De-nationalizing empire: Dutch involvement in the Early Modern British, French, and Spanish empires

Speaker: Cátia Antunes, Professor of History of Global Economic Networks at the institute for History, Leiden University
Moderated by: Tamar Herzog, Monroe Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs, Harvard Law School

Early Modern European empires are portrayed and perceived as nationally geared enterprises, as entangled spaces at the peripheries and as zones of contact. In the Netherlands, these perceptions have filtered into the public debate that seeks to define material and immaterial responsibilities for the colonial past. What the historiographical perceptions, academic portrayals and public debate seem, however, to ignore is the role played by foreigners (being non-subjects of a specific king or republic) in exploiting the empires of other countries. It is thus pertinent to enquire to how and why Dutch entrepreneurs (being those taking risks in matters of trade or production, introducing innovations, making decisions based on information that others did not possess and searching for opportunities where most perceived risk) participated in exploiting the English, French and Iberian empires, as Dutch firms are particularly prominent in the European colonial landscape. Since Dutch entrepreneurs engaged in exploiting the resources of those other countries, what is the future of the public debate in the Netherlands, and Europe at large, regarding a shared responsibility for the colonial past? The answer(s) to these questions can be found in the multiple public and private archives that house extensive collections of the firms that operated from the Dutch Republic into the four largest empires in Western Europe. By combining original and recently uncovered archival sources pertaining to the relevant men (and some women), businesses and activities and their relationships with fellow traders, investors and political powers in situ, this project carries the seed to radically change commonly held perceptions regarding Dutch colonial participation and how these perceptions are often filtered into the public debate. This socio-economic entanglement of empires may have resulted, I hypothesize, in a shared European culture of exploitation that is impossible to disentangle within public debates that remain nationally bound. Furthermore, and unsurprisingly, Dutch entrepreneurs were not unique in preferring the empire of others to earn their fortunes.

Cátia Antunes (1976) obtained her degree in History from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, after reading at the Centre of Urban History, University of Leicester (UK) and the History Department, Leiden University (The Netherlands). She obtained her PhD in November 2004, under the supervision of Prof. Richard T. Griffiths and Prof. Femme. S. Gaastra, with the dissertation Globalisation in the Early Modern Period: the economic relationship between Amsterdam and Lisbon, 1640-1705. In 2003 she became Assistant Professor at the Economic and Social History section, Institute for History, Leiden University. In 2004 and 2005 she did post-doc research for the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia in Portugal. She spent the academic year of 2007-2008 at the History Department of Yale University, on a Fulbright Research grant as a guest of Ezra Stiles College, under Prof. Stuart B. Schwartz. As of March 2013, she has been appointed Associate Professor in Early Modern Economic History. Catia’s interest for cross-cultural business networks during the Early Modern period has developed into a broader research profile about free agency and empire building in the Netherlands in comparative perspective with other Western European Empires. This research profile has been awarded a VIDI grant by the Dutch National Science Foundation (NWO) in May 2012. This comparative approach will be further explored with a global intake on the way Western European and Ottoman maritime monopolies shaped free agency and informal empire building before the Age of Revolutions and has been awarded a Starting Grant for the research project 'Fighting Monopolies' by the European Research Council in July 2012. In 2014, Catia expanded her research into a new interdisciplinary field of research. Together with maritime archeologists, specialists in dendrochronology, climatologists and environmentalists, looked at factors surrounding the use of wood, exchange and depletion of forestry resources in Early Modern Europe, from a historical perspective (Marie Curie-ITN scheme). The ForSeaDiscovery enquires into the link between forestry, sea power and economic growth. As of September 2017, Cátia will be exploring the complexities in the governance of the Dutch empire, from the perspective of diversity in the project 'Resilient Diversity: the Governance of Racial and Religious Plurality in the Dutch Empire, 1600-1800'. In a joint venture with Karwan Fatah Black (Leiden University), Ulbe Bosma (IISG-Amsterdam) and Matthias van Rossum (IISG-Amsterdam), we question how Dutch colonial institutions govern diversity in North America, the Caribbean, Western Africa and Asia. At the same time, we are looking for the reasons why institutions that govern diversity were so resilience and have had lasting impact on modern systems of governance.

Tamar Herzog's work centers on the relationship between Spain, Portugal, Portuguese and Spanish America and the ways by which Iberian societies changed as a result of their involvement in a colonial project. Her first set (of four) books examined the working of colonial institutions in everyday situations. It included an analysis of the relationship between legal norms and social and political practices, and was mainly concerned with the way institutions and normative orders responded to changing circumstances, and to material and symbolic constraints. Her fifth book dealt with the way individuals negotiated being members of both local and kingdom communities, and with how immigrants became citizens, and citizens were transformed in outsiders. Her sixth book examined the formation of the border between Spain and Portugal in both Europe and the Americas. Rather than a political, military or diplomatic history, it analyzed how boundaries were formed on the ground by neighbors and how the right to land and the use of territory were discussed, negotiated, obtained or denied. Her latest book is an extended essay on the history of European law, spanning from Roman times to present- day debates on the European Union and the globalization of law. It challenges a few of the most common assumptions regarding legal history, including, for example, the division of European law into Continental and English law, or the separation between European and colonial law. A legal scholar and historian by training, her work engages with early modern European history, colonial Latin American history, imperial history, Atlantic history, and Legal history.