Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

an activity in its own right, oriented both towards profit and towards new markets throughout the
Atlantic. Slave labor was perceived as “necessary” to the new system of plantation agriculture.
But Africa was also a source of wealth and profit, whether those profits were invested in stately
houses in cities like Middelburg or used to fund New World expansion.
The third substantive conclusion is that noblemen played a central role in the WIC. At
home they were investors, advocates, and facilitators, while abroad they served as colonial
administrators and military officers. The figure of Johan Maurits is well known, but behind him
there were others, such as Johan van Goch, Gerard van Arnhem, and Hendrik and Alexander van
der Capellen. These individuals set the tone for the meetings of the Heren XIX and, along with
Prince Maurits and Frederik Hendrik, helped to mediate otherwise debilitating disputes among
the company's five chambers. Merchants controlled decision-making in the chambers themselves
and made up the vast majority of the delegates to the Heren XIX, but in the latter body noblemen
often cast the deciding vote. In the mid-seventeenth century the nobility were present not only as
an aspiration for second- and third-generation merchants; they were present in the flesh—at
court, in the corridors and meeting chambers of the provincial assemblies and the States General,
and in the boardroom of the WIC. This offers an important corrective, especially for English
language scholarship in which the nobility is often invisible, and serves as a basis for a fuller
comparative treatment of European overseas expansion.
Together, these three findings permit an alternative interpretation for the collapse of
Dutch Brazil. As the dissertation has demonstrated, up to and including 1645, Brazil enjoyed
broad political support within the Dutch elite and, despite serious challenges, plans were being
set into motion to integrate the colony with other conquests and to revive a profitable sugar
industry. What stopped these developments was the Portuguese revolt, an event that Johan
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