Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

that focuses on political and imperial considerations. In terms of method, the dissertation has
shown that meeting minutes can be successfully used to access politics, not for evidence of
specific positions or final resolutions, but for the practical process of negotiation and
compromise. The dissertation argues that politics is not simply the confrontation of opposing
positions. These are rather the means that actors use to pursue their interests; they are the tools of
politics. Politics itself is the art of compromise and of reaching agreement, unless it is the simple
imposition of one party's will on another. Compromises can only be reconstructed from
negotiations and the records they leave behind. Only rarely do these compromises become
visible in the printed record of pamphlets and books. And this should change the way we study
political history.
The dissertation reached three main substantive conclusions. First, it has shown that the
company represented broad regional interests within the Dutch Republic. This is clearest in the
way that the Heren XIX was assembled and in the difficulties it encountered during its first
meetings between 1622 and 1624. But it can also be seen in the way that information circulated
and the way that coalitions formed to resolve the company’s problems in Brazil. Cities like
Groningen, Deventer, and Arnhem, as well as more prominent trading cities like Middelburg,
Dordrecht, and Leiden, were important investors and exercised significant power within the
company’s board. The WIC was responsible for resolving the divergent interests of these cities
and, overseas, for representing the United Provinces as a whole. In a newly forming and
decentralized Republic, the company served as an important agent of integration. This helps to
explain Eli Heckscher’s paradox, cited in Chapter Three, that the Dutch companies received
strong support from the state, even though the state itself was weak. Even more than for the
VOC, which relied on a narrower geographic base, the WIC's effort to manage Atlantic colonies
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