Dutch Atlantic World

by

Marjoleine Kars

Introduction

In the early modern world, long-distance trade and European colonization brought people along the Atlantic Ocean in western Europe, West Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas, into sustained contact. To study these connections beyond the confines of national histories, historians in the 1980s constructed the analytic category of the “Atlantic world” or “the Atlantic.” The “Dutch” Atlantic world refers to such interactions involving Dutch people, the United Provinces, and Dutch settlements in the New World. Until quite recently, the Dutch Atlantic had been little studied. Convinced that the Atlantic ventures of the Dutch did not amount to much, Dutch historians were more interested in the Dutch East Indies. Linguistic barriers kept non-Dutch Atlanticists away, and they concentrated instead on the larger British and Spanish empires. This neglect is slowly ending, stimulated by public debate in the Netherlands about the country’s role in Atlantic slavery and by an increased international interest in broad comparative studies. Moreover, since the 1990s, scholarship on the Dutch Atlantic is moving away from a myopic focus on the Dutch overseas and toward comprehensive histories of Dutch territories set in larger comparative frameworks. This entry will provide guidance in navigating works about the early modern Dutch Atlantic generally, as well as research focused on individual Dutch colonies and trading posts. Wherever possible, recent work is emphasized.

General Overviews

There is not, as yet, a comprehensive overview of the Dutch Atlantic that brings together all recent scholarship. Boxer 1965 provides an older overview, covering both the activities of the Dutch West India Company (WIC) and the East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC). Klooster 1997 provides a short and highly readable introduction written for an exhibit of early modern books of the Dutch in the Americas, so it does not include West Africa. Schmidt 2001 and Zandvliet 1998 imaginatively cover early Dutch expansion into the Atlantic. Moreover, paradoxically, scholars of the Dutch Atlantic agree that there was no such a thing. Emmer and Klooster 1999 argue that the notion of an Atlantic only makes sense for the British but not the Dutch, who never developed an integrated Atlantic empire. Schmidt 2009 suggests there was not one Dutch Atlantic but several different ones, while de Vries 2005 suggests the Dutch Atlantic never came into being as imagined.

• Boxer, C. R. The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600–1800. History of Human Society. New York: Knopf, 1965.

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  A synthetic work that chronicles the rise and fall of the Dutch East and West India companies. While quite old, and at times outdated, this book remains essential reading for students and nonspecialists.

• de Vries, Jan. “The Dutch Atlantic Economies.” In The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel. Edited by Peter A. Coclanis, 1–29. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005.

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  While De Vries sees the Dutch Atlantic largely in terms of failure, this essay provides a useful overview for beginning researchers and delineates four successive stages of economic development.

• Emmer, Pieter, and Willem Klooster. “The Dutch Atlantic, 1600–1800: Expansion without Empire.” Itinerario: European Journal of Overseas History 23.2 (1999): 48–69.

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  Authors argue that, with a few short-lived exceptions, the Dutch Atlantic was insignificant economically, demographically, culturally, and in every other way.

• Klooster, Willem. The Dutch in the Americas, 1600–1800: A Narrative History with the Catalogue of an Exhibition of Rare Prints, Maps, and Illustrated Books from the John Carter Brown Library. Providence, RI: John Carter Brown Library, 1997.

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  This beautifully illustrated book, while written to accompany an exhibit about the Dutch collection of early modern Dutch printed sources at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, provides a useful summary of the history of the Dutch in the Americas along with an annotated bibliography.

• Schmidt, Benjamin. Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

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  Creative monograph that argues that the struggle of the Dutch with Spain shaped their view of the Americas and the role they themselves could play in the New World.

• Schmidt, Benjamin. “The Dutch Atlantic: From Provincialism to Globalism.” In Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal. Edited by Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, 163–190. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

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  Imaginative essay assessing several different Dutch Atlantics, one of actual engagement, and one that was representational, consisting of texts and images that show that the Dutch at the time themselves applied the notion of an Atlantic.

• Zandvliet, Kees. Mapping for Money: Maps, Plans and Topographic Paintings and Their Role in Dutch Overseas Expansion during the 16th and 17th Centuries. Amsterdam: Batavian Lion International, 1998.

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  Lavishly illustrated, this book provides an institutional analysis of the mapmaking activities of the Dutch East and West India companies in the first century of Dutch overseas expansion. Includes case studies on Brazil, New Netherland, and Cape of Good Hope.