Trade, Globalization, and Dutch Art and Architecture: Interrogating Dutchness and the Golden Age 9789463723633, 9789048551583

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
1. Introduction: Grasping at the Past
2. The Gilded Cage: Dutch Global Aspirations
3. Gathering the Goods: Dutch Still Life Painting and the End of the “Golden Age”
4. Dutch Batavia: An Ideal Dutch City?
5. Simplifying the Past: Willemstad’s Historic and Historicizing Architecture
6. Conclusion: The “Golden Age” Today
Works Cited
Acknowledgements
Index

Citation preview

Trade, Globalization, and Dutch Art and Architecture

Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700 A forum for innovative research on the role of images and objects in the late medieval and early modern periods, Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700 publishes monographs and essay collections that combine rigorous investigation with critical inquiry to present new narratives on a wide range of topics, from traditional arts to seemingly ordinary things. Recognizing the fluidity of images, objects, and ideas, this series fosters cross-cultural as well as multi-disciplinary exploration. We consider proposals from across the spectrum of analytic approaches and methodologies. Series Editor Allison Levy is Digital Scholarship Editor at Brown University. She has authored or edited five books on early modern Italian visual and material culture.

Trade, Globalization, and Dutch Art and Architecture Interrogating Dutchness and the Golden Age

Marsely L. Kehoe

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Pieter Claesz, Still Life with a Turkey Pie, detail, 1627. Oil on wood. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. SK-A-4646. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 363 3 e-isbn 978 90 4855 158 3 doi 10.5117/9789463723633 nur 654 © M.L. Kehoe / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2023 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

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1. Introduction: Grasping at the Past Dutch and Dutching: Hybridity and Decolonization Collective Identity, Memory, Forgetting, and Innocence The Importance of Material Culture and Art History to Tell This Story Global Dutch Art History Chapter Outline Dutch Identity in Conflict Works Cited

15 19 23 28 30 31 33 35

2. The Gilded Cage: Dutch Global Aspirations The European Age of Discovery Establishment of the Dutch Republic The Beginnings of Dutch World Exploration and the Foundation of the VOC The Dutching of the Nautilus Shell Dutch Nautilus Mounts and the Dutch Sea The Freedom of the Seas The Formation and Fate of the WIC Guarding “Free Trade” The Twelve Years’ Truce The Denouement of the Republic and Transition to Monarchy Delft and the Shifting Legacy of the “Golden Age” Works Cited

39 43 45

3. Gathering the Goods: Dutch Still Life Painting and the End of the “Golden Age” Dutch Still Life: Defined by Objects Representing Objects in Dutch Still Life Pepper in Still Life and Trade Dutching Still Life Tables Works Cited

46 49 56 62 66 67 73 75 77 79

85 87 93 97 109 118 120

4. Dutch Batavia: An Ideal Dutch City? The Founding of Batavia The Plan of Batavia A Dutch City in the Tropics Dutch City Planning Principles in the Seventeenth Century Hierarchy in Batavia Ordering Batavia’s Population Conclusion Works Cited

125 130 133 137 141 150 152 160 160

5. Simplifying the Past: Willemstad’s Historic and Historicizing Architecture The Founding of Willemstad and the WIC The Vernacular Architecture of Downtown Willemstad The Townhouse as Dutch Colonial Architecture The Curaçaoan People Tracing Change over Time Conclusion Works Cited

165 169 172 176 188 192 199 202

6. Conclusion: The “Golden Age” Today Works Cited

207 212

Works Cited Archives and Databases Bibliography

213 213 213

Acknowledgements

229

Index

231

List of Illustrations Colorplates Plate 1

Plate 2

Plate 3

Plate 4 Plate 5 Plate 6

Plate 7 Plate 8

Nicolaes de Grebber (mount, attributed), Nautilus Cup, 1592. Collection Museum Het Prinsenhof, Delft, Netherlands. Nr. PDZ3. Nautilus shell with gilt silver. Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt. Photograph Albertine Dijkema. Cornelis Bellekin (shell, attributed), Anonymous nineteenthcentury Danish smith (mount), Nautilus Cup with Genre Scenes, ca. 1660. Nautilus shell with gilt silver. KODE Art Museums and Composer Homes, Bergen, Norway. Inv. nr. VK 5022. Anonymous Dutch engraver (attributed, shell), Andreas I. Mackensen (mount), Nautilus Cup, first half seventeenth century (attributed, shell), 1650–1660 (mount). Nautilus shell and gilt silver. Kunstgewerbemuseum Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany. Inv. Nr. 1993.63. Photograph BPK Bildagentur / Saturia Linke / Art Resource, NY. Willem Kalf, Wineglass and a Bowl of Fruit, 1663. Oil on canvas. Cleveland Museum of Art, USA, Leonard C. Hanna, Jr. Fund. 1962.292. Jan Davidsz de Heem, Still Life with Nautilus Cup and Lobster, 1634. Oil on canvas. Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart. Inv. Nr. 3323. Photograph Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY. Willem Kalf, Still Life with a Porcelain Pitcher, 1653. Oil on canvas. Alte Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich, Germany. Inv. nr. 17. Photograph BPK Bildagentur / Art Resource, NY. Andries Beeckman, The Castle of Batavia, 1661, oil on canvas. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. SK-A-19. Handelskade, Willemstad, Curaçao, 2014. Photograph author.

Figures Figure 2.1 Pieter Claesz, Vanitas Still life with Nautilus Cup, 1636. Oil on panel. Westphalian State Museum of Art and Cultural History, Münster, Germany. Inv.-Nr 1369 LM. Photograph BPK Bildagentur / Hanna Neander / Art Resource, NY.40

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Figure 2.2 Jan Jacobsz. van Royesteyn (mount, Dutch, 1549–1604), Nautilus Cup, 1596. Silver-gilt and nautilus shell, H. 11 3/8 in. (28.8 cm). The Toledo Museum of Art, purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott, 1973.53.40 Figure 2.3 Nautilus Emblem, Nr. 49 in Joachim Camerarius, Symbolorum et emblematum ex aquatilibus et reptilibus (Nuremburg: 1604). Photograph Newberry Library, Chicago, USA.51 Figure 2.4 Jeremias Ritter (mount), Nautilus Snail, ca. 1630. Nautilus shell and silver-gilt. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, USA. Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan. 1917.260. Photograph Allen Phillips/Wadsworth Atheneum.52 Figure 2.5 Anonymous Rotterdam silversmith (mount), Nautilus Cup, ca. 1590. Nautilus shell, gilt silver, jewels, and remnants of paint. Collection Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands. Inv. nr. MBZ 185 (KN&V). Loan: Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed 1953 (NK-collectie). Photograph Tom Haartsen.54 Figure 2.6 Anonymous engraver (shell), after Rembrandt van Rijn, anonymous silversmith (mount), Nautilus Cup, after 1631. Nautilus shell and gilt silver. Ostrobothnian Museum, The Karl Hedman Art Collection, Vaasa, Finland. Photograph Markus Paavola.55 Figure 2.7 Anonymous engraver, Guangzhou, China (attributed, shell), Anonymous German and Italian silversmiths (mount), Nautilus cup, ca. 1550. British Museum, London, England. WB 114.55 Figure 2.8 Jörg Ruel (mount), Nautilus Boat, ca. 1610–1620. Nautilus shell and gilt silver. Grünes Gewölbe, Dresden, Germany. Inv.Nr. III. 152. Photograph Paul Kuchel.59 Figure 2.9 Joachim Hiller, Nautilus Ostrich, ca. 1600. Nautilus shell, gilt silver, jewels, ivory, and painting. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. BK-1958-44.59 Figure 2.10 Display in Amsterdam Museum, 2009. Photograph author.61 Figure 2.11 Franciscus Leonardus Stracké, Monument to Hugo Grotius, 1886. Delft, Netherlands. Photograph author.78 Figure 2.12 Display in Museum Het Prinsenhof, 2009. Photograph author.78 Figure 3.1 Willem Claesz Heda, Breakfast Still Life, 1637. Oil on wood. Louvre, Paris, France. INV1319. Photograph Gérard Blot. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.88

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Figure 3.2 Abraham van Beijeren, Banquet Still Life, ca. 1660s. Oil on canvas. Hohenbuchau Collection, Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna, Austria. Inv.: HB 23. © Liechtenstein Museum / HIP / Art Resource, NY.88 Figure 3.3 Abraham van Beijeren, Still Life with Lobster and Fruit, early 1650s. Oil on wood. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA. 1971.254.92 Figure 3.4 Willem Kalf, Still Life with Nautilus Cup, 1662. Oil on canvas. © Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain. 1962.10.92 Figure 3.5 Willem Claesz Heda, Nautilus Cup and Plates with Oysters, 1649. Oil on wood. Staatliches Museum, Schwerin, Germany. Inv. nr. G68. Photograph BPK Bildagentur / Elke Wolford / Art Resource, NY.98 Figure 3.6 Willem Claesz Heda, Still Life with Oysters, a Silver Tazza, and Glassware, 1635. Oil on panel. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA. 2005.331.4.98 Figure 3.7 Pieter Claesz, Still Life with a Turkey Pie, 1627. Oil on wood. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. SK-A-4646.99 Figure 3.8 David Davidsz de Heem, Still Life, ca. 1668. Oil on canvas. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. SK-A-2566.101 Figure 3.9 “Generale Carga,” 1690. Nationaal Archief, The Hague, Netherlands, Archief van Johannes Hudde (1628–1704), archive nr. 1.10.48, inventory nr. 17. Photograph author.103 Figure 3.10 “Generale Carga.” Hollande Mercurius 41 (1690) (Haarlem: Pieter Casteleyn), 336. Photograph Newberry Library, Chicago, USA.103 Figure 3.11 Artus Quellinus I and workshop, The Four Continents Paying Homage to Amsterdam, design for the back pediment, Amsterdam Town Hall (now Royal Palace), ca. 1665. Terracotta. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. BK-AM-51-3.110 Figure 3.12 Willem Kalf, Still Life with a Nautilus Shell, 1643. Oil on canvas. Musée de Tessé, Le Mans, France. Inv. LM10.89. Photograph Agence Bulloz. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.114 Figure 3.13 Willem Kalf, Still Life with Columbine Goblet, ca. 1660. Oil on canvas. Detroit Institute of Arts, USA. Founders Society Purchase, General Membership Fund, 26.43.114 Figure 4.1 Aelbert Cuyp, The Commander of the Homeward-Bound Fleet, ca. 1640–1660, oil on canvas. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Netherlands. SK-A-2350.127

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Figure 4.2 Jacob Coeman, Pieter Cnoll, Cornelia van Nijenrode, Their Daughters, and Two Enslaved Servants, 1665, oil on canvas. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Netherlands. SK-A-4062.127 Figure 4.3 Waere affbeeldinge Wegens het Casteel ende Stadt Batavia, 1681. Nationaal Archief, The Hague, Netherlands. 4.VELH Kaartcollectie Buitenland Leupe, supplement, nr. 430.132 Figure 4.4 Plan van ‘t fort en omleggende land Jacatra, detail, 1619, manuscript. Nationaal Archief, The Hague, Netherlands. 4.VEL Kaartcollectie Buitenland Leupe, nr. 1176.135 Figure 4.5 Jacob Cornelisz Cuyck, Plan of Batavia, 1629, copy by Hessel Gerritsz, 1630, manuscript. Nationaal Archief, The Hague, Netherlands. 4.VEL Kaartcollectie Buitenland Leupe, nr. 1179B.135 Figure 4.6 Plan der Stad en ‘t Kasteel Batavia. Made under the direction of P.A. van der Parra in 1770, printed in Amsterdam by Petrus Conradi in 1780. Leiden University Library, Netherlands, Digital Collections. COLLBN Port 57 N 50.136 Figure 4.7 Carte de l’isle de Iava ou sont les villes de Batauia et Bantam, detail, ca. 1720, watercolor. Newberry Library, Chicago, USA.139 Figure 4.8 Seventeenth-century houses in Batavia, on the Spinhuis Gracht, photograph ca. 1920. Leiden University Library Digital Collections, Netherlands. KITLV 88700.140 Figure 4.9 Johannes Nieuhof, Tijgersgracht, 1682. Johannes Nieuhof, Gedenkwaardige Brasiliaense zee- en landreis (Amsterdam: Widow of van Jacob van Meurs, 1682), between 198–199. Columbia University Libraries, USA.140 Figure 4.10 Simon Stevin, Ideal Plan for a City, 1650. Simon Stevin, Materiae Politicae. Bvrgherlicke Stoffen: vervanghende ghedachtenissen der oeffeninghen des doorluchtichsten Prince Maurits van Orangie (Leiden: Justus Livius, 1650). Newberry Library, Chicago, USA.144 Figure 4.11 A. Besnard after Daniël Stalpaert, Map of Amsterdam with plan for the Fourth Expansion, ca. 1663–1682. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. RP-P-AO-20-33.149 Figure 4.12 General Population Distribution of Batavia. Author’s alteration of Figure 4.3.155 Figure 5.1 Handelskade 1 (left) and Handelskade unnumbered (right), details. From left: 1885, photograph Soublette et Fils (Collection Nationaal Museum van Wereldkulturen, Netherlands. Coll.nr. TM-60028720); 1915, photograph Soublette et Fils (Collection Nationaal Museum van Wereldkulturen, Netherlands. Coll.nr. TM-60019999); 2014 (photograph author).166

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Figure 5.2 Gerard van Keulen, Map of Curaçao, 1716. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA.170 Figure 5.3 J. Stanton Robbins & Co. / Blair Associates, The Distinctive Architecture of Willemstad, April 1961. From The Distinctive Architecture of Willemstad: Its Conservation and Enhancement. A Report prepared by J. Stanton Robbins and Lachlan F. Blair.171 Figure 5.4 Entrance to the St. Anna Bay. Photograph Soublette et Fils, 1890–1895. Thomas Frederick Davis papers, Descriptive account of Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles, 1902, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA. mm 80003197.175 Figure 5.5 Penha Building (Heerenstraat 1), details. From left: 1800 (‘t Eÿland Curacao, manuscript. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, Washington, DC, USA. G5181.A35 1800 .E9.); ca. 1822 (R. F. Raders, De haven van Curaçao, acquatint, New York Public Library, USA, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection); 1885, photograph Soublette et Fils (Collection Nationaal Museum van Wereldkulturen, Netherlands. Coll.nr. TM-60028720); 2014 (photograph author).177 Figure 5.6 Warmoesstraat, Damrak, Amsterdam. ca. 1880–1890. Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed, Netherlands. OF-05129.178 Figure 5.7 Late nineteenth-century Scharloo houses. Left: Villa Maria, 2–6 N. van den Brandhofstraat, built 1885, photograph ca. 1888–1900, Soublette et Fils, detail. (Collection Nationaal Museum van Wereldkulturen, Netherlands. Coll.nr.: TM60060208). Right: facade of Schaarlooweg 106, built 1881. (Photograph, 1994/1995. Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed, Netherlands. 900.260)180 Figure 5.8 Plantation house Groot Santa Martha with kunuku huts, detail, ca. 1900, photograph Soublette et Fils. Collection Nationaal Museum van Wereldkulturen, Netherlands. Coll.nr. TM-60019497.182 Figure 5.9 View of Willemstad, the Harbor of Curaçao, 1780, drawing and watercolor. Collection het Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Inv. nr. S.0163.184 Figure 5.10 Whimsical Curved Gables of Willemstad, 2014, photographs author. Clockwise from top left: Breedestraat 37, Heerenstraat 29–31, Handelskade 3, and Pietermaaiweg 16.186

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Figure 5.11 Details of Breedestraat 3–5, Willemstad. From left: ca. 1890, photograph Soublette et Fils (Collection Nationaal Museum van Wereldkulturen, Netherlands. Coll.nr. TM-60028736); ca. 1890–1895, photograph Soublette et Fils (Thomas Frederick Davis papers, Descriptive account of Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles, 1902, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA. mm 80003197); 1954, photograph H. van der Wal (Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed, Netherlands. TGGR-412); 2014 (photograph author).187 Figure 5.12 Breedestraat in Otrobanda, 1895–1900, photograph Soublette et Fils. Thomas Frederick Davis papers, Descriptive account of Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles, 1902, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA. mm 80003197.195 Figure 5.13 Breedestraat 24. Left: unknown photographer, detail, 1945–1960 (Collection Nationaal Museum van Wereldkulturen, Netherlands. Coll.nr. TM-60060876). Right: 2014 (photograph author).196 Figure 5.14 Handelskade 6, details. From left: 1888, photograph Soublette et Fils (Leiden University Library, Netherlands, Digital Collections. KITLV 5325); 1954, photograph H. van der Wal (Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed, Netherlands, Collectie Temminck Groll. TGGR-367); 2014 (photograph author).197 Figure 5.15 Renaissance Hotel, Willemstad. 2014. Photograph author.198 Figure 5.16 Brionplein, Willemstad. 2014. Photograph author.198 Figure 6.1 Van Vleck Hall, Hope College, Holland Michigan, built 1857. Photograph, ca. 1859. Holland, MI, USA, Joint Archives of Holland, Photograph Collection. H88-PH5470.209 Figure 6.2 Lubbers Hall, Hope College, Holland Michigan, built 1942. Undated photograph. Holland, MI, USA, Joint Archives of Holland, Photograph Collection. H88-PH5260-008.209

Graphs Graph 3.1 Volume of pepper imported by Dutch East India Company, for years in which entire fleet is known to author. Source: author; see Table 3.1 for data.105 Graph 3.2 Estimated volume of pepper imported by Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth century. Source: author; see Table 3.2 for data.105

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Tables Table 3.1 Volume of pepper imported by Dutch East India Company, for years in which entire fleet is known to author. Sources: Hollandse Mercurius and Cargo Lists in Nationaal Archief, The Hague, Archief van Johannes Hudde (1628–1704), archive nr. 1.10.48, inventory nr. 17. Data combines black and white pepper and is converted to lbs. Data only for years with full fleet (individual named ships) cargo is known, by comparison with named ships in The Dutch East India Company’s shipping between the Netherlands and Asia 1595–1795, Koninklijk Nederlands Historisch Genootschap, http://www.historici.nl/ Onderzoek/Projecten/DAS/, accessed November 20, 2011.118 Table 3.2 Estimated volume of pepper imported by Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth century. Sources: Hollandse Mercurius and Cargo Lists in Nationaal Archief, The Hague, Archief van Johannes Hudde (1628–1704), archive nr. 1.10.48, inventory nr. 17. Data combines black and white pepper and is converted to lbs. Known pepper cargoes averaged and estimated over annual fleet size, by comparison with named ships in The Dutch East India Company’s shipping between the Netherlands and Asia 1595-1795, Koninklijk Nederlands Historisch Genootschap, http://www.historici.nl/Onderzoek/ Projecten/DAS/, accessed November 20, 2011.119

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Introduction: Grasping at the Past Abstract: The Dutch “Golden Age” is both a point of pride and a deeply contested concept, increasingly discussed in scholarship and in popular conversation. This introduction to the book explores how the “Golden Age” and art history are intertwined, both in the past and the present, as part of Dutch collective identity. Central to the chapter and the book are the notions first that the Dutch “Golden Age” was a period of global expansion, and second, that as the relationship to the seventeenth century has evolved over time, that the global and challenging aspects of this period have been deliberately forgotten. Keywords: Golden Age, collective memory, identity, innocence, global, hybridity

