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number of document series within the archives of the States General at Nationaal Archief in The
Hague. 69 Outside of these collections there are remarkably few private papers, personal
correspondence, or journals and memoires composed by company directors—what Dutch and
German historians refer to as egodocumenten (literally, “ego documents,” or those in which the
author records his or her personal experiences and perspective). 70 This dearth of sources,
especially compared to those for studying other European elites, makes reconstructing directors’
ideology and outlook especially difficult. In a recent edited collection on the Self-Perception of
Early Modern Capitalists, the Dutch economic historian Clé Lesger lamented the fact that,
“Although the city housed a large trading community, early modern Amsterdam's merchants
have left us almost no documents in which they explicitly express their worldview.” Even
apparently promising sources such as the papers of the merchant and regent Cornelis Pietersz.
Hooft (1581-1647), Lesger continues, “are mainly comments on resolutions passed by municipal
or provincial authorities.” 71
The fragmentary and largely bureaucratic nature of these documents has discouraged
many scholars. Nevertheless, a key hypothesis motivating this dissertation is that the
deliberations of municipal and provincial authorities—or, in this case, the WIC's board of
directors, which mirrored their structure—can be more creatively mined than they have been thus
far. The records of these deliberations are especially rich for two reasons: first, meetings played a
69 Individual documents or bundles of documents related to the company can also be found scattered throughout
Dutch city and provincial archives, or abroad. Collections in the United States with holdings of material related to
the WIC include, among others, the New York Public Library, the Huntington Library, the Library of Congress, the
University of Pennsylvania Libraries, and the John Carter Brown Library.
70 Rudolf Dekker, “Egodocumenten tot 1814: Egodocumenten van Noord-Nederlanders van de Zestiende tot Begin
Negentiende Eeuw,” 1993, http://www.egodocument.net/egodocumententot1814.html; Lucia F. Werneck Xavier,
“Het Gebruik van Egodocumenten en Nederlands Brazilië: de Memorie van Kolonel Christoffel Arciszewski,” in
Brazilië in de Nederlandse Archieven, 1624-1654, ed. Marianne L. Wiesebron (Leiden: Research School CNWS,
2008), 130–149.
71 Clé Lesger, “Merchants in Charge: The Self-Perception of Amsterdam Merchants, ca. 1550-1700,” in The Self-
Perception of Early Modern Capitalists, ed. Margaret C. Jacob and Catherine Secretan (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008), 75-76.
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