Capitalism and Cartography in the Dutch Golden Age

Elizabeth A. Sutton

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780226254784
• eBook ISBN: 9780226254814
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

In Capitalism and Cartography in the Dutch Golden Age, Elizabeth A. Sutton explores the fascinating but previously neglected history of corporate cartography during the Dutch Golden Age, from ca. 1600 to 1650. She examines how maps were used as propaganda tools for the Dutch West India Company in order to encourage the commodification of land and an overall capitalist agenda.

Building her exploration around the central figure of Claes Jansz Vischer, an Amsterdam-based publisher closely tied to the Dutch West India Company, Sutton shows how printed maps of Dutch Atlantic territories helped rationalize the Dutch Republic's global expansion. Maps of land reclamation projects in the Netherlands, as well as the Dutch territories of New Netherland (now New York) and New Holland (Dutch Brazil), reveal how print media were used both to increase investment and to project a common narrative of national unity. Maps of this era showed those boundaries, commodities, and topographical details that publishers and the Dutch West India Company merchants and governing Dutch elite deemed significant to their agenda. In the process, Sutton argues, they perpetuated and promoted modern state capitalism.

NOTES

CHAPTER 1

1. Brettell, Modern Art, 1851–1928, 84.

2. Immanuel Wallerstein has written extensively on his theory of integrated economies in what he calls the world system. See Wallerstein, The Modern World System, esp. vol. 2, Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750.

3. Tilly, “Warmaking and Statemaking as Organized Crime,” 1–29.

4. For a sketch of the WIC’s economic activities in the seventeenth century, see, for example, de Vries and van der Woude, The First Modern Economy, 398–402. The classic history of Dutch overseas trade is still Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740. See also Emmer’s collection of essays in The Dutch in the Atlantic Economy, 1580–1880; and Klooster, “The West India Company’s Grand Scheme,” 58–70. On WIC activities in West Africa, see Ribeiro da Silva, Dutch and Portuguese in Western Africa.

5. On his landscape prints and unity, see esp. Onuf, “Envisioning Netherlandish Unity: Claes Visscher’s 1612 Copies of the Small Landscape Prints.”

6. See esp. Coclanis, ed., The Atlantic Economy During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries; Emmer, “The West India Company, 1621–1791: Dutch or Atlantic?,” 71–95; Schmidt, “The Dutch Atlantic,” 163–90; Bakker, “Emporium or Empire?,” 31–43; Klooster, “The West India Company’s Grand Scheme,” 58–70.

7. Quoted from Michael Doyle in Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law, 11.

8. Suriname was conquered by Zeelander Abraham Crijnssen in 1667, and passed into Dutch ownership under the Treaty of Breda. It was initially administered by the States of Zeeland, then the WIC, and after 1682, the Chartered Society of Suriname (Geoctroyeerde Societeit van Suriname). The society came into existence after the city of Amsterdam and Cornelis van Aerssens van Sommelsdijck each purchased a third, leaving one-third to the WIC, to whom the States of Zeeland had sold Suriname for 260,000 florins. Van Lier, Frontier Society, 19.

9. Bakker, Landscape and Religion, 132.

10. Giddens, The Constitution of Society, 26.

11. Ibid., 16–25.

12. Bourdieu, In Other Words, 135.

13. Giddens, Politics, Sociology, and Social Theory, 72, 49, 16. Weber’s 1891 thesis was on land tenure in ancient Rome. On Marx, property, and Roman law, see Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, vol. 2, The Nation-State and Violence, 68.

14. Giddens, The Constitution of Society, 258–62.

15. Ibid., 258.

16. Adapted from ibid., 258.

17. Ibid., 261–62.

18. Ibid., 262.

19. Giddens, Politics, Sociology, and Social Theory, 45.

20. Stephen Kalberg summarizes Weber’s distinction between “traditional” and “modern” capitalism as “the distinction between ‘capitalism’ and ‘modern capitalism’ stands at the foundation of Weber’s entire analysis. . . . Capitalism, as involving the exchange of goods and calculations for profit and loss balances in terms of money, has existed in civilizations in all corners of the globe, from ancient times to present . . . [whereas ‘modern capitalism’ is] a relatively free exchange of goods in markets, the separation of business activity from household activity, sophisticated bookkeeping methods, and the rational, or systematic, organization of work and the workplace in general. . . . Profit is pursued in a regular and continuous fashion, as is the maximization of profit in organized, productive business.” Kalberg, “Introduction to the Translation,” in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, xvii–xviii.

21. Kalberg, “Introduction,” xviii.

22. Marx notes, “In order that these objects may enter into relation with each other as commodities, their guardians must place themselves in relation to one another, as persons whose will resides in those objects, and must behave in such a way that each does not appropriate the commodity of the other, and part with his own, except by means of an act done by mutual consent. They must therefore, mutually recognize in each other the rights of private proprietors. This juridical relation, which thus expresses itself in a contract, whether such contract be part of a developed legal system or not, is a relation between two wills, and is but the reflex of the real economic relation between the two. It is this economic relation that determines the subject-matter comprised in each such juridical act.” From chap. 2 in Marx, Capital, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, 59.

23. See also Bourdieu, Distinction.

24. Foucault, The Order of Things; Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production; Giddens, The Constitution of Society.

25. Harvey, “Cartographic Identities,” 220.

26. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 173.

27. Ibid., 175.

28. Funnell and Robertson define “scientific” accounting as “an accounting system where the data is grounded in positive (empirically verifiable) monetary values . . . because these values are homogeneous, the capital accounting process can be reduced to the mathematical formula: Assets= Liabilities + Owners’ Equity.” Funnell and Robertson, “Capitalist Accounting in Sixteenth-Century Holland,” 579n2.

29. Stevin, Verechting van domeinen, ende vorstlicke bouckhouding op de Italiensche wyse. See Funnell and Robertson, “Capitalist Accounting in Sixteenth-Century Holland,” 560–86, esp. 577–78. See also Robertson and Funnell, Accounting by the First Public Company, 53–75, 105–35.

30. Robertson and Funnell, “The Dutch East-India Company and Accounting for Social Capital at the Dawn of Modern Capitalism 1602–1623,” 347–56; Robertson and Funnell, Accounting by the First Public Company,15–20, 136–66.

31. Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, 214.

32. “Money-form attaches itself either to the most important articles of exchange from outside, and these in fact are primitive and natural forms in which the exchange-value of home products finds expression. . . . Man has often made man himself, under the form of slaves, serve as the primitive material of money, but has never used land for that purpose. Such an idea could only spring up in a bourgeois society already well developed. It dates from the last third of the 17th century, and the first attempt to put it in practice on a national scale was made a century afterwards, during the French bourgeois revolution.” From chap. 2 in Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 61.

33. Robertson and Funnell, Accounting by the First Public Company, 21.

34. Benton, “Possessing Empire,” 21. See also Schmidt for his discussion of Pieter Stuyvesant specifically seeking maps to support Dutch claims to first possession of the area of New Netherland. Schmidt, “Mapping and Empire,” 551.

35. Harley, The New Nature of Maps, 98....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• ONE / Capitalism, Cartography, and Culture
• TWO / Amsterdam Society and Maps
• THREE / Capitalism and Cartography in Amsterdam
• FOUR / Profit and Possession in Brazil
• FIVE / Marketing New Amsterdam
• SIX / Capitalism and Cartography Revisited
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index