Two important notions guide this book: 1) that the global reach of the early modern Netherlands was key to the flourishing of this new nation, and 2) that this global reach has been repeatedly and systematically forgotten by subsequent generations despite its importance for shaping Dutch cultural identity. The first notion has been well established in scholarship over the past few decades, by art historians, economic historians, and historians more generally. This idea has also received attention outside of academia in large part through popular art exhibitions that demonstrate the wide variety of global subject matter, objects, and materials that were acquired by seventeenth-century patrons and collectors, which have since found their way into public and private collections of European art today. However, this notion still has not reached the mainstream, either in today’s Netherlands or elsewhere. Instead the Netherlands conjures quaint historical images of tulip f ields, windmills, and wooden shoes, of townhouses along canals, essentially an idealized version of the historical landscape of the Netherlands. When the great Dutch institution, the Rijksmuseum, unveiled their newly renovated and reinstalled building in 2013, the artworks that told the story of this global reach so clearly (like room 2.9, which includes paintings of trading posts and merchants, an Indian-made inlaid wood cradle in European style, and trade goods from a Dutch East India Company shipwreck) were relegated to the corner galleries, making way

Kehoe, M.L., Trade, Globalization, and Dutch Art and Architecture: Interrogating Dutchness and the Golden Age. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463723633_ch01

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for the traditional glorification of the favored seventeenth-century painters like Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Frans Hals, in the central Gallery of Honor.1 There are signs, however, that the conversation about the Dutch global past is becoming louder, and at the same time more contentious.2 To acknowledge the global reach of the early modern Dutch Republic is to underscore that this small nation didn’t succeed in a vacuum, but was in fact built on a broad foundation, supported by people and places considered ‘other.’ To learn about this global reach is to be reminded of the unfair trade, colonialism, and slavery practiced by the Dutch even as they cherished their role as the most tolerant nation in Europe. While Dutch tolerance remains much celebrated and is indeed the backbone of liberal politics in the country to this day, the activities of the Dutch abroad in the early modern period run contrary to this idea. To share a few examples, consider the slaughter and displacement of more than 10,000 Banda Islanders, and the massacre of twenty English, Japanese, and Portuguese employees of the English East India Company, both in order to procure spice monopolies;3 the legally sanctioned piracy (also known as privateering) of cultural hero Piet Hein who famously captured the Spanish silver fleet in 1628; or the enslavement of half a million Africans and uncounted Asians, as well as the transshipment of many more. 4 To acknowledge the dark side of this period, broadly called the Dutch “Golden Age” (de Gouden Eeuw), is to strike at the heart of some Dutch people’s sense of national and cultural identity. Many Dutch people have been excluded from 1 Mariët Westermann’s insightful examination of the Rijksmuseum’s new installation, in general praising the better integration of the museum’s art and history collection items and artful displays, still found the display wanting in terms of representing the identities and experiences of all Dutch citizens. “The new display on the whole evinces an optimistic view of Dutch culture and democracy even as it acknowledges the darker conditions that empowered the Dutch mercantile empire. The Rijksmuseum is more forthcoming than it had been about the human costs of the colonial past, but maritime grandeur and military success continue to sound dominant notes, with colonial histories relegated to galleries that are at farthest remove from the building’s architectural spine.” Westermann, “What’s on at the New Rijks?,” 48–49. 2 Gert Oostindie discusses the effort to make this part of school curriculum in the Netherlands beginning in 2006: Oostindie, “Die Niederlande und ihr koloniales Erbe,” 103ff. Recent exhibitions at the Mauritshuis (Shifting Image: In Search of Johan Maurits, 2019), Rembrandthuis Museum (Black in Rembrandt’s Time, 2020), and the Rijksmuseum (Slavery, 2021) are addressing this head-on, and have received both public accolades and criticism. 3 This incident in the Banda Islands is described in Boxer, Dutch Seaborne Empire, 111 and Reid, Southeast Asia, 2:274. Robert Markley discusses the Ambonese Massacre, and the aftermath, throughout his study: Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, and both are detailed in Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade, especially 105–107. 4 The data compilation on slavevoyages.org counts 554,336 Africans traded by the Dutch from Africa to the Americas. This is likely an undercount, and also doesn’t include the enslavement of subsequent generations in the Americas. Slave Voyages, https://slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates, accessed May 19, 2020. Van Welie, “Patterns of Slave Trading,” 2008.

Introduc tion: Gr asping at the Past 

this dominant narrative, while others embrace it. Here I return to my second notion, that this global reach has been repeatedly and systematically forgotten by subsequent generations even as it has remained an important shaper of Dutch cultural identity. From the seventeenth century to the present, Dutch people have looked to the successes of their so-called “Golden Age” with pride, as a way of defining their nation, and as a source of pleasure. And of course there is much to celebrate in this period: in art history we have the unprecedented flourishing of painting and print culture, as artists explored new subjects and styles, producing by one estimate 5.6–11.2 million paintings.5 In science, philosophy, and economics, huge strides were made, such as the invention of the microscope by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the publication of treatises by René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, the first internationally stock-traded company and the futures market—all of which are more broadly foundational to European and Anglo-American culture. These are all positive aspects of early modern Dutch culture, which sit soundly within Europe, and especially within the Dutch province of Holland. What has been erased from popular understanding of this period are its global dimensions and, intertwined with the global reach, the unappealing or even embarrassing side of these accomplishments. To acknowledge the global dimensions of this period means acknowledging both the positive aspects of this reach: the contributions of non-Dutch people and cultures to the Dutch Republic, ranging from their ideas and products to their bodies; and also the negative aspects of the global reach: namely the exploitation of people and landscapes. This conversation recently entered the mainstream when, on September 12, 2019, the Amsterdam Museum announced that it would no longer use the term “Golden Age” to refer to Dutch culture in the seventeenth century. The museum’s curator for the seventeenth century, Tom van der Molen, stated: “In the history of the West, the term ‘Golden Age’ is strongly associated with national pride, specifically positive aspects like prosperity, peace, wealth, and innocence which don’t adequately reflect the historical reality of this period. The term ignores the many negative aspects of the seventeenth century, such as poverty, war, forced labor, and the trade in humans.”6 The Rijksmuseum’s Director Taco Dibbits and the Dutch Premier, Mark Rutte, quickly made statements that they were going to continue to use the term, albeit with different intentions. Rutte stated that he is proud of the Dutch “Golden Age,” acknowledging, though, that there were cringeworthy aspects of the period.7 5 Carpreau’s estimate for the North and South Netherlands together is 13.5–27 million paintings; he discusses other estimates and how he arrived at this astronomical number. Carpreau, The Value of Taste, 152–157. 6 “Amsterdam Museum gebruikt term ‘Gouden Eeuw’ Niet Meer.” Translation my own. See also his essay from shortly thereafter, van der Molen, “Curator’s Project.” 7 “Rutte blijft zeventiende eeuw ‘Gouden Eeuw’ noemen.”

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Dibbits noted: “The name refers to a period in history of great prosperity. That does not alter the fact that we acknowledge the dark side of this.”8 This is not just a debate on semantics or what words we use to talk about this moment, a moment far removed from us in time. In fact, how we talk about the “Golden Age” has immediate consequences for many people today. The celebration of only the positive aspects of the “Golden Age” excludes those people who were not the “winners” of this moment in history—including the many Dutch people with roots in former Dutch colonies and current Dutch territories. The attachment to the idea of a golden past continues to exclude people of color from being considered truly Dutch, and the same applies to immigrants to the Netherlands and their descendants.9 The debate especially over Muslim immigrants has been going on for decades, crystalized by Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s argument about the limits of tolerance and the assassination in 2004 of Theo van Gogh, and the debate over race erupts every November as Dutch cities prepare their Saint Nicholas Day celebrations which include the offensive racist caricature Black Peter (Zwarte Piet).10 Frankly, these are debates about whether people of color can belong in this most tolerant of nations, and many argue vehemently that they don’t. While the extreme politics of white nationalism are by no means mainstream, thankfully, even liberal Dutch identity is grounded in the so-called “Golden Age.” Why, indeed, do we call it the “Golden Age”? This term is used broadly by many cultures to refer to a moment in the past of great accomplishment—politically, economically, culturally. Gold is a material of great value (how many currencies are tied to the gold standard?). When light strikes it, a gold surface reflects onto its surroundings with a golden glow, illuminating and perhaps improving its surroundings. Gold retains its untarnished sheen over the years and in its purest form is malleable and thus easily shaped. Gold seems a perfect metaphor for celebrating a moment in the past as a high point of unquestioned prosperity, that may be molded to fit a culture’s present needs, that casts a glow on adjacent moments that might not be as bright, and which needs no polish to shine. In this book, I focus on that malleability of the “Golden Age,” and suggest that while it would appear that the “Golden Age” required no polishing, in fact for the period to remain so shiny in the popular imagination, it has, indeed, been polished regularly by subsequent generations. This book aims to make visible this invisible tarnish and to examine moments of polishing that have shaped this “Golden Age” in contemporary imagination. 8 “End of Golden Age: Dutch Museum Bans Term from Exhibits.” 9 The discussion over the uses of the Dutch terms ‘autochtoon’ (indigenous, or born here) ‘allochtoon’ (immigrant, or born elsewhere) is illustrative: ‘allochtoon’ is traditionally used for both recent immigrants as well as descendants of immigrants, so that one can never become Dutch, but is othered for generations. ‘Allochtoon’ is falling out of favor in more recent style guides. 10 On Hirsi Ali and the assassination of Theo Van Gogh, see Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam. On Zwarte Piet, van der Pijl and Gourlordava, “Black Pete.”

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Dutch and Dutching: Hybridity and Decolonization At the center of this book is an adjective, Dutch, that is not as clear as it could be. “Dutch” is a succinct, Anglicized term for the geography, language, and culture associated now with primarily the northern portion of a region in northwest Europe known historically as the Low Countries or the Netherlands. This study focuses primarily on the period of the Dutch Republic (formally the Republic of the Seven United Provinces, or Republiek der Zeven Verenigde Provinciën, 1581–1795). The Dutch Republic declared its independence from the Spanish Habsburg (Southern) Netherlands, in 1581. The Dutch Republic is today the Kingdom of the Netherlands, called the Netherlands for short, while the former Spanish Southern Netherlands are today approximately the countries of Belgium and Luxemburg.11 The Netherlands as a political unit has had different borders at different times, borders that were in flux during the span of this study. Dutch is the language spoken in the broader Netherlands, meaning today’s Kingdom of the Netherlands, or yesterday’s Dutch Republic, as well as the northern region of today’s Belgium, Flanders, where the language, and its dialects, is often called Flemish (Vlaams). These terms also refer to the cultures and peoples of these regions. Dutch is also an official language in territories and former colonies of the Dutch Republic across the world, like Surinam and Curaçao, and the South African language Afrikaans derives from Dutch. In Dutch, this language is called Nederlands, which translates to Netherlandish, matching the geographical terminology. However, in English, the easier-to-pronounce “Dutch” is a corruption of Deutsch, referring to their German neighbors, leading to further confusion in American circles with the Pennsylvania Dutch, who are of German descent. While I’ve been trying here to narrow down the term Dutch to the specific geography, culture, and language of the Dutch Republic and Kingdom of the Netherlands, I actually intend to expand the meaning of this term to encompass the global reach of this political entity in the early modern period. As I stated at the outset, this global reach of this country is essential to understanding this country and culture, so for the sake of this book, “Dutch” incorporates this broader context of multiple places and peoples. To differentiate the narrow meaning from the broader meaning, I introduce the term “Dutching,” a verb in continuous form or gerund that I use in an intentionally jarring way grammatically, that implies a process or movement from not-Dutch 11 This explanation leaves aside entirely the issue of Holland standing in for the whole country. In the period I discuss, Holland was the richest region, containing the major cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Haarlem, and Delft, but the rest of the country resents being referred to by this synecdoche. It would be like calling everyone in the United States a New Yorker.

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to more-Dutch. Dutching is a recognition of the hybridity of colonial objects and landscapes, and as an active verb, underscores the process of change when something from elsewhere becomes Dutch through manufacture, artistic integration, or shifts in cultural meaning. Dutching mirrors the activity of expansion and colonization pursued by the Netherlands, first through the trading companies, and later by the government, that expanded the borders of the Netherlands to include regions all across the world. The products of these places were Dutched (the active verb, to Dutch, in simple past tense) as they were acquired and incorporated into Dutch culture. For example, the tulip, originally cultivated in Persia, was Dutched as it was imported from Turkey to Leiden by way of European botanists like Carolus Clusius (Charles de l’Éscluse, 1526–1609), and was further Dutched as it became a Dutch national obsession in the Tulipmania that peaked in 1637, and still today the Netherlands is the world’s main producer of tulips. In many cases, Dutching obscures the origins and transformations of the product, which must then be excavated, and these stories must be retold. Throughout this book I will examine subjects that seem to be quintessentially Dutch (in the narrow sense), and show that in fact, their stories are more complicated and global, intertwined with the Dutch colonial project of the so-called “Golden Age,” including its negative aspects. My notion of Dutching engages with the rich scholarship around the concept of hybridity, or more specifically, cultural hybridity.12 Hybridity is a term that derives from biology—think of two parents each contributing their genetic material to create a child that is a hybrid of the parents, exhibiting a mix of traits of each. This scientific, heteronormative usage carries over into the use of the term when referring to cultural hybridity, where it implies two cultures meeting on neutral footing, and the product of that union evincing characteristics of each. Scholars of cultural hybridity have rightly complicated this—two cultures rarely meet on equal terms, and the product is determined by the specific circumstances of that meeting. In a colonial encounter, the dominant power shapes the result, while hybridity can also be an opportunity for the oppressed to fight back.13 The term hybridity seems lacking for other reasons—it implies only two parents, and there is a presumption that the cultures meeting are pure, original cultures (if such a thing can even be said to exist). It also implies a stasis, both for the parents and the child. With the term Dutching, it is my intention to both refer to the specificity of the Dutch situation, but with an expansive understanding of “Dutch” that includes its global reach, and the encounters with, and exploitation of, many cultures and 12 To mention a few primary discussions, Pratt, Imperial Eyes; Young, Colonial Desire; Brah and Coombes, Hybridity and Its Discontents; and Dean and Liebsohn, “Hybridity and Its Discontents.” 13 Two examples that engage with this in the Southeast Asian context are King, Colonial Urban Development, and Yeoh, Contesting Space.

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people; and to consider this as a process that is continuing and unstable. I hope that the complicated and uncomfortable parts of this story become central to our understanding of this culture both in the past and today. This is not a phenomenon unique to the Netherlands or the Dutch “Golden Age,” but rather is present in all instances where peoples and cultures come together. It is, however, the story that I can tell as a specialist in early modern Dutch art, a field that is especially in need of what contemporary cultural theorists are calling decolonization. This call to decolonize, coming from students and scholars, when aimed at academia, is a call to decolonize our syllabi, our courses, and our knowledge.14 In practice, this means on the one hand expanding the canons of our fields to include the contributions of people whose experiences were or are outside of the culture’s mainstream, because of colonial or other oppressive structures that kept them there. On the other hand, decolonization means working to dismantle these structures, especially as they are integral to and replicated by our institutions. Sometimes when I’m writing and speaking and teaching, I slip into re-colonizing the Dutch “Golden Age,” dragging up stories of exploitation, finding satisfaction in creating discomfort. I worry that by discussing the colonial structures that supported the “Golden Age,” in some way I might reify or celebrate them. This is not my intention. Telling these stories is messy and complicated and can also be uncomfortable, at odds with the forces of the mainstream and the simple celebration of the past, reducible to an easy phrase like “Dutch Golden Age.” To acknowledge my own viewpoint on this story as an outsider, as an American, means I’m also grappling in parallel with my own culture’s omissions, exclusions, and simplifications, and we have our own simplified and golden phrase, “Make America Great Again.” This political slogan of the forty-fifth U.S. president, Donald Trump, suggests that we were once great and have now fallen, and we can become great again by following his leadership. The question of when the United States was great, and for whom, is never answered, and the slogan has become a rallying cry for conservative politics and white supremacists. Complicating or nuancing the stories we tell about the past calls attention to problems with how we construct cultural understanding. Stuart Hall, in his discussion of how to find space within the story of British heritage for colonial history and diverse contemporary voices, pointed out some of these challenges.15 He notes that official British heritage would appear to be one consistent thing (which is, in itself, reductive), reflecting the experience of only upper-class white Britons. Adding to this the stories of others (he discusses specifically the experiences of 14 For an especially astute discussion of decolonization in art history, see Cohen-Aponte, “Decolonizing the Global Renaissance,” 70–75. 15 Hall, “Whose Heritage?”

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the Indigenous and Africans), similarly reduces the other to another consistent, single story, often rooted further back in the past, before European contact. This is also one of the problems with the concept of hybridity, as it implies that there are pure, untouched cultures, which mix to form mixed or diluted cultures, which are in many cases viewed as inferior—there is an entire body of racist thought about miscegenation and degeneracy. In the American context, the desire to add stories from outside the Anglo-American experience to our canon, without letting in the messiness, leads to further problems. In the archeology of the Americas, for instance, scholars may aim to focus solely on pre-contact (pre-Columbus and the arrival of Europeans) sites and artifacts, representing the American history before Europeans arrived to complicate and disrupt the archeological record, rather than interrogating the moment of conflict and its aftermath. In contemporary America, we similarly speak of the Black experience, as if it is a homogenous experience, and also imply that it is independent from, rather than circumscribed by, white America and its structures. When telling the stories of Dutching, or hybridity, or encounter, it’s important not to reify the myth of untouched homogenous cultures, be they white European or other. These stories are complicated. When we attempt to tell the stories in between, the stories where cultures meet on unequal footing, we get closer to the realities of the past, but we also come up against the structures that keep these stories from being told. Our educational institutions aren’t equipped to train us for or support this kind of work. On a very basic level, it’s impossible to even learn all the languages and methods necessary to engage fully with just the European documents related to, in my case, Dutch global trade. I say this with a handle on several European languages, and having had the privilege to train in these for years. Our academic traditions discourage collaboration, which could bring us together with scholars working on the same questions but with different skillsets and perspectives. You’ll note that this is a single-author monograph, and is thus reflective of the systemic issues I’m arguing against, because it is also a product of my training. The digital humanities, which I’ve been practicing since completion of my doctorate, encourage collaboration and make this kind of work more possible and indeed pleasurable, and my future work will involve partnerships and new methods. You might suspect I am constructing an elaborate excuse here to fail at telling these stories about this history, this art history, fully and completely. I won’t be able to reconstruct the past, I won’t totally be able to get beyond the blind spots I have as a white American cis-het woman, but I firmly believe that the attempt matters to decolonizing the past. To do this work, these stories need to be told, with a range of perspectives that acknowledge the messiness, the ugliness, and the pain, and also the limits of our abilities. We may find in the retelling that the stories of the oppressed can’t be retold, that voices have been too thoroughly excluded from the archives,

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and our efforts will certainly fail at producing a 100 percent accurate account.16 However, in the attempt, we can uncover, expose, and begin to dismantle those colonial structures that still lie at the heart of our understanding of ourselves, our cultures, and our histories. While I can’t adequately speak for those oppressed by the Dutch colonial structures, I can bare those structures to the best of my ability.

