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trade in which the company had only very recently become involved. 103 The Heren XIX and the
States General were ultimately swayed not by pressure from Amsterdam, but by Johan Maurits'
argument that opening trade to Brazil was the only way to attract free settlers, and by a final
compromise that addressed Zeeland’s concerns over company finance by injecting additional
private capital and ensuring a steady flow of income from the slave trade. In this way Dutch
entry into the trade in slaves was not only a response to labor shortages in Brazil: it was a
deliberate effort to offset the rising costs of New World conquest. The subsequent debate over
free trade to Angola in the early 1640s came increasingly to focus on profits, effectively de-
linking the issue of slavery from concerns about Brazil—a shift that took concrete form when the
revolt halted the trade in slaves to Pernambuco and the company began to explore other markets
in São Tomé and the Caribbean. The chapter thus demonstrates important links between the
debates over free trade and slavery.
Chapter Six returns to the meeting in Middelburg and to the company's campaign to
secure military and financial assistance from the States General in the winter of 1645. It focuses
on two separate efforts to convince officials by establishing the company's value to the state. The
first of these, an internal memorandum drafted in the summer of 1645 by the Amsterdam director
Jacques Specx (1585-1652), drew together the company's diverse streams of income and
expenses from all its conquest areas to provide a calculation of the company's anticipated annual
profits. 104 The second, De Laet’s Historie ofte Iaerlyck Verhael van de Geoctroyeerde
Westindische Compagnie (History or Annual Account of the Chartered West India Company),
103 Ernst van den Boogaart and Pieter C. Emmer, “The Dutch Participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1596-1650,”
in The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. Henry A. Gemery and
Jan S. Hogendorn (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 353–375; W. S. Unger, “Essay on the History of the Dutch
Slave Trade,” in Dutch Authors on West Indian History: a Historiographical Selection, ed. M. A. P Meilink-
Roelofsz (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 42–98; Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From
the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (London: Verso, 1997).
104 NA 1.10.78, inv.nr. 8, fols. 115-120.
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