Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

Maurits predicted and which was not launched until more than a year after his departure. At a
structural level, conflicts between central authority and the nobility, on the one hand, and
merchant interests, on the other, were a recurrent theme in the history of the WIC, stretching
back to the discussions over a Raedt van Indien in the late-1610s. Merchants were interested in
overseas conquest, but not in ceding authority to noblemen who might restrict their independence
or negatively impact the profitability of their trade. Noblemen, in turn, were unwilling to subject
themselves to management by people they perceived to be their social inferiors.
Although the battle between Holland and the Prince of Orange began to tilt in Holland's
favor during the early 1640s, in 1645 neither side was powerful enough to impose its own vision
for imperial management on the other. This balance of forces created a space in which contingent
factors played an important role: the effort to replace Johan Maurits, whose success derived at
least in part from his courtly display and military leadership, took more than two years as
merchants and noblemen could not reach agreement and suitable candidates politely declined the
position. We can only guess what would have happened had Maurits been permitted to stay in
Brazil after 1644, as he indicated he wanted to do, or if either Jacques Specx or Alexander van
der Capellen had accepted the office of President and arrived in time either to discourage the
plotters of the revolt or to effectively crush it. This was evidently beyond Wolter Schonenborch,
who equivocated at a crucial time, delaying the new council's departure by almost six months,
and in any case proved ineffective once he arrived in Brazil. The WIC famously struggled to
recruit settlers to this and its other colonies, but it also struggled to recruit qualified leadership,
and in the summer and fall of 1645 it was the latter, as much as the former, that doomed Dutch
Brazil. It was this failure that is ultimately responsible for the familiar image of the sober Dutch
merchant, and for the new world he helped to create.
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