Collective Identity, Memory, Forgetting, and Innocence I’ve noted several times so far in this introduction that the stories we tell about our pasts matter for our present. This book is about more than just complicating the story of the Dutch “Golden Age,” it is about how the changing understanding we have about that period has affected subsequent ages. Storytelling is an important means of establishing our identities and our values, and also, importantly for this study, the objects and landscapes of art history have a central role in stimulating and transmitting those stories. My ideas here come from scholarship on collective identity and collective memory, on nationalism, and on memory and forgetting, which come from a diverse range of fields ranging from sociology and psychology to art history and cultural studies. These ideas about memory, identity, and the past have been explored in popular accounts, like David Lowenthal’s The Past is a Foreign Country (1985) and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition (1983), and these concepts are easily understood from our own experiences in communities. Our identities as members of groups, ranging from a small family unit to a nation or faith, are determined by the stories we collectively tell. These stories communicate information about our pasts, but also our values. We sometimes think of these stories as factual (and might then call them “history”) but they become mythical with time and distance, with the selections we make about which perspective to focus on, which details to revisit. When an individual experiences an event, she will recount it to herself and to others, and in the telling the story changes, either deliberately in the case of outright fraud, or subtly and unintentionally, as the story conforms to what else she knows, and the experiences and responses of others. As social creatures, we do this together as well, and while ritually retelling stories as a group, we tend to forget our individual perspectives and insights to conform to the larger group. These stories take on the power to define and provide evidence for broader values. This can of course be co-opted by propagandists, but it also 16 Gayatri Spivak famously asked whether the female subject of imperialism can speak, can be given agency, and concluded no, that the female subject’s voice will always be undermined by the imperial structures that continue to inform academic and political work. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

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happens subtly and nearly unconsciously. When we get beyond the scale of a family, and of living memory, the group gets larger and the stories less individual. Benedict Anderson called this our “imagined community,” the group where we are unable to personally connect to each member, yet still we share stories.17 Instead of in family and social gatherings, these stories are told in school, in media, through art and ritual. Sociologist Maurice Halbwachs’s account of collective memory, published a century ago, explains the importance of the ritual retelling of stories to establishing our memories, underscoring how the past is always worked by the present.18 For our purposes here, extending this discussion to Dutch “Golden Age” art history, Halbwachs’s conception of the means by which these stories are carried is key—he wrote of how the group must come together to tell stories (historiography and biography) and practice rituals (holidays, family meals), but also through symbol. The subjects I consider in this book comprise visual and material culture as well as landscapes, that operate in my reading of Halbwachs as symbols around which a culture rallies, that aid in the retelling of the past and which can be experienced (viewed, handled, inhabited) by people across time. Art historian and theorist Aby Warburg, writing around the same time, discussed “iconic memory” which applies to the visual, and historian Pierre Nora later wrote of “places of memory” (lieux des memoires). To my reading, however, neither of these concepts approaches Halbwachs’s more generalized symbol as a concept by which the material and visual production of art history, things and places that have been experienced physically in the past and present, can play a role in creating and sustaining the stories we tell as a culture about the past. The concepts of collective identity and collective memory are most often applied to discussions on a national scale, where nationalism and national identity is based on the stories shared by citizens of that nation. For example, I, as an American schoolchild, learned the quintessential American stories of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree, Abraham Lincoln studying by candlelight, and Thanksgiving. A six-year-old Washington received a new hatchet as a gift, then cut a cherry tree, and when his father confronted him, he said, “I cannot tell a lie” and admitted his crime, and went on to be the country’s first president. Abraham Lincoln as a young man was said to stay up late reading after dark, after completing his chores and work, becoming a largely self-taught lawyer, and he was one of the country’s most powerful speakers and the sixteenth president. I learned about Thanksgiving as a celebration of harvest where early settlers and Native Americans came together for a feast of mutual generosity. These stories evoke the values 17 Anderson, Imagined Communities. 18 Halbwachs, On Collective Memory.

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America purports to embody: honesty, hard work, generosity. But these stories, and the parts we highlight, have been cherry-picked to be positive, and also to exclude. Efforts to “cancel” or retell the stories of Columbus’s “discovery” of America and the Thanksgiving story decolonize by showing how these stories exclude the vital participance of the American Indigenous, their partial extinction, resistance, and centuries-long oppression. With these children’s stories we can see that these collective stories are not told just to create community, but can also be a means of excluding, indeed a means of collective forgetting. Scholars of memory and nationalism may object to my extension of this approach to the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Many argue that the rise of the modern nation-state, and subsequently nationalism, only happened circa 1800, in the wake of Napoleon. The concept of nationalism is of course also heavily intertwined with the fascist states of the twentieth century: Hitler’s Germany, Franco’s Spain, and Mussolini’s Italy. I’ll defer here to Judith Pollmann who, in an important publication of 2017, provides many examples drawn from archives, literature, and art, arguing that national identity and the imagined community can be found long before the modern era in Europe, the focus of her study.19 Two decades before this, H. Perry Chapman argued that this can be seen in the art history of the early Dutch Republic, particularly propagandist prints which had a role in developing a collective Dutch national identity.20 The so-called Dutch “Golden Age” is the primary time and place around which Dutch collective identity and memory rallies—the very naming of it as a golden age underscores its importance. It is a rare situation for a culture to have their time of greatest success just at the beginning of their existence as a nation, and also that it was spoken of as a golden age as it was happening.21 This was an age of global reach for the culture, and that this global aspect has been forgotten in subsequent eras is a prime example of how the stories we tell of the past are revised for present needs. A golden age that happened primarily within the borders of the Netherlands excludes the stories of the decline of that global reach, when other nations of Europe came to predominate global colonialism in the eighteenth and when all European imperial powers were challenged by growing independence movements in the 19 From 2008–2013 Pollmann directed a research project, Tales of the Revolt: Memory, Oblivion, and Identity in the Low Countries, 1566–1700, which explored primary and secondary sources to show that modern notions of how memory works are not unique to the modern era, which contributed to this book. Judith Pollmann, Memory in Early Modern Europe. See also Schmidt, Innocence Abroad, xxii–xxiii. 20 Chapman, “Propagandist Prints.” 21 Blanc, “Gouden Eeuw,” 70. In the same volume, Maria Holtrop explores the use of this term in subsequent eras: Holtrop, “Aurea Aetas.” I look forward how this new series, growing out of the Fonds National Suisse de la Recherche Scientifique (Swiss National Science Research Foundation)-funded project, Un siècle d’or? Repenser la peinture hollandiase du XVIIe siècle, will continue to explore this notion.

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twentieth. Significantly, it also excludes the touchier aspects of this period, namely that it was supported by the exploitation of people and resources of elsewhere. This forgetting allows for storytelling that is celebratory and golden, that makes this time a source of pride, precisely as the Dutch Premier, Mark Rutte, stated in 2019. Stuart Hall called this kind of forgetting selective amnesia, and Pollmann and Gert Oostindie also discuss forgetting.22 That I can point to scholars who theorize about forgetting, and a secondary literature that reestablishes the global and colonial reach of the Dutch seventeenth century, underscores that this forgetting was not total—these memories and facts are absolutely recallable—but also that there is a willing participation by all those who ignore this past in favor of the easier, more pleasant celebration of a story that speaks to current values. This forgetting allows for a rhetoric of innocence which is at the heart of Dutch understandings of their present and past. In the case studies of this book, I’ll show how buried the negative features and values of this period are, how difficult they are to locate in archival evidence. This is a willful hiding and forgetting, and it is also exculpatory—enabling the Dutch to claim an innocence regarding the exploitation and cruelty of what happened outside of the nation’s borders, and even within. While this ugliness is buried, it also remains in plain sight in the artistic production of this age. Arguments about innocence are not a new phenomenon, nor, again, unique to the Dutch situation. From the earliest years of the seventeenth century, the heart of the “Golden Age,” the Dutch argued they were the primary European victims of Iberian power, having just wrested their independence from Spain. This scrappy innocent new nation was acting in defense, on the behalf of the Dutch, sure, but also for the natural rights of all nations, as Hugo Grotius argued in his 1609 Mare Liberum, which will be further explored in chapter 2.23 All Europeans pointed to Spain’s cruelty in the Americas, what became known as the Black Legend, while practicing the same cruelties themselves.24 In his aptly-titled 2001 Innocence Abroad, Benjamin Schmidt masterfully explores Dutch seventeenth-century discourse on the European encounter with the Americas, which argued broadly that, like the indigenous Americans, the Dutch were the victims of Spain’s cruelty; how then could the Dutch be anything BUT innocent of cruelty themselves in this shared 22 Stuart Hall, “Whose Heritage?,” 7; Pollmann, Memory in Early Modern Europe, chapter 6, esp. 158 speaks more broadly of ‘Acts of Oblivion,’ as vocalized, public forgetting that nonetheless is rarely complete. She also notes that a difficult memory can be overwritten with a new narrative that provides a positive, collective story. Oostindie refers to “vergeten gescheidenis” (p. 74), and notes that “Iedere generatie schrijft haar eigen geschiedenis” (p. 73) (every generation writes her own history): Oostindie, “De conflictueuze herontdekking,” 73–74. 23 Grotius, The Freedom of the Seas. 24 Margaret, Mignolo, and Quilligan, Rereading the Black Legend.

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victimhood?25 After the seventeenth century, Dutch dominance of global trade and colonialism waned in comparison to France, England, and Spain, so the Dutch, and their fellow small-but-mighty Portuguese rivals, have largely been excluded from the broader conversations about, and sometimes apologies for, European colonialist enterprises. Scholars in the twentieth century have minimized the role of the Dutch in the slave trade, and have suggested that the Dutch in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were just trading, not colonizing (an argument which has merit on the surface, but this is just semantics). Gloria Wekker, in her phenomenal 2016 White Innocence, brings a force to this argument that Dutch culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is founded on a forgetting of four hundred years of Dutch imperialism. An anthropologist by training, Wekker works interdisciplinarily to examine the centrality of the simultaneous celebration of and ignorance of whiteness in this nation that buries its diverse present and past through a rhetoric of innocence. Through a critical examination of the contemporary Netherlands, she argues forcefully that imperialism and race are foundational to Dutch self-identity, carried along by memory and forgetting. While her argument makes forays into the role of the earliest moments of imperialism of the seventeenth century, it is primarily concerned with modernity, and not early modernity, and I hope this book will provide a longer bridge into that past. Wekker carefully defines the dominant population of today’s Netherlands, those who make a direct claim to the “Golden Age.” When contemporary conceptions of the Dutch past exclude the Dutched places outside of the borders of this nation, this allows some Dutch people to claim an exclusive right to this past, and to claim that this past is only Dutch, only white. This enables the continued exclusion of people deemed non-Dutch today, generally applied to the non-white and non-Christian, though many of these so-called non-Dutch have a clear presence in the “Golden Age.”26 The Dutch collective memory is based on a collective forgetting of the messy, complicated, and ugly aspects of the past in favor of a glowing, golden view. The global Netherlands has been reduced in imagination to the land that lies within the borders of this country in northwest Europe, to the exclusion of people, places, and goods which were key to the flowering of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century. This allows a Dutch cultural pride in the past which is shored up by repeated golden storytelling that is a strong cultural force against the many examples of scholarship that have been working to trouble this view of the past. The current debate about the term “Golden Age” means this discussion is finally out in the 25 Schmidt, Innocence Abroad. 26 This is the root of the Rembrandthuis Museum exhibition, HERE. Black in Rembrandt’s Time, and its catalogue: Kolfin and Runia, Black in Rembrandt’s Time. Historian Mark Ponte, one of the contributors, works to excavate from the archives the presence of Black Amsterdammers in the early modern period.

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open, though it doesn’t seem likely to be resolved soon. Again, this phenomenon is not unique to the Dutch case—we see it across cultures, as variations of “Make [wherever] Great Again” reach into an imagined and simplified version of the past, that hides the realities of exploitation and cruelty, and has real and violent consequences in the present for those deemed outside the stories we tell.

The Importance of Material Culture and Art History to Tell This Story The story of the global reach of the early modern Netherlands, of the exploitation of people, places, and goods in the name of trade and later colonialism, is best told through the art history of the so-called “Golden Age.” While scholars have noted the silences of the traditional, text-based archives, the art historical archive is rich, extensive, and also much cherished. Gert Oostindie and Bert Passman argued interestingly in 1998 that there seemed to be little Dutch awareness of their country’s role in the slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, based on textual documents.27 The Dutch trading companies kept scrupulous accounts which we can mine for supporting information, though these tend not to indicate the attitudes of record-keepers towards the colonial project. Gloria Wekker convincingly argues that the cultural archive in which to ground this story lies instead in our minds and memories, rather than, or in addition to, the physical archives, an approach put into practice in the Rijksmuseum’s 2021 exhibition, Slavery.28 If Dutch people didn’t acknowledge the broader world in text, they certainly did in art. The objects and images produced by Dutch artists, by artists and scientists exploring the world, by builders and city planners setting Dutch roots in foreign lands, and art that is made from material imported from around the world—this huge wealth of artistic material tells the stories that are harder to glean in the archives. The incredible production of art and architecture in the Dutch global “Golden Age” made available a huge body of objects and landscapes that provide visual and physical evidence of the past, and indeed, the global and un-golden nature of much of that past. There was an incredible flowering of the arts in the Dutch “Golden Age,” supported by the growing economy, which was largely dependent on the Dutch trading empire. There were millions of paintings produced in this period, plus prints and illustrated books, and the artistic output extends from very small marvels created for curiosity cabinets to new buildings and cities. This art is sometimes explicitly about the world 27 Oostindie and Passman, “Dutch Attitudes towards Colonial Empires.” They were examining why it was that this most tolerant of nations had a too-small and too-late movement to abolish slavery. 28 Wekker, White Innocence, 19; the Slavery exhibition draws on oral histories, songs, and traditions in addition to art, artifacts, and documents, particularly in the stories of Lohkay and Sapali (esp. 196–201): Sint Nicolaas et al., Slavery.

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outside of the Netherlands, but sometimes references this world more subtly through the depiction of foreign goods, or through the use of pigments and other materials sourced from far away. Not all of this art historical archive remains, of course, but its huge volume has enriched collections across the world and it is relatively accessible. This archive is also problematic, shaped as it is by elite notions of taste, collecting practices, and its role in shaping ideas of the past, however it is possible to work against these trends. While it may take some excavation to demonstrate how these works are evidence of and commentary on the empire, ultimately the reality of the past is laid bare by what we can see and experience. As Halbwachs speaks of symbols as a potential touchstone for the conveying of collective memory, the Dutch culture produced a vast number of symbols which have remained important for generations. That these objects and landscapes have been lovingly preserved for centuries is a demonstration that even with changing ideas of Dutchness, this so-called “Golden Age” remains central. Further, this art historical archive generates symbols around which new stories can be told, stories that acknowledge this difficult past. The material and visual culture of the Dutch so-called “Golden Age” remains beloved, with huge Dutch art collections in the world’s museums.29 That this material generates public excitement, for both Dutch and non-Dutch audiences, is clear with traveling exhibitions, like the Frick Museum’s fifteen-painting show from the Mauritshuis, which included Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and Carel Fabritius’s Goldfinch, and which became a huge blockbuster in 2013. Exhibitions have been engaging with the global Dutch as well—such as the Asia in Amsterdam exhibit at the Rijksmuseum and the Peabody Essex Museum in 2015–2016.30 This art tells the story of global entanglements visually and materially in a way that still engages audiences today. As will be clear from two of the cases examined in this book, the architecture of the seventeenth-century Netherlands is also cherished, and global, and can also serve as a large, inhabitable symbol around which to rally a collective memory. Visiting the Netherlands today, so many cities have preserved or recreated their historic downtowns, yes, for tourist income, but also for the sake of inhabitants. Dutch cityscapes are celebrated in miniature in Madurodam in The Hague and abroad in the Caribbean and Asia, and recreated at Huis ten Bosch in Nagasaki, Japan and in shorthand in the United States in Holland, Michigan and Pella, Iowa. This art historical archive has been cherished, saved, and recreated over generations showing a continual engagement of people with the global Dutch, and even when that global element has been ignored or forgotten, it is easy to recapture it and retell these stories. 29 With two key exception, it is always the seventeenth century being celebrated. Those exceptions are favorite Dutch modern artist, Vincent Van Gogh, though his career was primarily French, and the story of Anne Frank, which tells another important collective Dutch story of Nazi resistance and innocence. 30 Corrigan, Van Campen, and Diercks, Asia in Amsterdam. See also the curators’ reevaluation of the exhibit in 2022: You, Alisjahbana, Corrigan, Diercks, “A Curatorial Roundtable.”

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It is important to underscore that subsequent generations of Netherlanders have not been looking just to the past in general, but to this specific period of the seventeenth century (and primarily the first half), for stories of national importance. Cultural institutions overwhelmingly celebrate the seventeenth century, which to the uncritical eye is a charming, prosperous (but middle-class, not aristocratic), ambitious, inventive era. For example, the modern Dutch Christmas tradition of St. Nicholas (Sinterklaas) coming on a ship from Spain draws elements from the Dutch revolt from Spain in the late sixteenth century, and continued Dutch notions of Spain throughout the seventeenth century, though the modern tradition can be traced to a 1850 publication.31 These are the Dutch cultural equivalents of America’s rosy stories of our founding events and founding fathers, focusing on the positive to the exclusion of the complicated and the ugly. The artistic production of the Dutch so-called “Golden Age” thus remains central to Dutch culture into the present, and is a powerful expression of the values of this culture. The Dutch “Golden Age” is so rich in art, so materially wealthy, that we can speak of a cultural experience based in symbols, which have been preserved in museums and family collections to be revisited and stories retold. As this book will demonstrate, the global reach of this era is a story plainly told by these objects and landscapes, though, as Wekker noted, imperialism is lacking in Dutch self-image today.32 This is because the story of imperialism has been deliberately forgotten, hidden, behind golden views of this period, yet it remains there, and it remains on view. The deliberate ignoring of the ugly and difficult elements of this period becomes, in the face of so much evidence to the contrary, a Dutch cultural value.

Global Dutch Art History In the past decades we’ve seen a growing intervention by art historians focusing on the global Dutch “Golden Age,” a first generation including Julie Hochstrasser, Dawn Odell, and Rebecca Parker Brienen, followed by scholars like Carrie Anderson, Elmer Kolfin, Stephanie Porras, Elizabeth Sutton, Claudia Swan, and myself, and many ongoing projects.33 However, while this is a current vogue, it remains marginalized in broader Dutch art history, with scholars either considering the existence of the global reach a given, and therefore not requiring extensive engagement, or scholars treating the global aspect of this period as a special topic, over there, rather than one intimately 31 Saint Nicholas and his servant, or Sint-Nicolaas en zjin knecht, published 1850 by Jan Schenkman. 32 Wekker, White Innocence, 13. 33 I’m eager to see the ongoing work of Christina An, Justin Brown, Adam Eaker, Caroline Fowler, Aaron Hyman, Cynthia Kok, Queenie Lin, Margaret Mansfield, Ellen Rife, among others, in the area of the global Netherlands.

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entangled with the entire “Golden Age.” Artists who never left the Netherlands, or who only painted domestic subjects, who seemingly have no connection to the world outside, nevertheless painted with pigments sourced from abroad, depicted imported objects in Dutch interiors, and were supported by the wealth drawn from overseas trade. Engagement with the broader Dutch world is seen by many scholars as a subspecialty, best left to a few specialists or to fields outside art history. Enforcing the divisions between disciplines and subdisciplines has continued the work of colonial structures, ensuring that the entanglement of global and domestic can be hidden and ignored. There are certainly exceptions, but I’m not alone in my frustration that the field has been slow to adapt. The discussion of empire is more central in the art histories of other European imperial powers—Spain, France, and England—and there remain many opportunities to intervene in Dutch “Golden Age” art history. The importance of this art historical archive for understanding Dutch history and collective identity, as well as the unfinished work within this field, makes this specialty of Dutch art history so ripe for continued decisive interventions. As Dutch art continues to be celebrated by the museum-going public, and debates about the challenges of dealing openly with the past are increasingly in the public consciousness, there is work we can do in art history to further this conversation.

