Minutes of Empire

In September 1645, when the directors of the West India Company gathered for their semi-annual board meeting, they faced 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 Company's principal aim was to open a new front in the struggle against Habsburg Spain by attacking its colonial revenues at their source. This required deep and enduring cooperation between the company and the central organs of the Dutch state. Unlike the merchant-dominated ventures of popular imagination, the company emerges as an instrument of war in which noblemen, courtiers, and city and provincial magistrates played a decisive role. Through portraits of figures like Johannes de Laet and Hendrik van der Capellen, the book reveals how the company and its leaders wrestled with fundamental questions of political authority, colonial governance, and the relationship between private enterprise and public power--questions that crystalized in the fall of 1645 in the debate over the future of the lucrative but embattled Dutch sugar colony in northeastern Brazil. Minutes of Empire offers an intimate and original perspective on the cosmopolitan politics of overseas trading companies that challenges conventional accounts of how empire contributed to the Dutch Republic's political and economic ascent in the Golden Age.