Minutes of Empire

In September 1645, the directors of the West India Company gathered to discuss the most important crisis in the company's history, one that would determine the fate of a burgeoning Dutch imperial project in the New World. In this book, Alexander Bick tells the story of this meeting, applying the tools of microhistory to the boardroom of one of early modern Europe's most enigmatic trading companies. Chartered by the States General in 1621, the West India Companys principal aim was to open a new front in the struggle against Habsburg Spain by attacking its colonial revenues at their source. This required close cooperation between the company and the central organs of the Dutch state responsible for military affairs. Unlike the merchant-dominated ventures of popular imagination, the company emerges as an instrument of war in which noblemen, courtiers, and magistrates played a decisive role. Through portraits of figures such as Johannes de Laet and Hendrick van der Capellen, the book reveals how the company and its leaders wrestled with questions of political authority, colonial governance, and the relationship between private enterprise and public power questions that crystalized in the debate over the future of the lucrative but embattled Dutch sugar colony in northeastern Brazil. While this colony was ultimately lost, the West India Company's contributions to securing a favorable peace with Spain in 1648 would prove more enduring. Minutes of Empire offers an original perspective on the cosmopolitan politics of overseas trading companies that challenges conventional accounts of how empire helped to forge the Dutch state in the Golden Age.