Chapter Outline In this book, I discuss four moments when the Dutch “Golden Age” has been shaped and polished, centering four artistic examples that both expose and hide their global reach, representing moments when the so-called Dutch “Golden Age” was revisited and revised in order to serve the present. These are just a handful of moments, each of which could be a book on its own, and there are plenty more stories to tell, but with my choices I want to demonstrate the range of materials and artistic forms that are in play, including traditional painting, decorative arts, and architecture and urban planning. These are topics I began exploring during my graduate studies, so also are rooted in my journey through coursework, my comprehensive exams, and relationships with faculty on my committee. These moments show the spatial range of the Dutch global world, from a small tabletop in a Dutch home to a whole city on the other side of the globe, taking place on three continents and the oceans that connect them, spanning from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. The first moment I explore is aspirational, occurring at the beginning of the “Golden Age” and setting the stage for three moments of revision of the Dutch “Golden Age” of the seventeenth century, representing a spectrum of this process over the centuries following the waning of Dutch global economic domination. The next moment is a revision that occurs in the second half of the seventeenth century

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as the Dutch East India Company begins its denouement, a change palpable across the population, as cultural forces are marshaled to celebrate the immediate past in glowing terms. In the eighteenth century, the Dutch Republic faced a crisis of identity with growing foreign influence at home and competition over colonial territory—as nationalisms develop across Europe, the Dutch sought to define themselves by looking back to, and revising, their “Golden Age.” The fourth key moment of this study spans the crisis of nationalism and World War II, decolonization, into the period of modern globalization, as a historic colonial city grapples with its complicated past. The “Golden Age” continues to figure into understandings of Dutch identity in the present, presenting a challenge to the multicultural population of the Netherlands today. The first two moments explore the importing of goods to the Netherlands, and how the global is instrumental to artistic developments in the domestic sphere. In chapter 2, “The Gilded Cage: Dutch Global Aspirations,” I introduce the historical background of the Dutch “Golden Age” and consider the aspirations of the new Dutch Republic to expand throughout the world. The mounted nautilus cup, a popular collector’s item in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, serves as a metaphor for these aspirations, a display of the appealing exotica of the East, firmly controlled within a silver matrix designed by Dutch metalworkers. The final decade of the sixteenth century, when most extant Dutch nautilus cups were created, was a time of great anticipation of an emerging “Golden Age,” an ambition that would be fulfilled in the first half of the coming century. Chapter 3, “Gathering the Goods: Dutch Still Life Painting and the End of the ‘Golden Age,’” explores the waning of the “Golden Age.” In the second half of the seventeenth century, as the Dutch grasp on world trade began to slip, the subgenre of still life painting known as pronkstilleven (ostentatious still life) was popular. These sought-after paintings depicted exotic Dutch trade objects in the Dutch home with striking illusionism. This chapter considers the irregularity of the trade in an often-depicted exotic item, pepper, noting a public anxiety about this trade, and offers a reading of still life as reorganizing the far reaches of the Dutch East India Company into a smaller domestic setting. The Dutch global reach is revised to exist solely within the Dutch home precisely as spice monopolies are challenged and English and French trade grows. These chapters underscore that the global is essential to the local—as Edward Said argued in Culture and Imperialism.34 The second half of the book explores the export outwards of Dutch ideas and architectural forms to the Dutch global empire, which retain strong ties to the Netherlands, and also expose key values of the Dutch at home. Moving into the 34 Said, Culture and Imperialism. Bernard Porter argued that empire is not as important to developments at home as Said asserted: Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists.

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eighteenth century, chapter 4, “Dutch Batavia: An Ideal Dutch City?” explores changing conceptions of this seventeenth-century Asian capital of the Dutch East India Company. In 1754, the government of Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia) established a series of sumptuary laws that suggested the elite Dutch of Batavia had strayed far from Dutch behavioral ideals in the 135 years since its founding. Batavia, planned from its inception as an ordered, gridded, and canalled eastern trading capital, should have represented a Dutch ideal, yet it failed from the outset, as stagnant canals spread disease and the social order fragmented. This chapter explores how the initial form of the city and the reality of population dispersal throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries contrast with representations of the city in text and image, representing a revision of this highly multicultural and hierarchical city into something ideally Dutch. Chapter 5, “Simplifying the Past: Willemstad’s Historic and Historicizing Architecture,” examines revisions to an eighteenth-century city from the nineteenth through twenty-f irst centuries. Willemstad, the Dutch West India Company’s trading capital on Curaçao in the Caribbean, has always been a global city, most apparent in the island’s creole language, Papiamentu, which shows the influence of the city’s early mixed population of Dutch settlers, Iberian Jews, and enslaved Africans. The city’s resulting architectural heritage of Dutch-gabled townhouses, sprawling classicizing villas, and uniquely Curaçaoan color and curves, has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage City for precisely this multiculturalism. These global aspects, however, have been increasingly eroded as twentieth- and twenty-f irst-century architectural developments have emphasized the Dutch contributions. This chapter questions the selective preservation and promotion that seem to revise the global past of the city in favor of an overwhelmingly Dutch past. In the conclusion, “The ‘Golden Age’ Today,” I consider the contemporary implications of the revision of the Dutch “Golden Age” into something wholly Dutch. This chapter includes a brief consideration of the current celebration of a bucolic, quaint, and imagined Dutch culture in Holland, MI, in the annual Tulip Time festival, by a conservative religious community that migrated to the United States in the nineteenth century in a rejection of Dutchness. In an age of growing multiculturalism and cultural nationalism, and escalating clashes over what “Dutch” means, the question of how and why the past is revised to serve the present remains imperative.

Dutch Identity in Conflict Throughout this introduction, I’ve discussed or alluded to a Dutch collective identity and cultural values which drive a revised accounting of the Dutch “Golden

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Age”—revised to exclude the global and negative aspects of this period, in favor of a golden understanding of the past which continues to reflect glowingly into the present. The focus on the “Golden Age” roots this identity in the past, so as to suggest these traits are consistent and have endured for centuries, which of course, they have not, as they are constantly evolving to suit the present moment. Cultural identity is notoriously difficult to define and the line between identity and stereotypes is fuzzy. We prefer to think of our identity in positive terms, something to be proud of or strive for, though sometimes we identify negative traits to push against. A culture is never monolithic—there are those who will identify fully, partially, or not at all with the values their culture espouses. There are also many who will feel that they cannot identify with the values of the culture in which they find themselves, and indeed, cultural identities often exclude and define certain persons as not belonging. In this book, I aim to show how the art historical archive of the early modern Netherlands and the continued grasping at that past continue to define the Dutch collective identity. The discussion of these objects and landscapes reveals that this identity is contradictory and inconsistent. We jump between the ostentation of a still life painting with rich trade objects and the plain townhouse, and between the freedom of the seas and a hierarchically arranged city plan. This examination of cultural values through art reveals the inherent contradictions. For example, while the global reach of the early modern Netherlands directly impacted the art market, as many made their fortunes on overseas trade, much of the art produced in this period focuses on domestic life (scenes set in home interiors, Dutch city views and landscapes). This focus on the domestic is seen in chapter 3, where objects from far away are reorganized on a household tabletop, reflecting, I believe, an anxiety about losing access to global trade. Another trait that is seen across Dutch culture in past and present is humility, reflected in the plain and relatively unadorned domestic architecture explored in chapter 5. Humility is intimately connected to its opposite, pride, which manifests in the ostentatious display of riches reflected in objects like the nautilus cup or the pronk still life, which nonetheless are small, constrained celebrations of wealth. In eighteenth-century Batavia, the subject of chapter 4, this ostentation is curbed by sumptuary laws, designed to keep the Dutch Batavians from acting unDutch. These values are bound up in Calvinist morality, as explored most popularly by Simon Schama as “an embarrassment of riches.”35 They also relate to Dutch ideas about social hierarchy, namely that hierarchy should be flattened or nonexistent, or simply hidden, which is the contradiction at the center of chapter 4. Humility and pride are also bound up with the Dutch pride in their pragmatism, on doing 35 Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches.

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what makes sense in a straightforward (and plain) way, lacking frills or hidden agendas, which is both demonstrated and contradicted by Dutch city planning and architecture in chapters 4 and 5. Finally, there is continuum between freedom and control that chapter 2 explores. Hugo Grotius, as we will see, argues for the freedom of the seas, and the freedom of all societies to enter into trade agreements on equal and fair footing. Dutch behavior in trade proves to be both hierarchical and unfair, but the notion that the Dutch East and West India Companies were only trading with other cultures, rather than colonizing their land, goods, and people, contributes to the argument for Dutch innocence, as discussed earlier in this introduction. Innocence of this history requires strategic forgetting, which we see throughout these examples. These traits, as conflicting as they are, provide for a Dutch collective identity that is not entirely consistent, that allows for a plurality of ways to be Dutch, but also defines who is and is not Dutch. The “Golden Age” remains bound up in these questions of belonging and exclusion, innocence and guilt, and we cannot simply celebrate this past without seeing its tarnish. A final word on why I have chosen to pursue this subject: there are clear similarities between Dutch identity and American identity, especially in American ideas of social mobility, freedom, and innocence. I, as an American, am deeply uncomfortable with aspects of this collective identity, and I both push against and reflect these values, as I benefit from the happenstance of my birth into U.S. citizenship. In identifying how and why my culture and the culture I study have come to be is how I see a way to reckon honestly with a challenging past and to find a better way forward.

Works Cited Amsterdam Museum, “Amsterdam Museum gebruikt term ‘Gouden Eeuw’ Niet Meer.” Press release, September 12, 2019. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983, 1991. Blanc, Jan, ed. Dutch Golden Age(s): The Shaping of a Cultural Community. Gouden Eeuw: New Perspectives on Dutch Seventeenth-Century Art 1. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020. Blanc, Jan. “Gouden Eeuw: The Invention of the Dutch Golden Age during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” In Dutch Golden Age(s): The Shaping of a Cultural Community. Gouden Eeuw: New Perspectives on Dutch Seventeenth-Century Art 1, edited by Jan Blanc, 65–94. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020. Boxer, C. R. The Dutch Seaborne Empire 1600–1800. New York: Penguin Books, 1965. Brah, Avtar and Annie E. Coombes, eds. Hybridity and Its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture. London: Routledge, 2000.

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Buruma, Ian. Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance. New York: Penguin Press, 2006. Carpreau, Peter. The Value of Taste: Auction Prices and the Evolution of Taste in Dutch and Flemish Golden Age Painting 1642–2011. London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2017. Chapman, H. Perry. “Propagandist Prints, Reaffirming Paintings: Art and Community during the Twelve Years’ Truce.” In The Public and Private in Dutch Culture of the Golden Age, edited by Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr. and Adele Seff, 43–63. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2000 Cohen-Aponte, Ananda. “Decolonizing the Global Renaissance: A View from the Andes.” In The Globalization of Renaissance Art: A Critical Review, edited by Daniel Savoy, 67–94. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Corrigan, Karina H., Jan Van Campen, and Femke Diercks, eds. Asia in Amsterdam: The Culture of Luxury in the Golden Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Exhibition catalogue. Dean, Carolyn, and Dana Liebsohn. “Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America.” Colonial Latin American Review 12, nr. 1 (2003): 5–35. “End of Golden Age: Dutch Museum Bans Term from Exhibits.” The Guardian, September 13, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/13/end-of-golden-age-amsterdammuseum-bans-term-from-exhibits, accessed January 10, 2020. Greer, Margaret R., Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan, eds. Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Grotius, Hugo. The Freedom of the Seas, or The Right Which Belongs to the Dutch to Take Part in the East Indian Trade. Edited by James Brown Scott. Translated by Ralph van Deman Magoffin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1916. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Edited and translated Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Hall, Stuart. “Whose Heritage? Un-settling ‘The Heritage’, Re-Imagining the Post-nation.” Third Text 49 (Winter 1999–2000): 3–13. Hochstrasser, Julie Berger. Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Holtrop, Maria. “Aurea Aetas or Golden Age: Changing Notions of the Dutch Seventeenth Century in Different Periods.” In Dutch Golden Age(s): The Shaping of a Cultural Community. Gouden Eeuw: New Perspectives on Dutch Seventeenth-Century Art 1, edited by Jan Blanc, 193–204. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020. King, Anthony D. Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power, and Environment. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976. Kolfin, Elmer and Epco Runia, Black in Rembrandt’s Time. Zwolle: WBooks, 2020. Exhibition catalogue.

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Markley, Robert. The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006. van der Molen, Tom. “Curator’s Project: The Problem of ‘the Golden Age,” CODART, November 2019, https://www.codart.nl/feature/curators-project/the-problem-of-the-golden-age/, accessed January 10, 2020. Oostindie, Gert, ed. Dutch Colonialism, Migration and Cultural Heritage. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2008. Oostindie, Gert. “Die Niederlande und ihr koloniales Erbe: eine unvollendete Geschichte.” In Die Niederlande; Ein Länderbericht, edited by Friso Wielenga, 75–112. Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2015. Oostindie, Gert. “De conflictueuze herontdekking van het koloniale verleden.” In Kolonialisme en racisme Civis Mundi Jaarboek, 73–83. Soesterberg: Uitgeverij Aspekt, 2016. Oostindie, Gert and Bert Passman. “Dutch Attitudes towards Colonial Empires, Indigenous Cultures, and Slaves.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 31, nr. 3 (Spring, 1998): 349–355. van der Pijl, Yvon and Karina Gourlordava, “Black Pete, ‘Smug Ignorance,’ and the Value of the Black Body in Postcolonial Netherlands.” NWIG: New West Indian Guide 88, nr. 3/4 (2014): 262–291. Pollmann, Judith. Memory in Early Modern Europe: 1500–1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Porter, Bernard. The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Reid, Anthony. Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce 1450–1680, 2 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988/1993. “Rutte blijft zeventiende eeuw ‘Gouden Eeuw’ noemen,” NU, September 13, 2019, https:// www.nu.nl/politiek/5992436/rutte-blijft-zeventiende-eeuw-gouden-eeuw-noemen. html?redirect=1, accessed January 15, 2020. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, [1993] 1994. Schama, Simon. The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. New York: Vintage, 1987. Schmidt, Benjamin. Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Sint Nicolaas, Eveline et al. Slavery: The Story of João, Wally, Oopjen, Van Bengalen, Surapati, Sapali, Tula, Dirk, Lohkay. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum/Atlas Contact, 2021. Slave Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, https://www.slavevoyages.org/, accessed May 19, 2020. Spivak, Gayatri C. “Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow-Sacrifice.” Wedge 7/8 (Winter/Spring 1985): 120–130.

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Wekker, Gloria. White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. van Welie, Rik. “Patterns of Slave Trading and Slavery in the Dutch Colonial World, 1596–1940.” In Dutch Colonialism, Migration and Cultural Heritage, edited by Gert Oostindie, 155–259. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2008. Westermann, Mariët. “What’s on at the New Rijks?” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek (NKJ) / Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art 65 (2015): 22–53. Yeoh, Brenda S. A. Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial Singapore. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1996. You, Yao-Fen, Tamalia Alisjahbana, Karina Corrigan, and Femke Diercks. “A Curatorial Roundtable Revisiting Asia in Amsterdam: The Culture of Luxury in the Golden Age.” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 14:1 (Winter 2022). http://doi.org/10.5092/ jhna.2021.14.1.4. Young, Robert. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race. New York: Routledge, 1995.

2.

The Gilded Cage: Dutch Global Aspirations Abstract: This chapter introduces the historical background of the Dutch Golden Age and considers the aspirations of the new Dutch Republic to build trading relationships throughout the world. Hugo Grotius’s Freedom of the Seas (1608) argued that all nations should be free to trade on equal footing, and that the Dutch could enforce this freedom by challenging, in particular, the Spanish and Portuguese. Dutch trading companies, monopoly policies, and piracy and privateering, however, complicated Dutch support for freedom. The mounted nautilus cup serves as a metaphor for these aspirations, a display of the appealing exotica of the East, firmly controlled within a silver matrix designed by Dutch metalworkers. Keywords: nautilus cup, silver, monopoly, piracy, trading company

The nautilus cup was much desired during the Dutch “Golden Age,” as attested by its presence in seventeenth-century collections and its regular appearance in Dutch still life painting.1 Among other curious objects, Pieter Claesz depicts a nautilus cup in specific detail, intricate enough to identify this as the nautilus cup mounted in 1596 by Utrecht goldsmith Jan Jacobsz. van Royesteyn. (figures 2.1 and 2.2) Another typical example of this curious object is a similar mount made in 1592 in Delft, possibly by Nicolaas de Grebber. (plate 1) This object was depicted in the painted collection inventory, The Paston Treasure (1670s), painted in England by an unknown Dutch artist. The mother-of-pearl surface of the shell, incised with lines forming foliage, birds, and tiny scales, serves as the rounded body for a gilded monster with open mouth and scaly neck, wrapped on four sides with narrow figural straps. This, with an extended lip suggestive of pouring, comprises the bowl of a goblet, which is mounted on a stem of two satyrs, one playing a flute and other singing from a book, and held steady by a flattened turtle atop a decorative base. 1 The most extensive discussion of nautilus shells remains Mette, Nautiluspokal. For a longer discussion of this object, see my previous work: Kehoe, “Dutching at Home and Abroad,” chapter 3; Kehoe, “The Nautilus Cup”; and online catalogue, Kehoe, Nautilus Catalogue.

Kehoe, M.L., Trade, Globalization, and Dutch Art and Architecture: Interrogating Dutchness and the Golden Age. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463723633_ch02

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Figure 2.1: Pieter Claesz, Vanitas Still life with Nautilus Cup, 1636. Oil on panel. Westphalian State Museum of Art and Cultural History, Münster, Germany. Inv.-Nr 1369 LM. Photograph BPK Bildagentur / Hanna Neander / Art Resource, NY.

Figure 2.2: Jan Jacobsz. van Royesteyn (mount, Dutch, 1549–1604), Nautilus Cup, 1596. Silver-gilt and nautilus shell, H. 11 3/8 in. (28.8 cm). The Toledo Museum of Art, purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott, 1973.53.

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Various details on the mount refer to the sea: the man riding the monster’s neck is a tiny Neptune, and once held a trident, a miniature nautilus floats at the turtle’s side, and tiny scallop shells are included throughout. The mount is gilt silver, with the addition of glass and enamel for accent, wrapped around a nautilus shell. There are 28 extant Dutch objects like this, and a further 28 objects attributed to the Netherlands more generally (so either North or South), every single one of these Dutch-mounted nautilus shells taking the form of a goblet, serving in my reading as a metaphor of the world’s oceans (the shell) tightly contained in the cage of the “Golden Age” Dutch Republic (the gilt-silver mount).2 The Low Countries have always had a special, yet antagonistic relationship to the sea, working since the twelfth century to control the North Sea at their shore and along rivers prone to flooding. In the end of the sixteenth century and through the seventeenth, this relationship with water expanded to encompass the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and less-successful attempts at the Arctic Ocean, as the Dutch sought their own routes to the riches of Asia and her spices and the so-called New World, following rivals Spain and Portugal with their two centuries of experience on these seas. The majority of these Dutch nautilus cups were made before Dutch success on these seas and thus the metaphor is aspirational—representing what the Dutch hoped to achieve with their new trade efforts, which encompassed stealing secret navigational information from Portugal, the outfitting of exploratory fleets, and the monumental legal argument of Hugo Grotius, the Mare Liberum (1608). The Dutch successes of the “Golden Age” would be built on innovation and exploration, yes, but also on piracy, monopoly, and disingenuous legal arguments. The Dutch metalwork mount frames the shell, displaying it for viewers, not hiding it. This continued visibility of the shell reminds us of this object’s exotic origins, and the Dutching of the shell remains incomplete—the materials of gilt silver and mother-of-pearl remain forever in juxtaposition. The metalwork lightly cradles the shell if the fit is good—side braces that trace the curve of the shell, a shaft that holds it suspended, barely visible hinges that allow the mount to hold and release the shell. The relationship of the shell and the mount is one of tension, of naturalia versus artificialia that appealed to collectors, of foreign and domestic materials and histories that touch in key places where they mutually reinforce one another. Just as the creamy pearlescent shell is held within the gilded silver mount yet remains distinct visually and materially, scholarship of Dutch “Golden Age” global and domestic histories and art histories have remained largely separate, despite their interdependence. The best historical accounts of the Dutch Republic leave very 2 Of this corpus of nautilus objects, very few have verifiable dates, artists, and/or places of manufacture, and many are attributed based on context and style, so the quantities discussed in this chapter are subject to change as attributions are revised.

