Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

Amsterdam newspapers did publish stories about the revolt, but their accounts lacked crucial
details and, in at least one case, badly distorted the nature and significance of what had taken
place. By focusing on Amsterdam, and on printed texts, scholars have largely studied the re-
circulation of news, instead of tracing the specific contexts in which news was initially received
and put to use.
The chapter that follows addresses this challenge through three distinct lenses. The first
section joins the directors of the Middelburg chamber in examining the letters from Recife and
places these manuscript sources within a matrix of other sources on the revolt, both printed and
oral. 14 The next section looks at decision-making and planning within the Heren XIX. Through a
close analysis of the board’s deliberations, it demonstrates the ways the company assessed the
news and how its directors tailored multiple messages to suit different audiences within the
Republic. The final section hones in on a single participant in these deliberations, Johannes de
Laet. Building on the work of Jacob Soll, the chapter argues that De Laet played the crucial role
of “information master” within the WIC and that he was instrumental in building a coalition to
relieve the colony in Brazil. 15 As in France and elsewhere in early modern Europe, the collection
of information translated into power and authority, but in the Dutch Republic that authority was
predicated on close cooperation between a company, led by its board, and at least a half-dozen
other institutions and assemblies that together constituted the Dutch state. 16
14 Harold Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).
15 Jacob Soll, “From Note-Taking to Data Banks: Personal and Institutional Information Management in Early
Modern Europe,” Intellectual History Review 20, no. 3 (2010): 355–375.
16 Jacob Soll, The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2009); Paul Slack, “Government and Information in Seventeenth-Century England,”
Past & Present 184 (August 2004): 33-68; Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice; Markus Friedrich,
“Government and Infromation-Management in Early Modern Europe: The Case of the Society of Jesus (1540-
1773),” Journal of Early Modern History 12 (2008): 539-563; See also Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing
Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
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