The study of Atlantic history for several decades has reconfigured how historians study empires in the early modern period, primarily by focusing on how people, ideas, and goods crossed borders and contributed to the creation of an increasingly interconnected world. Most of these studies, however, have focused on the Anglophone Atlantic and have fallen into the trap of what Christopher Ebert and Thiago Krause lament in the current volume as “methodological nationalism” (p. 171) – that is, a continued emphasis on “national economies” that emphasize the idea of mercantilism during the period as being more normative than it actually was. The result is the continuation of traditional studies of empire under the guise of “Atlantic” history. Pursuing Empire: Brazilians, The Dutch and the Portuguese in Brazil and the South Atlantic, c.1620–1660 contributes to a growing historiography that aims to avoid “methodological nationalism” by focusing on the intersection of the Dutch and Portuguese South Atlantic, with a specific focus on Brazil. The book therefore contributes to a growing literature on a region that has long been neglected in historical scholarship, but which is essential to our understanding of the early modern Atlantic world.
Many of the volume's contributors themselves have pioneered studies of the South Atlantic. Indeed, the first three chapters, by Francisco Bethencourt, Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, and José Manuel Santos Pérez, provide syntheses of their works to date and include some useful bibliographical updates. Bethencourt complicates the traditional notion that the Iberian and Northern European empires were divided by seigniorial and capitalist models, emphasizing how the Dutch, English, and French were as interested in expanding their territorial realms as the Spanish and Portuguese were in stimulating commerce. All the early modern empires, moreover, enacted protectionist policies that attempted (but largely failed) to enforce state monopolies at the expense of private trade. Ribeiro da Silva examines how two main groups of merchants based in Amsterdam bypassed, but also sometimes utilized state monopolies to maintain business relationships with Portuguese actors in the South Atlantic. The chapter focuses on how Dutch, Flemish, and Germans, and Portuguese Sephardic merchants depended upon each other to expand trade in the newly conquered African and American Dutch territories during the mid-seventeenth century. Ribeiro da Silva argues that transnational and intercultural partnerships between private merchants in West Africa and Brazil allowed their operations to endure regardless of Dutch–Portuguese state competitions for territorial control.
Santos Pérez presents a useful survey of the geopolitical concerns of the Habsburg court in Madrid and its council in Lisbon during the events leading up to the Dutch invasion of Brazil. The chapter is concerned with the implications that the union of the Iberian crowns had for Brazil and examines Philip III's attempts to mold Brazil's administration into a Spanish imperial model by, for example, expanding the sale of public offices and instituting visitas (royal inspections) of Brazilian captaincies. This policy was prompted by Spanish fears that Dutch incursions in Brazil and the Río de la Plata eventually might threaten the production and transportation of silver from Peru. The subsequent arming of Luso-Brazilian settlers and erosion of Jesuit authority over indigenous aldeias (religious settlements) shifted power dynamics in Portuguese America in ways that ultimately proved detrimental to Spanish control of the Portuguese empire.
The chapters by Anne McGinness, Bruno Romero Ferreira Miranda, and Marco Antônio Nunes da Silva shift the book's focus towards daily life in Dutch Brazil. They tackle the human experiences of colonialism which Cátia Antunes argues is a blind spot of the traditional historiography on early modern colonial history (p. 10).Footnote 1 McGinness offers a fresh perspective on religious relations among Protestants and Catholics in Dutch Brazil, arguing that Dutch rule in northern Brazil relied upon its policies of tolerance and ability to appease a majority-Catholic population. Nevertheless, McGinness suggests that the very tolerance of Dutch authorities allowed Portuguese Catholics to resist Dutch rule to the point of eventual rebellion. Especially welcome is the special attention that the chapter gives to indigenous perspectives on Dutch proselytizing, drawn from rare Tupi sources written in Dutch and Portuguese. Of note is the way that Catholic and Calvinist conversion efforts divided Tupi converts, creating animosity between those who supported Portuguese or Dutch rule. McGinness thus contributes a much-needed addition to the study of not only indigenous societies but religion in general in Dutch Brazil, which has previously focused mostly on Europeans.