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little space for discussion of the country’s global entanglements, leaving these to specialists who work primarily on Dutch East India Company (VOC) or West India Company (WIC) domains (and these too are siloed).3 Similarly, art historians of the Dutch “Golden Age” primarily focus on developments within the Dutch Republic, even when Dutch still lifes and genre paintings regularly depict objects sourced from abroad, interiors are decorated with maps alluding to a larger geography, and the newly-developed genre of seascape depicts waters bustling with merchant ships. 4 As in historical studies, there are art historians who specialize in global Dutch art, especially when Dutch artists travel abroad, for instance with Prince Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen’s expedition to Dutch Brazil, and there is increasing discussion of the material and visual culture of the global Dutch, like illustrated travel accounts and collections of curious objects.5 This chapter attempts to bridge these divisions between domestic and global and historical and art historical by providing a concise history of the Dutch Republic, pushing trade to the forefront, considering when these histories touch and must be understood together. As noted in chapter 1, historians have considered Dutch early modern domestic awareness of the world abroad to be minimal, especially when examining textual evidence, yet I contend that the art historical archive of the Dutch “Golden Age” provides ample evidence for the daily intimate interactions that Dutch people had with the broader world. Further, those connections of local and global that can be seen and experienced in visual and material culture beg us to look back at textual evidence to see if maybe there are moments of awareness to be discovered there. Even if not acknowledged or known by the individuals whose words remain in the textual archive, at a minimum, the overseas efforts of the Dutch provided the economic fuel for the growth of the arts domestically, providing the gold (and other materials) for the “Golden Age,” as well as motivated political and cultural developments. 3 Though historians certainly recognize the importance of the global reach of the Republic, a nuanced and integrated discussion of trade is sorely lacking in most accounts of the Dutch “Golden Age.” The best histories of the Dutch Republic, such as those by Jonathan Israel and Maarten Prak, separate the history of trade from the domestic history of the Republic into distinct chapters or even volumes. Prak, Dutch Republic; Israel, The Dutch Republic and Dutch Primacy. On the separation between scholarship on the Dutch East and West Indies, see van Groesen, “Global Trade.” 4 In art historical accounts of the period, the overseas reach of the Dutch Republic is nearly entirely absent, with a few notable exceptions. Horst Gerson made an important early foray in 1942, suggesting an expansion of the works to be considered among Dutch seventeenth-century material, including a chapter on Asia: Gerson, Ausbreitung und nachwirkung der holländischen malerei, see the chapter entitled “Asien.” 5 Scholars who specialize in the Dutch overseas world include Rebecca Parker Brienen, Julie Berger Hochstrasser, and Dawn Odell; recent examples that bring the Dutch overseas and at home together include Benjamin Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism; Carrie Anderson, “The Old Indies at the French Court”; Kehoe, “Imaginary Gables”; and van Groesen, The Representations of the Overseas World.

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This chapter explores the history of the Dutch Republic, from its beginnings in the last decades of the sixteenth century to its decline at the end of the eighteenth. I date the Dutch “Golden Age” from the 1590s into the second half of the seventeenth century, periods significant to the Republic’s trading history, as will become clear in this chapter and the next. I include here the events leading up to this flourishing and the Republic’s long denouement, following Ferdinand Braudel’s formulation of a long seventeenth century. Further, the global reach of the Netherlands did more than provide the economic impetus for the “Golden Age,” and thus the growth of a larger art market. With the importation of trade products like new textiles, foodstuffs, and exotica to populate these artworks; material from which to form these artworks; as well as the occupation of colonial landscapes to shape into Dutch cities abroad, art and architecture from the period enters the discourse on Dutch trade. I show that the global reach of the Netherlands is more than just depicted in Dutch “Golden Age” artistic production; rather, it is the central subject of many of these works. This historical overview will provide a foundation for more fully understanding the artistic production of the period, and specifically for the moments examined in the following chapters. This chapter aims to bring together moments in history that have been held apart by contemporaries and subsequent historians and art historians. In part, echoing the discussion in chapter 1, this results from the restrictive structures of scholarship, but there has also been a desire to ignore moments where the culture’s ideals don’t match the realities. For this reason, I discuss the foundational legal argument of Hugo Grotius, the Mare Liberum, as an ideal, alongside an exploration of the realities of Dutch trading values and actions that clearly undermined and contradicted this text, namely monopoly and piracy. While providing a framework for the entire period of Dutch trade, and especially for the moments discussed in more detail in the following chapters, this chapter focuses on the moments at the very beginning of the Dutch Republic, ca. 1590–1610, a date range that coincides with the most prolific Dutch production of nautilus cups. I discuss the nautilus cup and its Dutching at length, as a metaphor for Dutch aspirations in the period and for the domestic and global entanglements it represents. I conclude with a brief discussion of how this foundational moment is memorialized in the city of Delft today.

The European Age of Discovery Early modern European interest in global trade had much to do with the spices that were available only through costly over-land trade routes across Asia, whose first celebrated European traveler was Marco Polo. European merchants were interested

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in developing a less expensive route to the East in order to access cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, and pepper at the source, so they could cheaply supply the growing European market for these spices. The primary source of these spices was the Maluku Islands in today’s Indonesia (also called the Moluccas, historically referred to as the Spice Islands by Europeans).6 While European powers competed with one another to reach and then monopolize these trades, they in fact were entering into a centuries-old sophisticated maritime trade within the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia, where rather than dominating, the Europeans were sometimes only bit players in regional rivalries.7 To describe the Dutch Republic’s efforts in transoceanic trade, it is first necessary to understand Spain’s and Portugal’s successes of previous centuries that paved the way. The Kingdom of Portugal was the first major European sea power. Portugal began exploration of the northwestern coast of Africa in 1419, and throughout the fifteenth century developed the most advanced navigational techniques of the European powers. Portugal’s explorations led to their rounding of the Cape of Good Hope, the southern tip of Africa, in 1488, and in 1498 Vasco de Gama reached India.8 At the time of this Portuguese effort to get to the Maluku Islands heading east, Portugal’s rival, the increasingly powerful Kingdom of Spain under the rule of Ferdinand and Isabella, financed Christopher Columbus’s travel west across the Atlantic in hopes of reaching the Indies by an alternative route. Increasingly in conflict and both claiming to have discovered “new” lands (meaning lands that had never been ruled by Christians, despite these “new” lands’ long established Indigenous cultures), Spain and Portugal appealed to the Pope, who issued a series of decrees regarding the rights of these two powers to the non-European world.9 The final decree, with most lasting effect, was the Treaty of Tordesillas, issued in 1494. Spanish-born Pope Alexander VI established that the Spanish had the right to the newly discovered lands to the west of the 46th degree longitude, essentially giving 6 Like “Dutch,” “Indonesia” is a confusing geographical term. Today it refers to the nation that was formerly the Dutch East Indies, independent since 1945/49, though the term dates from the nineteenth century. When I refer to the seventeenth-century indigenous of this region collectively, I use the anachronistic term Indonesian, preferring this over the historical term Dutch East Indian, because generally I am defining this in opposition to the Dutch group. Where possible, I refer to the specific island, region, or political entity to be more precise. 7 On the spice trade in the Maluku Islands, see Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce; and Meilink-Roelofsz, Asian Trade and European Influence. For a decentering of the Western account of this trade, see Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, which despite the title, includes other European powers, especially the Dutch. 8 Markus Vink has reconceptualized this as part of a history of the Indian Ocean as a system, rather than of interactions of distinct nations. Vink, “‘The World’s Oldest Trade.’” 9 For a concise yet intricate discussion of these negotiations, see Nunn, The Diplomacy Concerning the Discovery of America.

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North and South America to Spain, and leaving Africa and Asia to Portugal. In 1529 the Treaty of Zaragoza established the continuation of this line through the Eastern Hemisphere, at 142 degrees, to the east of the Indonesian Archipelago, assuring the Portuguese the right to the Maluku Islands. These meridians were chosen at a time of imprecise geographic knowledge, and pass through the edges of the regions that Spain and Portugal were each claiming, thus the apparent anomalies of Portuguese Brazil and the Spanish Philippines. This rivalry between Spain and Portugal was in the fifteenth and for the majority of the sixteenth centuries distant from the rest of Europe, as no other power possessed the skill and technology to challenge the Iberians. From 1580–1640, the two kingdoms would be united under Habsburg rule, and thus were a common rival to the new Dutch Republic, who had little stake in distinguishing between Spain and Portugal’s claims.

Establishment of the Dutch Republic The Dutch Republic, which would eclipse the Iberians in the arena of trade in the seventeenth century, was not a political entity until the late sixteenth century when the northern provinces of the Netherlands began fighting for independence from Spanish rule and for international recognition. The Low Countries, roughly encompassing today’s Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxemburg, were united under the French House of Burgundy from the end of the fourteenth century. In 1516, a series of marriages brought the Low Countries under the rule of Charles I of Spain, more popularly known as Holy Roman Emperor Charles V from 1519. He combined his Kingdom of Spain with the New World and also the Low Countries, which were administered by a regent. Concurrent with the growth of Protestant movements and with increasing frustration at the attempts of Charles V and, from 1559, his son Philip II, to rule the Low Countries remotely from Spain, a group of noblemen in 1566 presented a petition to Spain’s regent, Margaret of Parma. This petition requested suspension of the strict heresy laws against the Protestant challenges to the Church. The failure of this effort culminated in the Iconoclastic Fury of the same year, when supporters of Calvin’s reforms to Christianity attacked churches and monasteries, destroying religious art and assaulting Catholics. Philip sent an army under the Duke of Alva, who established the Council of Troubles (locally known as the Council of Blood), to enforce the laws against heresy. Unable to pay his soldiers, because Spanish (American) silver was not arriving as promised, Alva imposed a 10 percent sales tax on the Low Countries, without the consent of the local government. Paying for their own persecution was too much for many in the Low Countries, so beginning in 1568 a Dutch army, under the command of Willem, Prince of Orange, fought back against Spanish tyranny, the start of the Eighty

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Years’ War, also known as the Dutch War of Independence. This is often billed as a religious war, of Protestants against Catholics, but this was only part of the motivation: the right of local governments to their sovereignty and an opposition to paying exorbitant taxes to the Spanish empire also motivated much of the revolt. In 1579, a group of southern states united in the Union of Arras, establishing their commitment to Spanish rule and Catholicism. In the same year, the Union of Utrecht brought the northern provinces of the Low Countries together, a group including much of the territory won by the rebels, mostly Protestant areas. The Union of Utrecht provided the foundation for the Dutch Republic, with governance shared among the states, and a Stadhouder as leader, rather than a king (though the young Republic did offer limited royal rule to several monarchs, who turned it down). This was followed up with the 1581 Act of Abjuration, which argued that Philip II had given up his right to rule the northern Netherlands through a series of abuses. The northern and southern Netherlands would remain at war until 1648, except for the Twelve Years’ Truce from 1608–1621, while the southern Netherlands remained under a Spanish regent. This division is roughly contiguous with the border between Belgium and the Netherlands today. The Dutch reaction to the growing overseas domination of the Spanish and Portuguese kingdom should be understood as related to this context of domestic rebellion—while establishing their independence from Spain at home, the Dutch were at the same time attacking the economic might of the Spanish abroad as their own forays into global trade expanded.

The Beginnings of Dutch World Exploration and the Foundation of the VOC The newly formed Dutch Republic soon began fighting Spain, and her ally Portugal, in a new theater: world trade. The goods that the Iberians had been importing from around the world, most notably spices from the Indonesian Archipelago, had been circulating in European markets. Portuguese imports included that exotic curiosity, the nautilus shell, known to Europeans by a few examples since the medieval era, but never imported in such quantities. Not content to merely distribute these goods, the Dutch wanted to go to the sources themselves, to beat out their European competitors.10 In the last decade of the sixteenth century, the Dutch made great strides in world navigation, beginning with the efforts of Jan 10 It should be noted that the Dutch were also very active in bulk trading closer to home, such as the Baltic trade—Israel argues, in Dutch Primacy, that while bulk trade is important, it is the trade in luxury goods that brings in the most spectacular profits.

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Huygen van Linschoten (1533–1611).11 As the seas were mostly uncharted, crossing them and reaching the desired destination required knowledge of routes based on precise navigational measurements and the few known landmarks. These routes were carefully guarded secrets that van Linschoten familiarized himself with while working on Portuguese ships sailing to and from the East. Upon his return to the Dutch Republic in 1592, he began work on a publication of these Portuguese secrets, which was printed in 1595. Cornelis de Houtman (ca. 1565–1599), using van Linschoten’s information and more he had discovered while doing research in Lisbon, organized a fleet of ships that left the Republic in 1595.12 These ambitious acts of espionage in the early 1590s are the beginning of the Dutch “Golden Age.” De Houtman’s fleet was financed by a group of Amsterdam merchants calling themselves the Compagnie van Verre, or Long-Distance Company.13 The goal was to reach the spices of the Maluku Islands by going around Africa and across the Indian Ocean. The Compagnie returned two years later with a great loss of ships, men, and with little saleable product, but nevertheless successful, having proven that despite Portuguese claims of monopoly, Asian merchants were willing to trade with the Dutch. De Houtman’s fleet inspired similar private ventures. These ventures were organized by groups of merchants who invested proportionally in a fleet of ships, rather than in individual ships. Multiple ships could travel more safely together and, if necessary, engage rival expeditions. Additionally, the group who financed the ship shared the risk and rewards of the voyage—if a ship were lost, the merchants still split the profits of the remaining fleet. It is this joint-ownership and shared risk that led to the organization by the Dutch of the world’s first stock-issuing company.14 In response to the success of these private trading efforts, and with the foresight that competition among Dutch merchants would keep prices high at the source, and low when they reached the Dutch market, in 1602 the Dutch government formed the Dutch East India Company, known by its Dutch acronym VOC, for Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie. This company unified (verenigd) the earlier companies’ efforts and was given a Dutch monopoly (meaning no private Dutch merchants could trade) over the Asian trade, with the right to use military means, including the deployment of the Republic’s soldiers, and negotiate treaties with local leaders. To increase demand, retain high profits, and ensure a steady supply of spices, the Dutch knew they had to control all aspects of the market from the source to Europe’s tables. The monopoly fostered by the Dutch East India Company helped the Dutch to control the European market. In the Maluku Islands, the VOC’s methods varied: their 11 van der Moer, Een zestiende-eeuwse Hollander. 12 Julie Berger Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade, 101–102, and 330, note 28. 13 See Jacobs, In Pursuit of Pepper and Tea, 7–12. 14 Gaastra, The Dutch East India Company. Gaastra’s first chapter explains the private fleets that were forerunners to the VOC, and the organization of the VOC.

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interest was not in territorial acquisition, but in domination of trade, so they set up outposts and warehouses in key locations and developed exclusive trade relationships with local spice merchants. This was not an innocent undertaking: in addition to diplomacy the Dutch destroyed crops and farms, enslaved indigenous people, and committed genocide and murder, discussed below. While chartered as a privately financed trading company, the VOC represented the Dutch Republic economically and militarily throughout Africa and Asia. The ultimate goal of the VOC was to gain a Dutch foothold in Asian trade, but the primary project was to break the Portuguese dominance of the Indonesian Archipelago’s spice trade. This success would assure Dutch primacy in world trade and undermine their enemy in the Eighty Years’ War. The VOC was overseen by a board of seventeen representatives (the Heeren XVII) from the major merchant centers of the Dutch Republic: Amsterdam, Middelburg, Delft, Rotterdam, Enkhuizen, and Hoorn.15 In theory, the Heeren XVII made all the decisions regarding the administration of the VOC, but in practice the lower representatives of the company, the governors of outposts and ship captains, made many decisions. From the beginning, VOC shares were issued to raise capital, and these shares were soon traded on the Amsterdam Exchange, the world’s first stock market, founded in 1608. The shares were priced to be affordable to the merchant class, and foreign investment was encouraged, making it truly the world’s first multi-national corporation. The VOC worked closely with the government of the Dutch Republic, so while it was officially a private international corporation, there was Dutch governmental influence and culpability.16 In 1608, the entanglement of the VOC and overseas trade in the Republic’s war with Spain was made explicit: the jurist Hugo Grotius published his legal argument, Mare Liberum, by request of the VOC.17 It justified a Dutch reaction of warfare to Portuguese claims of ownership over their navigational routes on the world’s oceans. Essentially, it argued in favor of Dutch privateers attacking any Spanish or Portuguese trading expeditions as a means of undermining the Iberians economically. This had a two-fold purpose: weakening the Spanish enemy and increasing the Dutch share of world trade. This will be discussed at length below. 15 The composition of the board was as follows: eight from Amsterdam, four from Middelburg, and one each from Delft, Rotterdam, Enkhuizen, and Hoorn, and a rotating seat from one of the latter four; Amsterdam was given one seat less than a majority so that it would be unable to completely dominate. An invaluable source on the organization of the VOC is Gaastra, The Dutch East India Company. 16 A long-standing distinction in studies of Dutch trade and colonialism holds that the Dutch ambitions were for trade only, not imperial, hence the private companies, and thus Dutch interests abroad were different from the other European powers, and the Netherlands only became a colonial power after the VOC and WIC dissolved. Antunes argues, on the contrary, that the Dutch had imperial ambitions from the outset: Antunes, “From Binary Narratives to Diversified Tales.” 17 Grotius, The Freedom of the Seas.

Plate 1: Nicolaes de Grebber (mount, attributed), Nautilus Cup, 1592. Collection Museum Het Prinsenhof, Delft, Netherlands. Nr. PDZ3. Nautilus shell with gilt silver. Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt. Photograph Albertine Dijkema.

Plate 2: Cornelis Bellekin (shell, attributed), Anonymous nineteenth-century Danish smith (mount), Nautilus Cup with Genre Scenes, ca. 1660. Nautilus shell with gilt silver. KODE Art Museums and Composer Homes, Bergen, Norway. Inv. nr. VK 5022.

Plate 3: Anonymous Dutch engraver (attributed, shell), Andreas I. Mackensen (mount), Nautilus Cup, first half seventeenth century (attributed, shell), 1650–1660 (mount). Nautilus shell and gilt silver. Kunstgewerbemuseum Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany. Inv. Nr. 1993.63. Photograph BPK Bildagentur / Saturia Linke / Art Resource, NY.

Plate 4: Willem Kalf, Wineglass and a Bowl of Fruit, 1663. Oil on canvas. Cleveland Museum of Art, USA, Leonard C. Hanna, Jr. Fund. 1962.292.

Plate 5: Jan Davidsz de Heem, Still Life with Nautilus Cup and Lobster, 1634. Oil on canvas. Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart. Inv. Nr. 3323. Photograph Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

Plate 6: Willem Kalf, Still Life with a Porcelain Pitcher, 1653. Oil on canvas. Alte Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich, Germany. Inv. nr. 17. Photograph BPK Bildagentur / Art Resource, NY.

Plate 7: Andries Beeckman, The Castle of Batavia, 1661, oil on canvas. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. SK-A-19.

Plate 8: Handelskade, Willemstad, Curaçao, 2014. Photograph author.

