1620s to the early 1640s. 55 Jacob Soll’s work on France and Erik Thomson’s on
Sweden show that the Dutch example was influential there too, if somewhat later, as part of what
Istvan Hont has identified as a consistent project by European territorial monarchies to
appropriate and reproduce the advantages of overseas commerce. 56
At the same time, historians have tended to interpret the Dutch as a source for
commercial ideology, without examining the sources on which the Dutch themselves drew. Eco
Haitsma Mulier has shown the powerful influence of Venice on Dutch political thought in the
seventeenth century, as the ideal model for a stable maritime republic. 57 But for establishing and
governing colonies in the New World surely Spanish or Portuguese models would have been
more appropriate, as J. H. Elliot has shown to be the case in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
55 Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1978); John C. Appleby, “An Association for the West Indies? English Plans for a West India
Company 1621-29,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History XV, no. 3 (May 1987): 213-241; Karen
Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630-1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993); Ted McCormick, William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009); Lisa Jardine, Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory (London: Harper Press, 2008).
56 Jacob Soll, “Accounting for Government: Holland and the Rise of Political Economy in Seventeenth-Century
Europe,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History XL, no. 2 (Autumn 2009): 215-238; Erik Thomson, “The Dutch
Miracle, Modified: Hugo Grotius’s Mare Liberum, Commercial Governance and Imperial War in the Early-
Seventeenth Century,” Gratiana 30 (2009): 107-130; Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and
the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).
57 Eco O. G. Haitsma Mulier, The Myth of Venice and Dutch Republican Thought in the Seventeenth Century, trans.
Gerard T. Moran (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1980).
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