Miranda offers a similarly refreshing portrait of the life of a Dutch West India Company (WIC) soldier. He utilizes soldier memoirs together with surviving administrative records of the first WIC to examine how poor administration and lack of provisions created a large group of disaffected soldiers. Miranda does this by examining in detail how meager wages led them to seek extra work, which the military administration strictly forbade, simply to keep themselves properly fed. The WIC was unable to curtail such activity and eventually had to adjust its policies to account for its inability to provision its soldiers. Dutch soldiers thereafter increasingly intermingled with the local population, at times to the detriment of WIC interests, such as when Dutch soldiers deserted their contracts to join roving bands of bandits. Soldiers often are presented as a faceless mass of people, cogs in the machine that was state power in the early modern period. Miranda humanizes these individuals and, in the process, demonstrates how even those who served the interests of exploitative colonial enterprises could suffer under its demands.
Nunes da Silva is also interested in daily life in Brazil but as seen through the perspective of Portuguese Inquisitors. The chapter examines cases of Dutch Calvinists and Portuguese Catholic marriages, and, to a lesser extent, Portuguese Jewish and New Christian relationships. His insight into Portuguese conversions to Calvinism contribute to a topic that is sorely lacking in the literature, and the chapter offers an interesting survey of the way Inquisitors perceived the convivencia that took place under Dutch rule in Brazil.
Following this chapter, Antunes returns to Dutch economic activity in Brazil, evaluating the continuities and changes in cross-cultural business networks across four main periods that defined its history. The period from the late sixteenth century up to 1621 was defined mostly by private Dutch enterprises that engaged with Spanish and Portuguese private and state ventures. Following the end of the Twelve-Year Truce and the creation of the WIC in 1621 was a period defined by constant military skirmishes that disrupted traditional Dutch–Brazilian trade but also saw the Dutch gain significant territorial and economic advantages over the Habsburg-ruled Portuguese empire. The restored Portuguese Crown in 1641 began to reverse these gains, first in West Central Africa and ultimately in Brazil in 1654, forcing Dutch traders to contend with restored Portuguese control over key South Atlantic trade centers. As a result, after 1655, Dutch participation in the Brazil trade returned to the realm of private enterprises and ultimately faded, as merchants from the Republic gradually turned their attention towards the Caribbean. Antunes examines how each period relied on fluctuating cross-cultural partnerships. The early and later periods, for example, were defined by Christian and Jewish partnerships as Dutch Christians relied on the networks and knowledge of Portuguese Jews to gain access to Brazilian markets. During the period of WIC control, however, Christian merchants from the Republic dominated the Brazil trade by large margins. The chapter offers a good overview of how flexible partnerships allowed merchants from the Republic to adapt to the shifting realities of imperial competition in Brazil.
The final contribution, by Ebert and Krause, takes a closer look at Dutch–Brazilian trade in the decades following the end of Dutch Brazil in 1654. Ebert and Krause present ample data demonstrating how private Dutch traders were pushed out of direct participation in the Brazil trade but continued to engage with it primarily through partnerships with Brazilian merchants active on the West African coast. Tobacco and textiles were of particular interest to these merchants and to state monopolies alike, as both products were important for procuring captured Africans for enslavement across the Americas. Brazilians came to dominate the trade between West Africa and Brazil and worked in cooperation with both Dutch and African merchants as well as other interloping Europeans. As a result, Dutch traders felt less need to breach Portuguese restrictions on trade with Brazil as it was easier simply to await the arrival of Brazilian merchants at their African-held territories. The chapter complicates the characterization of the Portuguese empire as falling under total English domination in the second half of the seventeenth century. Not only did Portuguese merchants retain economic and political interests in the Netherlands during this period, but Brazilian and African traders maintained their own complex and transnational trade networks in the South Atlantic that successfully challenged mercantilist policies. As Ebert and Krause note, the notions of centers and peripheries or of an archaic Iberian and modern Northern European Atlantic do not work when one considers the multiple instances of integration found in the South Atlantic. This, they argue, “can be found if one leaves methodological nationalism behind and puts the slave trade front and centre” (p. 192).
The volume thus pushes the field further towards analyses of integration and transnational engagement in the early modern world. The organization of the volume is somewhat uneven and some of the chapters could benefit from expanded analyses of primary sources. Grammatical errors are littered throughout and, in some instances, detract from arguments presented. More troubling is the relegation of the slave trade and enslaved Africans to the background of many of the discussions despite the profound impact of both on the South Atlantic. These issues aside, the volume does challenge methodological nationalism by examining the multiple instances of integration and transnational relationships that surrounded Dutch Brazil in the early modern period. Undergraduate courses could utilize this book to highlight transnational and intercultural entanglements in the early modern world. Graduate students, meanwhile, would benefit from the historiographical syntheses that many of the chapters offer and from observing the methodologies that contributors used to analyze Dutch Brazil in an Atlantic context.
