Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

chapter examines the way that voting was conducted and reveals the rituals employed by the
Heren XIX to ensure loyalty and secrecy. 100 Consistent with recent scholarship on the nobility in
Holland, but contrary to commonly held assumptions among historians working in English, this
episode highlights the central role of noblemen in managing Dutch overseas expansion and
exposes deepening divisions in the 1640s between noblemen and merchants—divisions that
would delay the selection of the new Council at a critical moment for the Dutch colony in Brazil.
Chapter Five offers a new interpretation of the well-known debates over free trade to
Brazil and Angola that erupted during the 1630s and 1640s. These debates have traditionally
been explained as the result of divergent interests between Amsterdam, where merchants saw
greater profits in free trade, and Zeeland, where both merchants and magistrates saw
enforcement of the WIC monopoly as the best means to protect their share in colonial markets,
where Amsterdam would otherwise have enjoyed considerable advantages. 101 More recently,
Weststeijn has argued that the debate was an important source for Enlightenment ideas on free
trade. 102 By reconstructing the course of the negotiations, rather than relying on printed sources,
and by connecting the debate over free trade to Brazil to the subsequent debate over free trade to
Angola, the chapter shows how disputes over free trade were actually motivated by issues of
colonial finance, and in particular, how the Heren XIX and the States General used trade policy
to address the mounting challenges of populating and defending Dutch Brazil.
Crucially, the chapter demonstrates that the decision to re-open the trade to Brazil in
April 1638 was predicated on formally recognizing the WIC’s monopoly on the trade in slaves, a
100 David Baute, Cort Relaas sedert den Jare 1609: de Avonturen van een Zeeuws Koopman in Spanje tijdens de
Tachtigjarige Oorlog (Hilversum: Verloren, 2000); S. P. L’Honoré Naber, “Het Dagboek van Hendrik Haecxs, Lid
van den Hoogen Raad van Brazilie (1645-1654),” Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap
(1925): 126-163.
101 Van Dillen, “De West-Indische Compagnie, het Calvinism en de Politiek.”
102 Arthur Weststeijn, “Dutch Brazil and the Making of Free Trade Ideology,” 2011. Cited with permission of the
author.
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