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The Dutching of the Nautilus Shell In the late sixteenth century, as the new country’s attention turned to overseas trade, the gentleman collectors of the new Dutch Republic sought unique and foreign objects for their curiosity cabinets, including the nautilus shell imported from the seas of Southeast Asia. Compared to the princely collections across Europe, like that of Rudolf II in Prague, Dutch tastes were more modest and inexpensive, reflecting both the anti-aristocratic values of the Dutch and a rising middle class with newly disposable income.18 Goldsmiths of Utrecht, Delft, and Rotterdam catered to the desires of the wealthier collectors by mounting these objects in fantastical metalwork mounts. Nautilus shells were perfect examples of the exotic, having traveled from foreign seas to reach the Netherlands, and were relatively rare yet accessible to these new collectors.19 As a bonus, the nautilus shell was scientifically and mathematically interesting. Among the ordered chaos of curiosity cabinets, or Wunderkammern, a nautilus cup distilled the central questions posed by the collection: who is a more impressive creator, Nature (or God) or Man? Is God a mathematician, having demonstrated the principle of the newly theorized logarithm in the increasing spiral of the nautilus’s chambers? What curious objects come from the far corners of the world, and which are created at home? The juxtaposition of the natural material of the shell (naturalia) and the shaping of (gilt) silver around it by skilled craftsmen (artificialia) both displayed and enclosed the shell, keeping these materials and the various processes of their making and manipulation visible.20 Among dated mounts for nautilus shells, the peak of production by Dutch metalworkers was the last decade of the sixteenth century, precisely when plans were being laid by Dutch merchants to challenge Spain and Portugal over sea routes and overseas trade. As a metaphor for Dutch control of the seas, the mount containing and constraining the shell, it is an aspirational metaphor, made before the Dutch 18 These collectors followed in a tradition of collecting that began with medieval cathedral treasuries, spread into the secular realm in royal collections, in the early modern era became the province of universities and wealthy merchant collectors, and was considered a gentlemanly practice in the Dutch Republic. On European collections, see Impey and Macgregor, The Origins of Museums, with an essay specifically on Dutch collections, Lunsingh Scheurleer, “Early Dutch Cabinets of Curiosities”; for non-royal collections, Smith and Findlen, Merchants and Marvels; and for Dutch collecting, Bergevelt, Meijers, and Rijnders, Verzamelen; and Bergevelt and Kistemaker, De Wereld Binnen Handbereik. 19 On the exotic, see Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism, esp. 325–326 on the shift from exotic meaning non-native or foreign to meaning delightful, which parallels a shift towards a generic exoticism which collapses various exotic motifs connected to specific cultures into a single, dizzying, “other.” 20 Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, especially chapter 7; Karin Leonhard, “Shell Collecting”; Henry E. Coomans, “Schelpenverzamelingen,” 196; Bass et al., Conchophilia, especially the essays by Stephanie Dickey, Anna Grasskamp, and Hanneke Grootenboer on the collection and contemplation of shells; and on the logarithm and the nautilus, see Mette, Nautiluspokal, 44–57.

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succeeded commercially and legally with the project to dominate European trade to Asia. The cups remained popular as collectors’ items and subjects of still life painting throughout the seventeenth century, later celebrating that success as a fait accompli. But at the moment of their making, the Dutch could acquire neither the shell nor the silver directly from the producers themselves, but instead relied on trade with enemy Spain (gold and silver) and Portugal (shells). Despite embargoes and the occupation of routes and ports, commerce was indeed continuing between the new Dutch Republic and her rivals. As a case study for Dutching, the nautilus cup is interesting precisely because of the many clearly distinguishable steps this object goes through, involving a variety of techniques and makers, mostly anonymous, and these Dutching steps remain visually distinguishable in the final product. The nautilus cup doesn’t so much become Dutch, as illustrate the stages of its becoming. These layers of Dutching build, seemingly demonstrating Dutch mastery over the seas, trade, and natural materials (shell, gold, and silver). Yet the original state of the shell—a material from far away—remains central to the design and meaning of this object, reproducing a tension between there and here, Asia and the Netherlands, Iberian traders and merchants of the as yet unrecognized Dutch Republic, the seas and the trade network, natural material and man’s manipulations. The nautilus cup demonstrates its hybridity in strong visual and material terms through the juxtaposition of the natural shell to the handcrafted Dutch mount. There is a clear delineation between materials that indicate their opposition: the closest the materials come is at the points where the shell is fixed into the mount, but the materials themselves do not meld. This opposition of materials is also suggested by the painters’ interest in exploring textures and reflections when they paint this object into their still life paintings, as discussed in chapter 3.21 This analysis of the stages of Dutching a mounted nautilus is complicated further by the lack of documentation currently available for many of these objects. Several hands were likely at work in each of these examples, and the shell was worked in an entirely different workshop than the mount, possibly spanning continents and cultures. Only with clear contextual evidence and ideally with the presence of maker and/or guild marks can the metalwork mounts be dated and attributed to a specific location and perhaps artist. These mounts wrap around shells which were worked prior to their mounting, unless they have been replaced, which is not always clear. As the shells were likely worked by Asian and European artists, and a single shell potentially worked in multiple settings, the maker’s culture and the date of most 21 Still life painting is often used as evidence for the original appearance of objects like the nautilus cup, with the expectation that these paintings show actual objects. One example is how Tax uses a still life painting to determine the original look of a nautilus shell and mount now separated; this use of a still life painting is typical of studies of the nautilus cup: Tax, “Jan van Kessel en een Delftse nautilusbeker.” See also chapter 3.

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of the shells is uncertain. Further technical and material examination of many of these objects remains to be done. Dutching begins with the nautilus shell’s removal from the beaches and seas around the Maluku Islands, either by locals or by European sailors—for these shells to reach the Dutch Republic in the end of the sixteenth century, it was Portuguese sailors and traders who were importing them.22 At the time, little was known about the mollusk, Nautilus pompilius, that built and lived in the shell before casting it away at death, and naturalists and artists developed fantastical ideas of a tentacled creature who caught wind with its body as it sailed across the ocean’s surface, as illustrated in Joachim Camerarius’s 1604 emblem.23 (figure 2.3) The eighteenth-century VOC botanist Georg Eberhard Rumphius, author of the Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet, included a study of the nautilus in this volFigure 2.3: Nautilus Emblem, Nr. 49 in Joachim ume, where he described both local use of the Camerarius, Symbolorum et emblematum ex aquatilibus shell (as a spoon) and European collecting.24 et reptilibus (Nuremburg: 1604). Photograph Newberry Library, Chicago, USA. The recognition by locals of a market for the nautilus shell, whether they collected it at the request of a naturalist like Rumphius or in anticipation of its potential value, is an act of Dutching driven by locals.25 The next step in Dutching occurs when the shell travels to Europe on trading ships, in the private cargo of sailors and merchants.26 The shell became available to Europeans within the framework of the spice trade, 22 Nautilus shells had arrived earlier in Europe, through overland routes. On the pre-VOC trade routes, see Schmidberger, Nautilus, 19. 23 Nautilus pompilius’s habitat is deep in the ocean, roughly in the range of the Indo-Pacific around Southeast Asia, so ships traveling to the Maluku Islands had particular access to the cast-off shells of these deep-sea mollusks. The German version of Camerarius’s Latin emblem is “sicher auf dem Gipfel wie im Tal. Wie die Schiffskuttel ruhige und stuermische See gleich gut aushaelt, ganz genauso tut es der tapfere Sinn in gleichen Lagen,” Schmidberger, Nautilus, 21. 24 Rumphius, Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet, 90. 25 Swan, “The Nature of Exotic Shells,” 25 and 43–46 aims to recover the labor of servants and enslaved workers in the collection and preparation of the shells. 26 The VOC cargo lists, discussed in chapter 3, never list nautilus shells, which suggest they were only brought as private cargo; however, sometimes a volume (by pound) of paarlmoer, or mother-of-pearl, is

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Figure 2.4: Jeremias Ritter (mount), Nautilus Snail, ca. 1630. Nautilus shell and silver-gilt. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, USA. Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan. 1917.260. Photograph Allen Phillips/Wadsworth Atheneum.

an important aspect to recall when considering the symbolic meaning of the shell in its later context. The shell is further Dutched when its exterior is altered, which was the case with many of the collected shells. Through soaking in an acidic bath, the hard white and orange-brown exterior sloughs away, revealing the interior mother-of-pearl, a technique that Rumphius described learning in Indonesia, but which was also practiced by European craftspeople.27 This adds aesthetic value to the shell, of a type prized by European collectors, but not of interest to Indonesian locals.28 In figure 2.4, the artist has fully removed the shell’s exterior on the half in front of the figure, while the shell’s characteristic brown stripes can be seen at the rear. This artist has selectively stripped, so that glimpses of mother-of-pearl are visible included. This could indicate that nautilus shells arrived as official cargo, but this could also refer to the same material which is produced by other shells, or pieces of shells used for inlay work. 27 Rumphius, Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet, 90; I’m grateful for Tianna Uchacz and Sophie Pitman for sharing their experience with stripping shells using sixteenth-century methods while on the team of Columbia University’s Making and Knowing Project. For more on that project, visit www.makingandknowing.org. 28 This is the implication in Rumphius, Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet, 90.

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between stripes, a technique also seen in figures 2.6 and 2.7 and plate 2. The artist(s) of figure 2.5 has fully stripped the shell, and selectively removed the curve of the shell where it enters the mouth (also seen on figures 2.6 and 2.7, and plates 2 and 3), and then added painted decoration (also seen on figure 2.9). The inscribing into the shell of abstract or pictorial motifs adds another element of Dutching, a decorative element seen in about half of the extant shells. While the majority of this artistic work remains anonymous, of the 35 shells which have an artist’s name attached, 25 of these are attributed to the Bellekin family and their circle. The most well-known Bellekin is Cornelis, active in the second half of the seventeenth century in Amsterdam, showing that, at least when the artist is named, nautilus engraving is a specifically Dutch tradition.29 Cornelis Bellekin’s signature style includes a mixed method of selective removal of the exterior layer of the shell, often in foliage motif, interspersed with engraving of insects, and larger engraved scenes on the larger surface on the side of the shell.30 (plate 2) Here, the sides of the shell are engraved with genre scenes, and “C. Belkin” is visible just below the central female figure. He also often depicts mythological subjects. Many engraved shells exhibit Dutch-styled imagery, and may thus have been decorated by a Dutch artist or another artist imitating Dutch style. In some cases, the Dutch artwork that inspired a nautilus decoration can be identified, like this Danish-mounted shell that has an etching directly copied from a print by Rembrandt of a urinating farmer. (figure 2.6) Roughly a third of engraved shells show an entirely different style, one described in early inventories as being Chinese or Indian, though this does not necessarily mean they show a non-European hand: these geographic terms were imprecisely used in the period and may also refer to European work done in an imagined Asian style. Modern inventories can also be faulted for vagueness—for example, figure 2.7 is described by Hanns-Ulrich Mette as having “Chinese” designs of dragons, but nothing secure is known of the artist.31 Anna Grasskamp has examined the Asian-styled carved shells, noting similarities in style, motifs, and technique with Chinese-made material culture, convincingly arguing that some were indeed imported fully carved from Asia, while others were made in European workshops in imitation.32 Plate 3 demonstrates yet another method for altering the shell, the careful and patterned removal of sections of the shell to expose the interior curve and the septa, also seen in examples engraved by Cornelis Bellekin. These varied techniques of decorating a shell suggests the possibility of several hands at work on a single shell, with only the engraver ever named, and even this only in a small number of cases. 29 van Seters, “Oud-Nederlandse Parelmoerkunst.” 30 The insect motif is reminiscent of the work of Flemish artist Georg Hoefnagel (1542–1601). 31 Mette includes scare quotes around “Chinese” in his catalogue entry: Mette, Nautiluspokal, 195; while the British Museum has attributed this object to an anonymous Chinese artist in Guangzhou, China. 32 Anna Grasskamp, Art and Ocean Objects, 25–50.

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Figure 2.5: Anonymous Rotterdam silversmith (mount), Nautilus Cup, ca. 1590. Nautilus shell, gilt silver, jewels, and remnants of paint. Collection Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands. Inv. nr. MBZ 185 (KN&V). Loan: Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed 1953 (NK-collectie). Photograph Tom Haartsen.

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Figure 2.6: Anonymous engraver (shell), after Rembrandt van Rijn, anonymous silversmith (mount), Nautilus Cup, after 1631. Nautilus shell and gilt silver. Ostrobothnian Museum, The Karl Hedman Art Collection, Vaasa, Finland. Photograph Markus Paavola.

Figure 2.7: Anonymous engraver, Guangzhou, China (attributed, shell), Anonymous German and Italian silversmiths (mount), Nautilus cup, ca. 1550 (attributed). British Museum, London, England. WB 114.

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The final step in Dutching is the mounting of a nautilus shell, either in its original state of white with brown stripes, stripped partially or entirely to its mother-of-pearl layer, or further decorated as described above. The metalworker has a different skillset from the artists who worked on the shells, and many mounts obscure the decorative motifs on the shells’ surfaces, showing that shell and mount were often not designed as an ensemble. Shells were mounted as early as the fifteenth century in Germany, and nautilus shells appear in medieval collection inventories, but it is the nautilus mounted as cup made by the Dutch at the beginning of the Dutch “Golden Age” that becomes its enduring form.33 The goldsmiths who worked with nautilus shells fixed each shell firmly into the arms of the mount, a gilded cage that holds the shell in place and displaying it as the materials complement and contradict one another.

Dutch Nautilus Mounts and the Dutch Sea In this section, I will more closely examine the mounts themselves, which represent the major final stage of transformation of the exotic nautilus shell into a Dutched object, as it is fixed into a decorative matrix which presents the shell as liquid-bearer entirely within the context of the Dutch Republic. Thanks to European metalsmithing practices and guild regulations, with the mounts these objects finally begin to shed the anonymity of their making. Many of the mounts bear maker and/or guild marks, so when the marks are identifiable these mounts can be attributed to specific artists, cities, and years. In contrast, the indigenous fishermen and sailors who collected the shells from the sea; the laborers who exposed the shell’s mother-of-pearl; the merchants who imported the shells; artists who decorated shells; and even the patrons of most mounts, remain unnamed. Because many of the mounts can be dated and located, stylistic and formal patterns allow further unmarked mounts to be attributed to specif ic locales, though this connoisseurship cannot always be relied upon. Through an analysis of the 314 nautilus objects included in Hanns-Ulrich Mette’s catalogue, and an additional 53 objects that I’ve added to the corpus, we can see the typical Dutch mount was produced by the goldsmiths of Utrecht, Rotterdam, and Delft, with a clear peak of production in the final decade of the sixteenth century.34 The Dutch mounts are always transformed into a cup form, with the outermost chamber of 33 The prototype European nautilus cup is a German example from Nuremberg around 1480, though this is, in fact, a mounted dolium, a shell found both in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Levenson, Circa 1492, 127. 34 Mette, Nautiluspokal, and Kehoe, Nautilus Catalogue.

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the shell imitating the bowl of a goblet. There is, however, little evidence that these were ever used to drink from—no staining or depictions of people drinking from them—and the hole connecting each chamber of the nautilus, how its original inhabitant attached itself to the shell and navigated underwater, contraindicates the shell’s use as a cup.35 Many of the Dutch shells, like figures 2.2 and plate 1 where we began this chapter, have been worked into a monster, a form especially favored by the Dutch (see also figure 2.7). The typical Dutch type doesn’t, however, reflect the entire corpus of known mounted nautiluses—instead, this form, special to a key decade (the 1590s) of the Dutch relationship with trade and the seas, suggests a particular preoccupation of this period, namely the aspiration to dominate overseas trade. In the full corpus of mounted nautilus shells, German workshops produced by far the most nautilus mounts, followed by the Dutch Republic, and then the Netherlands generally (these examples have been attributed stylistically to the Netherlands, meaning either the North or South Netherlands).36 Augsburg and Nuremburg, the source of the majority of the German mounts, were long-established centers of wealth and metalwork that could support a larger market for rich objects like the mounted nautilus, while the Dutch cities were just beginning to rise in international prominence and were populated by a middle class that was just beginning to consume expensive collectables for their curiosity cabinets.37 The goldsmiths of the new Dutch Republic were just starting to assert their importance in Delft, Utrecht, and Rotterdam.38 Following the Germans and the Dutch, the other artists who were mounting nautilus shells were the Danes (primarily in the eighteenth century), craftsmen in the Spanish Netherlands concentrated in Antwerp, and a few French and Italian craftsmen. Surprisingly, considering their greater access to the materials of Southeast Asian shells and American silver, there is only one Iberian example, a Spanish example from the first half of the fifteenth century. In fact, there appears to be no correlation between a country’s access to the nautilus shell trade and their incorporation in decorative arts. As for Spain in the early fifteenth century, access 35 Note that other exotic goblets, like coconut and ostrich egg cups, were thought to have magical properties, transforming the liquid; but this does not appear to have been a belief about the nautilus shell or mother-of-pearl. 36 On German goldsmiths, see Kohlhaussen, Nürnberger Goldschmiedekunst; and Rossacher, Der Schatz des Erzstiftes Salzburg. 37 Lunsingh Scheurleer, “Early Dutch Cabinets of Curiosities,” 115. In their account of Rembrandt’s collection, van Gelder and van der Veen make a case for Rembrandt collecting in order to establish himself as a gentleman, despite his lower birth and current social position: van Gelder and van der Veen, “A Collector’s Cabinet in the Breestraat.” 38 A sign of the recent rise of these artisans is the 1597 break of Utrecht’s goldsmiths from the city’s general smiths’ guild, indicating their new status distinct from what they called the “coarse metalworkers” (grofsmeden). Van den Bergh-Hoogterp, Goud en zilversmeden te Utrecht, 1:33–40.

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to the sea routes to Asia along which these shells could be gathered was only an aspiration for the Dutch when they produced most of these examples in the 1590s. With the Dutch Republic in the midst of a destructive war with Spain, the youth of Dutch goldsmithing centers, and an economy yet to flourish, it’s surprising that these Dutch nautilus cups were made at all. Nautilus shells were mounted primarily in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and outside of the Netherlands the mounts take many forms in addition to the cup form. German goldsmiths transformed the shell into the hull of a ship, or the body of a bird or other creature, in the process sometimes obscuring and sometimes displaying the shell. A nautilus ship is a clear reference to the Latin name of the shell and how these shells were often found floating on the surface of the ocean. (figure 2.8) These ship mounts often nearly entirely obscure the shell, unlike the cup mounts which present them to the viewer. Bird mounts may conceal or display the shell, but the shell has been transformed by a visual joke into a new species with legs, wings, neck, and head added by the goldsmith. (figure 2.9) There is an amazing example, also by a German artist, of the nautilus shell transformed into a snail—the subversion of this foreign species into something familiar. (figure 2.4) While these forms inspire rich analysis, they do not help to understand the Dutch fascination with the mounted nautilus, as the Dutch never used these forms. The Dutch exclusively preferred the shell mounted as cup, a form that has great significance for understanding the Dutch attitude towards the seas and trade at the beginning of the “Golden Age.” In the entire nautilus corpus, from the earliest object from the first half of the fifteenth century to 1975, 57% were mounted in German workshops, and 10–20% in Dutch (depending on how we interpret those attributed to the Netherlands generally). While this makes a case for a near eclipse of the Dutch by the stronger German tradition of mounting the shells, when narrowing the focus to mounted nautiluses from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and then particularly to the end of the sixteenth century, the gulf between German and Dutch cups narrows, to 49% and 18–30% respectively. The cup form is the predominant shape for mounted nautilus, seen in 84% of all mounted shells in the corpus. Of the 28 Dutch mounted shells, 100% are mounted as cups, as are 100% of the general Netherlands objects, of which there are also 28. Of the German mounted shells, 81% are cups, the remainder being animals and ships as described above. This shows a stronger and consistent Dutch interest in the mounted nautilus as cup, as well as an interest in displaying much of the shell, rather than transforming or obscuring it. The cup form is particularly salient as it suggests a holding or pouring of liquid, key to understanding the nautilus cup’s role in the context of the early modern Dutch Republic as a metaphor for the controlled seas. When considering only the cup form, narrowed to the end of the sixteenth

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Figure 2.8: Jörg Ruel (mount), Nautilus Boat, ca. 1610–1620. Nautilus shell and gilt silver. Grünes Gewölbe, Dresden, Germany. Inv.Nr. III. 152. Photograph Paul Kuchel.

Figure 2.9: Joachim Hiller, Nautilus Ostrich, ca. 1600. Nautilus shell, gilt silver, jewels, ivory, and painting. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. BK-1958-44.

