Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

Chapter Seven
The Fall of Dutch Brazil
The collapse of the empire imagined by the company’s founders and directors was not the end of
the WIC. The company continued to trade in gold and other products from Guinea and to provide
slaves to Spanish America and to French and English plantation colonies in the Caribbean well
into the eighteenth century. But with increasing competition, and protective trade policies
enforced by England and France, the company’s debts caught up with it. In 1674 the WIC was
reorganized to concentrate on its core business along the coast of Guinea: in line with this more
modest mandate its board of directors was reduced from nineteen members to ten, and
shareholders were encouraged to pay a percentage of the value of their investment in return for
shares in what would become known as the Second WIC. 1 At home, directorships in the new
company became, as one historian described it, an “obligatory stop” along the career trajectory
of the urban patriciate, especially in Holland and Zeeland. 2 What began with radical Calvinist,
anti-Spanish sentiment and ambitious aims to seize all of the New World was now a staid
monopoly firm managed by a merchant elite, in effect a sinecure in a “mature” economy based
on market access, business organization, and finance. 3
This dissertation set out to tell the story of an earlier, more tumultuous period. As in
statistics, trends can be defined by moving the bounding dates. Instead of looking back on the
1 Den Heijer, De Geschiedenis van de WIC.
2 Van Dillen, “De West-Indische Compagnie, het Calvinism en de Politiek.”
3 De Vries and Van der Woude, The First Modern Economy.
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