Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

WIC were his geographical and historical publications. 97 Building on recent work by Dutch
scholars, and on dozens of sources scattered throughout the archives of the WIC, the City of
Leiden, provincial assemblies, and the States General, the chapter shows De Laet’s deep
involvement in the everyday management of the company and his more specific role shaping the
company’s message in the fall of 1645. The circulation of news from Brazil is thus used to probe
the relationship between knowledge and power within the Dutch Republic.
Chapter Three provides a new explanation for the origins and byzantine structure of the
Heren XIX. Looking back to the company’s formation in the early 1620s, it asks what the board
was designed to do and precisely who was to be represented at its meetings. Most scholars have
assumed that the domestic organization of the WIC mirrored that of the VOC, and that
differences in their respective histories can be attributed primarily to differences in the goods
they traded or the political and economic spheres in which they worked. 98 This assumption is
flawed in several important respects. By examining multiple annotated versions of the WIC’s
charter drafted between 1606 and 1620, along with negotiations within provincial assemblies, the
States General, and the Amsterdam city council, the chapter shows how an initial draft modeled
on the VOC charter was subsequently revised to make the company suitable, in the eyes of its
founders, for Atlantic conquest. In particular, the chapter explores decisions to make the States
General a partial owner of the company and for it to play an active role in company
management—both innovations that diverged sharply from the VOC. While the language in the
final charter closely resembles that of its older sibling, several important clauses served to
97 Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Hugo Grotius’s Dissertation on the Origin of the American Peoples and the Use of
Comparative Methods,” Journal of the History of Ideas 52, no. 2 (June 1991): 221-244; Benjamin Schmidt, “Space,
Time, Travel: Hugo de Groot, Johannes de Laet, and the ‘Advancement’ of Geographic Learning,” LIAS: The
Journal of Early Modern History of Ideas 25 (1998): 177-199; Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s
Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
98 See, for example, Emmer, “The West India Company, 1621-1791: Dutch or Atlantic?”
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