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century, the German and Dutch outputs are even closer, at about 39% and 18–30% each of the total. Competing against the larger and more established workshops of the German territories, and the larger German share in the production of metalwork in the period, the Dutch workshops in this small nation that was still on the brink of becoming an economic powerhouse were reaching towards the German rate of production. The Dutch produced a strikingly large proportion of nautilus mounts, particularly of the cup type, and especially at the end of the sixteenth century. Dutch metalworkers further emphasized the symbolic role of the nautilus cup as a holder of liquid with an additional typically wide, flaring lip, drawing attention to the imagined action of pouring, as in the three Dutch examples discussed above (figures 2.2, 2.5, and plate 1). Among the objects that are dated, this feature is seen exclusively on cups before 1607, the majority from the 1590s. The reference to liquid without the capability to hold liquid, along with the origins of the shell and sea-related decorations suggest that the Dutch nautilus cup functions as a symbolic reference to the sea. This understanding of the nautilus shell as representative of the ocean is confirmed by the early modern symbolic associations of this specific shell as representing the sea or water more generally, as well as exotic, faraway lands.39 While many mounts referenced this association with sea or exotic themes, it’s notable that the surface decoration on the shells does not share this thematic consistency, further evidence that the artistry of the shells diverges from that of the mount. The fraught relationship of the Dutch Republic to water is the ultimate statement made by the nautilus cup, best embodied by a group of shells depicting a sea monster (figures 2.2, 2.7, and plate 1). 40 Rather than merely an allusion to the sea, these objects are transformed into a ferocious monster, on the brink of burrowing inward and consuming itself, a curious version of the ouroboros or self-devouring serpent. Here, the shell and the gilt silver are most in harmony, the most Dutched, where the monster is both the shell and the mount, representing the ferocity of the sea in the Dutch imagination. The great Dutch efforts to fight against the sea are represented by the figures astride or standing on the monsters’ necks, seemingly attempting to restrain the monster, as does the Black figure on the tamer snail of figure 2.4. The Dutch were by necessity engineers of the sea: with much of the Low 39 The catalogue for a small exhibit in Kassel on the nautilus describes three ways the nautilus was used as a symbol: representing the sea in general, water as one of the four elements, or as a representation of faraway, unknown lands. Schmidberger, Nautilus, 21–22. See also the discussion of the allegorical associations of shells in Küchen, “Wechselbeziehungen.” 40 Of the seventeen shells with this form, eleven are Dutch, as opposed to only three German examples. In addition, another of these shells is likely either from the South or North Netherlands, so the association of this type with the Dutch Republic may be still stronger. This monster type seems restricted to the late sixteenth century, and was primarily made in the workshops of Delft and Utrecht.

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Figure 2.10: Display in Amsterdam Museum, 2009. Photograph author.

Countries lying below sea level, the Dutch have been building dikes and trying to manage the sea at their shore since at least the twelfth century. They were not masters of the sea, however, as periodic devastating floods broke the dikes, salted farmland, and resulted in tremendous loss of life and resources. 41 This group of monster nautilus cups represents the desire of the Dutch to win this battle against water. They ultimately would win this battle not at their shores, but instead on the overseas trade routes so idealistically and disingenuously claimed for the Dutch by Hugo Grotius in 1608, the subject of the next section. With great hopes for defeating their political enemies Spain and Portugal through economic means, the Dutch had no idea whether they would succeed in dominating Spanish and Portuguese trade routes. This ambition is wrapped up in these mounts that capture the ocean and serve it up for Dutch consumption. Throughout the seventeenth century, the tradition of nautilus mounting strongly established by Dutch goldsmiths in the 1590s would continue, and these objects also found their way into still life painting, the subject of chapter 3, in a medium that celebrates this trade dominance even as it begins to wane. 41 Simon Schama discusses the place of these floods, de ramp in Dutch Republic national sentiment: the role of the sea as vicious but also redemptive. Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches, 34–38.

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In museum installations today, the mounted nautilus very often serves as representative of early modern collecting or the VOC, a further shift of the meaning of this object in the hindsight of the seventeenth-century success of the Dutch. The Art Institute of Chicago and the Amsterdam Museum both display their nautilus cups as representations of early modern collecting and world trade, no longer occupied, as early modern collectors were, with the debate between naturalia and artificialia. The Art Institute of Chicago’s nautilus cup stands in a cabinet alongside pieces of coral, near a mounted coconut goblet. This exhibit discusses the early modern practice of collecting and displaying exotica. One of the cups belonging to the Amsterdam Museum is in a case with other engraved mother-of-pearl objects and a plate of VOC chine de commande. 42 (figure 2.10) While the case could easily have focused only on the artistic medium of mother-of-pearl carving that Amsterdam was particularly known for, especially the work of the well-represented Bellekin family, instead this case is part of a general VOC area of the museum, and represents the kind of objects brought back from the far reaches of that company. The relation of this class of object to early modern trade that is so apparent today must also have been perceptible to the early modern artist and collector, as the new country aspired to this success. While a collector may have considered more consciously the tensions of material, creator (Nature vs. Man), and exotic origins, the references to the sea and Dutch attempts to control it are all central to the mount’s iconography.

The Freedom of the Seas Dutch aspirations to control the seas found expression as much in their navigational and intellectual efforts as in their art. In 1608, at the end of this period of great Dutch efforts in both early navigation and nautilus mounting, but before the greatest successes of the VOC, Hugo Grotius, a Dutch jurist, published his Mare Liberum, a highly influential legal argument establishing the common right to all of the seas and of trade, opposing the Portuguese claim of their exclusive right to both. 43 This argument works similarly to the nautilus mount: serving up and displaying the world’s oceans for all to consume, while at the same time arguing for Dutch control. The nautilus cup is a material and visual reminder of the Dutch attempt to control the seas in order to monopolize trade with the spice-growing Maluku Islands. Like the tension between the foreign shell and the domestic mount, with 42 I refer to the display of the Amsterdams Historisch Museum in January 2009; during a subsequent visit in August 2011 I found this area of the museum (now renamed Amsterdam Museum) has been reinstalled, but along the same general theme. 43 Grotius, Freedom of the Seas, 1916.

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the mount holding the shell firmly in its matrix, there was a tension between the Dutch rhetoric of the free seas and the actions taken to control trade on the seas. This section explains the arguments of Hugo Grotius’s Mare Liberum, followed by a discussion of contrary Dutch efforts to control the world’s oceans, particularly through the practices of monopoly and piracy. Around the turn of the seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic made great efforts to gain access and then control the sea routes to and trade with the Indonesian archipelago, especially the Maluku Islands. This effort took place on intellectual, legal, economic, and diplomatic fronts, particularly with the publication of the Mare Liberum. The Dutch East India Company asked a young jurist from Delft, Hugo Grotius (or Hugo de Groot, 1583–1645), to make a case against the Portuguese and Spanish claims of dominion over the seas and trade with the Indies. This request focused especially on Portuguese claims to the East Indies, as the Dutch desperately wanted to control the spice trade, and where they had in 1603 seized the Portuguese ship Santa Catarina with a rich cargo of porcelain and silk, but the arguments of Grotius equally apply to Spanish claims in the West Indies. 44 The result was the Mare Liberum, first published as an anonymous pamphlet in 1608, and which remains a foundational document for international law.45 The polymath Grotius is well known for his political role in the Netherlands, beginning at the early age of sixteen, especially as advisor to Johan van Oldenbarnevelt from 1605 and as the Pensionary of Rotterdam from 1613. 46 Despite his precocious political rise in the Dutch Republic, he went out of favor over the Arminian controversy, and was sentenced to life in prison in 1618.47 In 1621, his wife helped him escape from prison hidden in a book chest, and he spent the rest of his life in exile in Paris. While this is undoubtedly his most sensational biographical moment, Grotius is celebrated for his many publications on law, history, religion, and even for his poetry. The Mare Liberum established a legal basis for responding with force to the claims of Spain and Portugal of their right over the world’s oceans and trade with the East and West Indies. Grotius cites legal precedent ranging from Aristotle and the Old Testament to his contemporaries, to determine that the oceans and trade 44 The key motivation of justifying the capture of the Santa Catarina is discussed in Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society, 50–51; and Dumbauld, Life and Legal Writings, 26. 45 Grotius, Freedom of the Seas. All English translations are Ralph van Deman Magoffin’s from the Latin original. On the importance of Grotius for international law, see Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society, 1–11. 46 On Grotius, see Dumbauld, The Life and Legal Writings; and Nellen, Hugo de Groot. 47 There were two key Protestant factions, the Arminians and the Gomarists, or the Remonstrants and Counter-Remonstrants, respectively, and this doctrinal dispute entered the political arena. In 1618, Grotius, along with other government officials, was arrested and imprisoned. On the controversy, see a concise explanation in Arblaster, Low Countries, 139–141, and for a lengthier explanation, Israel, Dutch Republic, chapters 16–21.

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are a common right and must be free to all nations. The Mare Liberum attacked the legal basis for papal treaties on trade which had given the Iberians grounds for asserting their right to all the non-Christian regions of the world. Grotius denies first that the Pope had standing to offer such rights, an argument in keeping with the Dutch Republic’s rejection of Iberian and papal authority, arguing that a pope has no jurisdiction over the temporal world or trade, and certainly is not in a position to offer the many inhabited lands, especially of the East, to Portugal. 48 Grotius goes on to argue that no one nation can claim sovereignty over the seas, because they cannot be occupied (e.g. you cannot build a settlement on the sea), and there is enough water in the sea that if one person uses some for navigation, this does not change the essence of the sea: “…the sea is common to all, because it is so limitless that it cannot become a possession of any one, and because it is adapted for the use of all, whether we consider it from the point of view of navigation or of fisheries.”49 Further, he writes, Portugal cannot claim to control trade with the lands of the East. These lands all have their own people and rulers, who are free to trade with anyone: “These islands of which we speak, now have and always have had their own kings, their own government, their own laws, and their own legal systems.”50 Grotius generously, among his contemporaries, argues that even as non-Christians, the peoples of other lands have basic natural rights.51 The natural basis for trade is that resources are unequally distributed throughout the world, so it is natural that people from one area trade with another area in order to redistribute goods.52 The locals of the East Indies can trade with whomever they choose because they are free people and are not owned or controlled by Portugal. These are curious arguments given the Dutch intention to establish monopolistic trading rights with Eastern leaders and their generous treatment of pirates, perceived as great violators of national rights and freedom on the seas, discussed below. Finally, Grotius argues that as the Portuguese have not respected the common rights of all the nations of the world to the seas and trade, and have resisted this with force, molesting ships that have attempted to navigate on the “Portuguese” seas and trade with Portugal’s Indies, it is appropriate and necessary to respond to Portugal with force, even to declare war. The Mare Liberum calls on the Dutch to respond to the Portuguese with military means: “Therefore, if it be necessary, arise, 48 Grotius, Freedom of the Seas, 16. This point is reiterated in his chapter VI, 45–46. 49 Ibid., 28. Though in the ecological distress caused by the whaling and fishing industries we have seen this is incorrect. 50 Ibid., 11. Grotius argues this on multiple levels: the Portuguese have no right to control the trade of the East Indies because they have no claim of sovereignty over the East Indies on the grounds of discovery (Ch. II), Papal Donation (Ch. III), war (Ch. IV), occupation (Ch. V). 51 Ibid., 19. 52 Ibid., 7, 61–64.

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O nation unconquered on the sea, and fight boldly, not only for your own liberty, but for that of the human race.”53 In other words, the Dutch are volunteering to keep the Portuguese in check for the sake of free world trade. Despite the noble language of the Mare Liberum, the Dutch Republic was far more interested in securing dominion over the seas and trade, rather than freeing the seas, in order to establish monopolistic trading rights to the best goods of the East Indies. Disregarding their own elegant argument that trade should be free to all, the Dutch established exclusive trading rights through treaties with many of the powers of the East Indies, playing these powers off one another in order to further their own causes, and used the free seas as an economic battleground on which to attack enemy (or competitor) ships and cargoes, with government-sanctioned piracy. The apparently anti-imperial language of the Dutch, even as they used it to strengthen their hold on their trading partners, is a rhetorical technique critiqued by Benjamin Schmidt regarding the Americas, an argument which can be extended to Dutch trade relationships in the East.54 Schmidt shows that the Dutch argued in favor of the freedom of the American Indians, a freedom that includes, most crucially, the freedom to enter into trade relationships with the Dutch, implying that these relationships will be equal, rather than exploitative. Several scholars have argued that Dutch actions violated their rhetoric in the Mare Liberum, including Simon Schama, Patricia Seed, and C. R. Boxer, who shrewdly entitled one of his chapters “Mare Liberum and Mare Clausum.”55 The Dutch argument in favor of free trade and free seas mainly provided the Dutch Republic with an opportunity to control the majority of profits in the overseas trade. In 1612 the Dutch Republic sent Grotius to England to explain the Dutch position; his rationalization, in Boxer’s words, was that: …although the Dutch had originally gone to the Moluccas as peaceful traders, they had been compelled in self-defense to drive out the Portuguese and Spaniards, and to maintain their position against the latter by means of costly garrisons and fleets. Since they were carrying on this struggle single-handed, they were entitled to all the profits derived from the spice trade…56 53 Ibid., 73. 54 Schmidt, Innocence Abroad, xxvi. 55 Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, 236–237; Seed’s claims that each nation’s language for marking ownership of lands is consistent from the official trading companies through privately acting individuals is overstated, but the general argument about conflicting mindsets is compelling. She critiques Grotius for exaggerating the Portuguese claims to the sea, suggesting that Portugal was only claiming ownership of routes that their nautical and cartographical instruments had made possible. Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, especially chapters 4 and 5; and Boxer, Dutch Seaborne Empire, chapter 4. 56 Boxer, Dutch Seaborne Empire, 114.

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For their efforts to secure free trade and free seas for the good of all the nations of the world, the Dutch believed they were deserving of a subsequent domination over those “free” seas and “free” trade. The Mare Liberum argued for military action to be taken if the right to free trade is impeded, but the Dutch Republic, acting through the VOC, seemed to feel that military action was justified as long as it was protecting or exercising the Dutch “right” to monopoly. VOC ships were outfitted for both trade and warfare, exhibiting the military efforts they regularly used in order to protect free trade, or rather, their monopolies. The clarity, elegance, and interest in common rights of Grotius’s document, like the sparkle of the gilt silver and mother-of-pearl of a nautilus cup, disguised the often-ugly Dutch attempts to monopolize trade with the Maluku Islands. After introducing the VOC’s western counterpart, I will detail two ways that the Dutch worked to defend their version of free trade—monopoly and piracy—which went beyond mere self-defense or defense of the rights of the commons. These means show the tension between the Dutch Republic’s actions and rhetoric, a tension that is demonstrated in the Dutched objects and landscapes of this book, and which underlies Dutch collective identity from the seventeenth century to the present.

The Formation and Fate of the WIC Soon after the establishment of the VOC, the Dutch vision for global trade expanded to the Atlantic Ocean and plans were laid for a West India Company (Geoctroyeerde Westindische Compagnie, or WIC).57 The WIC’s founding was delayed until the end of the Twelve Years’ Truce (1609–1621, discussed below) and the WIC would have difficulties from the beginning. First, the WIC failed to collect enough start-up capital due to an economic slump in the Republic in the 1620s, so there was a further delay of several years before the WIC could begin work.58 The first WIC would fold in 1674, and was reconstituted as the second WIC in 1675. Because of this slow start, the WIC entered into the Atlantic trade after the Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English had all made important inroads, and it would never be as successful as the VOC in monopolizing trade, nor as profitable as the other European colonial powers.59 Like the VOC, the WIC was governed by a council of representatives, nineteen in total (the Heeren XIX) from f ive regional chambers: Amsterdam, Zeeland 57 On the WIC, see Israel, Dutch Primacy, 156–170 and Boxer, Dutch Seaborne Empire; and on Dutch interests in the Americas, see Schmidt, Innocence Abroad. 58 Israel, Dutch Primacy, 157. 59 Maarten Prak, Dutch Republic, 116; and Israel, Dutch Republic, 156–157.

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(Middelburg), Maas (Rotterdam and Dordrecht), the Northern Quarter (Hoorn and Enkhuizen), and Groningen/Friesland.60 The WIC’s shifting territory crossed the north and south Atlantic, including outposts on West Africa’s Gold Coast (especially Elmina in present-day Ghana, 1637–1872), pieces of coastal Brazil (1630–1654), six Caribbean islands (three Leeward Islands: Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao, and three Windward Islands: St. Eustatius, St. Martin, and Saba, 1634–present), Suriname (1667–1975), and the city of New Amsterdam in New Netherland (present New York, 1614–1624 under the New Netherlands Company, and 1624–1664 under the WIC). Dutch Brazil is particularly interesting from an art historical point of view as Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen (governor-general 1637–1644) convened a group of artists and scientists to explore and document the region, producing some of the first European images of the Americas.61 The WIC would be instrumental in trading enslaved people and gold from the west coast of Africa and sugar, salt, indigo, and dyewoods in the Caribbean and South America.62 In significant distinction from the VOC, the WIC had less leeway with military operations, and the second WIC allowed more private trade, thus attracting Dutch merchant settlers. In the Caribbean, the Dutch faced fierce rivalry from Spain. Unable to capture much territory or establish strong military bases, the WIC focused on trade and transshipment, carrying goods for the other more established colonial powers.63 Many Spanish harbors refused Dutch trade, even after Spain recognized Dutch independence in 1648, and though the WIC had more luck with French and English colonies, WIC shares garnered low prices on the Amsterdam stock market. This lack of market dominance, however, should not diminish or excuse the imperial role that the Dutch played in the region.

Guarding “Free Trade” While official Dutch rhetoric, as seen in Grotius’s powerful arguments in the Mare Liberum, supported free trade, in reality, the Dutch and the trading companies both limited free trade through monopoly and attacked free trade through support for legal privateering and illegal piracy. Similarly, Dutch pursuit of monopoly with non-European powers was often violent and manipulative. Monopoly applied both 60 The Heeren XIX consisted of eight representatives from Amsterdam, four from Zeeland, and two each from Northern Quarter, the Maas, and Groningen, and one from the States General. 61 Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise; and Whitehead and Boeseman, A Portrait of Dutch 17th Century Brazil. 62 On the Dutch and the slave trade, see Emmer, De Nederlandse slavenhandel; Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade; and Sint Nicolaas et al., Slavery. 63 Israel, Dutch Primacy, 163.

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among the Dutch and in the Republic’s relationship with other powers: in most areas where the VOC or WIC was established, Dutch citizens were not allowed to trade privately. The WIC allowed more private trade than the VOC, but this contributed to the lower profitability of the WIC.64 Merchants were allotted only a small space for personal cargo on VOC return ships, not enough volume to prove competition for the company. Some historians even argue that this led to the eventual failure of the VOC at the end of the eighteenth century: this prohibition was a disincentive for Dutch citizens to settle in the overseas trading ports, and also caused great corruption among VOC officials, who in order to supplement their income violated the monopoly policies of the VOC.65 Monopoly was also a concept that was important domestically, as can be seen from the active concern of guilds, such as the goldsmiths’ guilds that regulated the craftsmen who made mounts for nautilus shells, that their local markets be protected from outsiders.66 My research in the archives of the Delft goldsmiths’ guild found only one mention in official guild documents of the world outside the Netherlands, despite the fact that all nautilus shells were sourced far away, and indeed the silver the craftsmen worked with was primarily from the Spanish Americas, both of which were arriving in the Republic via Iberian trade networks.67 This was a concern members had raised about Japanese silver being sold in Delft which violated their local monopoly on the sale of fine metalwork. The Delft goldsmiths, and those in other cities, left little trace of their awareness of the broader world, but were more concerned about competition from other cities in the Republic, as well as by local “others.” Elsewhere in this archive, concerns were raised about violations to their monopoly by Jewish (and thus non-guild) dealers in second-hand goods.68 That the concept of monopoly was more important than free trade in the Dutch Republic is 64 Some Dutch merchants pushed back against the founding of the WIC because the proposed monopoly impacted their success, and later the WIC controversially opened Brazil’s sugar and tobacco trade to private Dutch merchants, notably including Sephardic Jews from Amsterdam, which undermined company profits but ensured private Dutch success. However, much of the private trade in the WIC realm was unofficial: Klooster, Illicit Riches, and Rupert, Creolization and Contraband. 65 This point is disputed by Boxer, Israel, and van der Brug, who all posit more compelling reasons for the decline of the VOC: Boxer, Dutch Seaborne Empire; Jonathan Israel, Dutch Primacy; and van der Brug, “Unhealthy Batavia.” 66 On the major Dutch goldsmiths’ guilds in Delft and Utrecht, see Montias, Artists and Artisans in Delft; and van den Bergh-Hoogterp, Goud en zilversmeden te Utrecht. 67 Delft City Archive (Gemeente Archief): Archief van het Gilde van Goud- en Zilversmeden, 1502, 1536–1807, archive nr. 234, inv. nr. 2: Ingekomen en minuten van uitgaande stukken van de dekens 1576–1727, 18th document. On the sources of silver, see Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat, 156. 68 Delft City Archive (Gemeente Archief): Archief van het Gilde van Goud- en Zilversmeden, 1502, 1536–1807, archive nr. 234, inv. nr. 10: Plakkaten en ordonnaties van de Staten van Holland en West-Friesland, de stad Delft en andere steden betreffende de goud- en zilversmeden, 1662–1733, various documents.

