Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

support to the WIC, but they also imposed important political and financial constraints. Although
on several occasions the company was promised annual subsidies, in practice these lapsed after
1633 and the company was left to cover the mounting costs of war, not least in Brazil. It did so
by raising additional private capital in the form of new shares and, later, interest-yielding bonds.
In effect, and from the very beginning, the entire project of New World conquest was to be
funded by private investment, in return for the granting of monopoly rights by the States
General. This took the form of a series of compromises, including the charter itself, the 1636
verhoging and subsequent decision to re-impose the company's monopoly on trade to Brazil, and
the renewal of the VOC charter in return for 1.5 million guilders to fund the relief. On the one
hand, the States General's limited ability to guarantee these monopolies in the face of private
merchant interests left the company perpetually on the edge of bankruptcy. On the other, the
opportunity for private initiative transformed the company’s conquests into a potential target for
speculative capital. It is interesting in this context to consider that the height of enthusiasm for
Brazil followed the Tulip Bubble by less than ten years, and popped just as quickly.
One of the important consequences of this approach to colonial management was that the
company's revenues from Africa, its most reliable area of operation, increasingly were used to
fund riskier undertakings in the New World—just as the Amsterdam merchants trading to Africa
had feared they would during the negotiations to create the WIC in the first two decades of the
seventeenth century. We have been taught to think of Africa as a source of labor, but this is only
part of the story. During the 1620s and early 1630s, the company derived considerable profits
from gold, ivory, and pepper; after 1636 the focus shifted to the trade in slaves. The slave trade
was initially conceived of as a means to populate Brazil and to offset the financial burdens of
expanding and defending the colony. But after the revolt in Pernambuco, the slave trade became
266