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clear when looking at their consistent monopolistic economic practices at home, in addition to their efforts in overseas trade. The most peaceful attempts the Republic made to secure monopolies overseas were through trade agreements with local leaders. As Grotius had argued, the indigenous leaders had every right to conduct trade with every other nation, to enter into a treaty as long as both signatories were on equal footing.69 Thus, the Portuguese who claimed monopoly over indigenous trade were in violation of free trade principles, which the Dutch vowed to defend.70 Their actions rarely lived up to their ideals. The VOC was deputized, by their charter, to make treaties with local leaders in Indonesia. Until the colonial period that began after the collapse of the VOC, the Dutch did not claim to own any territory, except that on which their forts and warehouses were built, and instead established diplomatic relationships with local governments. These treaties were not always approached with both parties on equal footing, often included monopoly expectations, and the Dutch were adept at extending their political and economic power throughout the region. For example, on the island of Java, the VOC developed relationships with the many competing kingdoms on the island, which allowed them to undermine Javanese power in their favor.71 In 1681 the Cirebon sultanate, because of fighting among the kingdoms of Java, made a treaty with the VOC for protection, for which they had to give up the title of sultan, and the sultan’s powers were reduced.72 This treaty also included economic measures that gave monopoly rights over Cirebonese goods to the VOC. In the neighboring sultanate of Surakarta (also known as Kartasura), the sultanate gave up more significant power to the VOC in 1745 in exchange for protection.73 If indeed these treaties were entered into with both parties on equal footing, they gave clear advantage to the VOC and would ultimately allow the VOC to control many of the islands of the Indonesian archipelago both politically and economically. These tactics, also practiced by other colonial powers, enabled the Dutch to cloak their efforts as trade rather than imperialism. The VOC did not always pursue peaceful diplomacy when establishing trading relationships with Indonesian populations. Two famous incidents in the Maluku Islands, mentioned briefly in chapter 1, demonstrate how brutal the Dutch and the VOC could be in their efforts to free the seas and trade, for their own benefit. The first concerns Dutch treatment of an indigenous population in order to secure a Dutch monopoly, and the second their treatment of a European competitor. The 69 Grotius, Freedom of the Seas, 63–64. 70 Grotius, Freedom of the Seas, 11. 71 For more information on the early Dutch presence on Java, see Abdurachman, Cerbon, 45; and Israel, Dutch Republic, 322–324. 72 For this treaty, see Abdurachman, Cerbon, 52–53. 73 For this diplomatic relationship, see Pemberton, On the Subject of “Java,” chapter 1.

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ten tiny Banda Islands were the main growers of nutmeg, one of the prime spices of the Maluku Islands. After a decade of difficult relations with the local government, with breaches of contract on both sides, VOC Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen in 1621 resolved the conflict by killing, enslaving, or deporting the entire population of 15,000 Bandanese, repopulating the island with Dutch workers and enslaved people from other locations.74 While the Mare Liberum justified making war on a group that is prohibiting free trade, this is certainly a more extreme reaction than that argument suggested. Julie Berger Hochstrasser details further atrocities the Dutch perpetrated in order to control the output of the Maluku Islands.75 The second, and ultimately much milder, incident, widely publicized during the many Anglo-Dutch conflicts of the early modern era, was the so-called Ambonese Massacre of 1623, in which the VOC tortured and executed ten English traders on the island of Ambon.76 By treaty, the VOC and English East India Company (EIC) had joint access to the spice trade of Ambon, but the Dutch suspected an English plot to take over full access. This suspicion was confirmed when twenty men, ten English employees of the EIC, and one Portuguese and nine Japanese employees of the VOC, confessed under torture. All twenty were beheaded. The injustice of this event provided fodder for the anti-Dutch presses of England, who produced many pamphlets and accounts of this appalling event.77 Again, the Mare Liberum provided for a violent reaction to restrictions on trade; however, in this instance the Dutch preemptively reacted to an unproven plot that in any case still excluded all others besides the English and Dutch from “free trade.” In addition to monopoly and the various means used to protect it, another major contradiction between the rhetorical attention the Dutch paid to the free seas and the reality of how the Dutch dominated the seas was their treatment of those great enemies of nations and freedom: pirates. While pirates have a reputation for being anarchic and thus nationless, as popular works like The Republic of Pirates and Under the Black Flag suggest, in reality pirates had a complicated relationship with the nations of the early modern era, especially the Dutch Republic.78 Pirates, who roam the open seas attacking ships laden with goods or people, in order to amass booty for themselves, would seem to be clearly the enemy of a nation dedicated to keeping those seas free and open, and a nation which above all values trade, rather than robbery. 74 This incident is described in Boxer, Dutch Seaborne Empire, 111–112, and Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 2:274. 75 Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade, especially 105–107. 76 Markley discusses this conflict, and the aftermath, throughout his study: Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination. 77 Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, chapter 4 on literary references, Schmidt, Innocence Abroad, on examples in visual culture. 78 Woodard, Republic of Pirates; and Cordingly, Under the Black Flag.

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In the Mare Liberum, Grotius refers several times to pirates, always negatively, as examples of violators of the free seas: “they beset and infest our trade routes.”79 Dutch law forbade piracy, and punished Dutch citizens who became pirates. However, Dutch law also licensed and circumscribed the rules for a similar occupation, the privateer.80 One of the spectacular and long-celebrated early successes of the WIC was privateer Piet Hein’s capture of the Spanish silver fleet in 1628. The amount of silver captured in that single event equaled the value of the first thirteen years of the WIC’s African gold trade, and this privateer-provided infusion of capital was crucial for the company.81 A privateer is like a pirate, except in possession of a license (or letter of marque) from a national government stating that they have a commission to attack and plunder enemy ships. This is a role that was only valid during wartime, which for the early modern Dutch Republic was nearly always the case, either against the Spanish or Portuguese, and later the English. Generally, a privateer was expected to attack the ships of the declared enemy, such as Portugal, the enemy identified in the Mare Liberum. This commission could be officially expanded to include the allies of the enemy, like the Southern Netherlands, or even ships trading in enemy ports, like Lisbon. A privateer was not to attack the nation’s own ships, nor those of allies or neutrals. This circumscription of who the victim could be separated the privateer from the pirate. What the privateer was allowed to do with a captured ship also separates him from the pirate. Any people aboard were to be kept alive and delivered to a Dutch port to be treated as prisoners of war; while a pirate might execute or imprison them, or press them into service. The booty on board the ship was also supposed to be brought to auction in the Republic (usually the booty was more mundane and less liquid than currency and jewels, despite how it is popularly represented), and the proceeds were to be divided among the Dutch government, the licensing body (usually the Admiralty of Amsterdam, Middelburg, or Rotterdam), the investors, and the captain, with a wage paid to the sailors. A privateer, like the VOC and WIC, was funded by investments from the citizens of the Dutch Republic. As a joint-stock venture, a privateering mission fit into the economy of the Republic in a legitimate and typical way. A pirate, on the other hand, kept the booty and its proceeds for himself, divvied it up among the crew, and paid no share to any government. While it appears that the privateer had carefully assigned duties, he was still essentially a legal pirate, or a mercenary, waging private warfare on the economy of the enemies of the state by terrorizing trade routes. And despite these clear instructions, the privateer’s actions often brought him much closer to a pirate, 79 Grotius, Freedom of the Seas, 10. 80 On privateering, see Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering. 81 Israel, Dutch Primacy, 162.

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as maritime historian Virginia West Lunsford’s carefully researched study on the Dutch privateer demonstrates. 82 Dutch privateers often acted outside of their commissions, attacking even Dutch ships. They collected multiple commissions from different nations, showing which license was convenient when asked to provide documentation; despite a Dutch law prohibiting a Dutchman from accepting a commission from another state, even a friendly one. Dutch privateers also regularly kept their booty or distributed it improperly, without providing the state with its share. As these were piratical acts, and the Dutch frowned mightily on pirates, one would expect the Dutch government would respond with harsh penalty. However, it was often the case that these fallen privateers were charged with euphemistic crimes, such as “plundering of prizes” rather than outright piracy. 83 Indeed, even if charged as pirates, this often led not to execution but to milder charges, and Lunsford describes several convicted Dutch pirates who went on to hold high Dutch military or trading company commissions later in life. 84 It appears that rather than disdaining pirates, as the Mare Liberum and Dutch laws about privateering and piracy suggest, the Dutch actually welcomed them for their major role in terrorizing the enemy during wartime and competitors during war and peace. Lunsford describes the public feeling about pirates as shown by popular novels and adventure stories: From the time of the Republic’s inception, its citizens displayed a proclivity for piracy, as Dutch law defined it, whether such behavior took the form of overly zealous or careless privateering, or outright, indiscriminate marauding on the high seas.85

She traces this Dutch affinity for piracy back to the fundamental role of a group of pirates, the Sea Beggars, in the war for Dutch independence.86 These pirates were essential to the early Dutch Revolt, blocking the Scheldt River and thus cutting off Antwerp, and famously liberating Leiden from their siege by the Spanish. They broke the dikes surrounding the city, and sailed in on the resulting flood, routing the Spanish soldiers. Nostalgia for these heroes pervaded the Dutch “Golden Age,” even though the Sea Beggars were also guilty of terrorizing Dutch people, so were not solely working for the good of their nation.87 82 Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering. 83 Ibid., 43. 84 Ibid., 166ff. 85 Ibid., 41. 86 For more on the Sea Beggars, see Israel, Dutch Republic, 163–178. 87 Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering, 44–46.

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That Dutch and other pirates and privateers were good for the Dutch economy is clear because they terrorized the shipping routes of all the European powers. Dutch pirates would eventually be pardoned, even celebrated, because their efforts had helped the Dutch to defeat their enemies at war and also maintain a larger portion of the overseas trade. Privateers, even those that were engaging in piracy, were celebrated as essential to the Dutch military mission, for “…the very real and integral role that privateers—whether upright and moral or wayward and corrupt—played in the struggle to preserve the independence, prosperity, and vigor of the young Dutch Republic.”88 Despite their claims to the contrary, and arguments for the freedom of the seas, the actions of the Dutch Republic regarding monopoly and piracy demonstrate that a full freedom of the seas was not what the Dutch were looking for, but rather a Dutch control of the seas and overseas trade, by any means necessary. In these examples, a constant tension between Dutch rhetoric and action is demonstrated, a tension that is made visible in the material and form of the Dutched nautilus cup as well as the other case studies of this book.89

The Twelve Years’ Truce A window in which privateering was illegal and tensions between the sea powers of Iberia and the Dutch Republic were somewhat diffused was the Twelve Years’ Truce. Having established themselves as a formidable rival on the seas, in trade, and politically, the Dutch conflict with Spain, or Eighty Years’ War, or Dutch War of Independence (1568–1648), was officially on hiatus from 1609–1621, when the new Dutch government and the Kingdom of Spain established a temporary truce. While these diplomatic exchanges were important to the domestic history of both nations, the truce was motivated in large part by concerns about both groups’ trade networks, and the truce would also have consequences for trade. The Dutch Republic’s economy, despite growing profits abroad, was suffering domestically because of thirty-eight years of continued warfare and the Spanish restrictions of Dutch trade within Europe.90 Spain, England, and France all were restricting Dutch intra-European trade, and the English were making significant inroads into the Mediterranean trade. The citizens of the Republic desired peace, and also recognition of their new nation. Propitiously, the Spanish Crown was also desirous of an end to the military costs of this long war, so this initial Dutch effort towards resolution was met positively. 88 Ibid., 178. 89 The way that the colonizing actions undermine or make a farce of the colonizing mission is part of the argument of Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man.” 90 Israel, Dutch Republic, 399.

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Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the landsadvocaat of the Republic from 1586–1619, the second most powerful governmental position in this period after the Stadhouder, began a series of truce negotiations with Spain in 1606.91 The Spanish were willing to concede sovereignty of the Northern Netherlands to the Dutch Republic if the Republic would withdraw from the East Indies and forget their plans to start a western counterpart to the VOC. This was motivated by Iberian frustration with the great success of the VOC in the Maluku Islands; in 1605 the VOC had conquered the islands of Ambon, Ternate, and Tidore, key victories in their efforts to monopolize the spice trade. Oldenbarnevelt agreed verbally to this exchange, while he had no actual authority over the Dutch trading companies. In 1607, a cease-fire was signed, but afterwards Philip II of Spain was surprised to see that despite Oldenbarnevelt’s verbal assurances, there was no mention in the documents of Dutch trade withdrawal. Immediately after this document was signed, the Dutch navy won a major victory off the southern coast of Spain. Spain was humiliated by this Dutch duplicity. In 1608, talks again began between the two powers, by which time it was clear to all that Oldenbarnevelt had no authority over Dutch trade. The investors in the VOC were not interested in giving up their economic interests merely for the Dutch Republic to be recognized as a free state. The truce document as finally drawn up in 1609 called for a cease-fire and a removal of trade embargoes. In exchange for temporary recognition of their sovereignty, the Republic agreed to hold off on chartering the Dutch West India Company (WIC), to stop attacking the Portuguese in the East Indies (they only complied for a few years), and to allow Catholics to worship openly in the Republic. These were minor concessions on the part of the Dutch, though the delay in chartering the WIC would have consequences for that company, as noted above. The truce allowed the Dutch to regain their foothold in European trade, and continue to grow their trade in the East Indies, including the establishment of the VOC capital, Batavia, in 1619, the subject of chapter 4. The Republic’s new international recognition as a sovereign nation, even temporarily, put them in a better position to negotiate with other European nations and also in the neighboring regions, especially in Northern Africa and the Near East. It also put the new Republic in a stronger position among European powers. For example, when England banned the export of their raw cloth to be finished in the Republic in 1614, the Dutch response, a ban on import of finished English cloth, was strong enough that the English backed down. They were now negotiating as a wealthy and powerful European nation. The Republic 91 Oldenbarnevelt’s career would end in disgrace. Before the end of the Truce, the author of the Truce, Oldenbarnevelt, was arrested during the Arminian controversy and sentenced to death by beheading in 1619. On the controversy, see a concise explanation of this conflict, in Arblaster, Low Countries, 139–141, and for a lengthier explanation, Israel, Dutch Republic, chapters 16–21. On contemporary media coverage, see Warren, “Paper Warfare.”

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also established ambassadorships to other nations, which raised their status in diplomatic politics considerably. The Truce ended in 1621. The remainder of the Eighty Years’ War, which ended in 1648 with the peace of Münster, would be fought in the economic theater. This meant both powers harassing each other’s shipping routes through the trading companies and privateering, embargoes on Dutch trade to the Iberian Peninsula, and Spanish efforts to keep Spanish and Spanish American goods away from the Dutch. The Spanish restriction on export of their salt to the Dutch Republic was especially effective, because the Dutch needed salt for their herring industry. While the Eighty Years’ War and the Truce were ostensibly about sovereignty and religious freedom, clearly the economy and trade were major factors in how the war progressed.

The Denouement of the Republic and Transition to Monarchy Throughout the chapters of this book, other key moments of Dutch history that intermingle with trade will be discussed more thoroughly. Chapter 4 examines the founding of Batavia in 1619, as the Asian capital of the VOC, where Dutch urban planning principles will be utilized to enforce a colonial social hierarchy throughout the history of that city, especially in the eighteenth century. In chapter 5, the WIC establishes Willemstad as the Dutch capital in the Caribbean, initiating an architectural archive where Dutchness continues to be contested into the twenty-first century. Chapter 3 will examine the second half of the seventeenth century, the end of the Dutch “Golden Age,” as the Dutch East India Company successes begin to wane, producing an anxiety about Dutch success that can still be felt in the still life paintings of trade objects that became popular at the same time as the Dutch monopoly on those products slipped away. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Dutch Republic was faced with challenges from other European powers to her trade prowess abroad and her sovereignty at home. Iberian challenges gave way to English and French conflicts as these powers grew frustrated with the outsized role the small Dutch Republic had in European politics and overseas trade. English and French trading companies and colonial rule would expand to eclipse Dutch efforts through the late seventeenth century into the twentieth. A factor in the waning of Dutch power in this period is three Anglo-Dutch Wars which occurred in rapid succession (1652–1654, 1665–1667, and 1672–1674), and which took place primarily on the seas, fighting over trade access and overseas (proto)colonies. The Dutch lost Manhattan to the English, in 1664 by force, and then by treaty after the second Anglo-Dutch War, thus losing their primary access to North American trade. In 1672, the Dutch

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also had to contend also with English and French invasions on land—this year is known in Dutch as the Rampjaar or Disaster Year. The eighteenth century was a time of slow decline for the Dutch Republic and the Dutch trading companies. The VOC would contend with disease in Batavia, costing the company resources and people. In the Americas, Dutch private and illicit trade competed with WIC trade, so private merchants flourished and built great homes and warehouses in Willemstad, but WIC revenues faltered. In the 1780s, facing a financial recession, the decline of the company trade in East and West, a fourth and final Anglo-Dutch War (1780–1784), and a growing patriot movement for popular sovereignty, a revolution with strong ties to that in France began. With the end of the Dutch Republic, the VOC and WIC also ended, their territories and trade routes were taken over by the government, changing hands as the government changed over the following tumultuous decades. In 1795, the Batavian Republic was established, a revolutionary government that exiled Stadhouder Willem V of Orange. The continued intervention of France, especially after Napoleon’s ascent to emperor in 1804, ended the brief democratic republic. Napoleon supported a coup d’etat in 1805 to put in place a Dutch leader that he thought would act in his best interest—unfortunately for Napoleon, Pensionary Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck also supported the Batavian Republic’s interests. Napoleon then established the Kingdom of Holland in 1806, headed by his brother Louis. In 1813, Russian and Prussian soldiers liberated the Netherlands from France, and Willem VI of Orange followed quickly behind, becoming King Willem I of the Netherlands, a constitutional monarchy that included both the northern and southern Netherlands, reuniting the Low Countries which had been divided since 1568. With this new kingdom, the former territories of the trading companies officially became colonies of the Netherlands. After the southern Netherlands revolted in 1830, becoming today’s Kingdom of Belgium, the Kingdom of the Netherlands has held a territory roughly contiguous with the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch Republic. In the course of the twentieth century, many European overseas territories were decolonized. Within days of the surrender of Japan in World War II, Japan-occupied Indonesia declared its independence from the Dutch, and the Netherlands spent the next four years trying to retake the colony before finally recognizing Indonesia’s independence in 1949. In 1954, the Dutch government reorganized its Caribbean territories as the countries of Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles (including all six islands) within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Suriname became independent in 1975, while the islands have remained part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands until today. In 1986 Aruba became an independent country within the Kingdom, and in 2010, Curaçao and Saint Martin also each became countries, while the remaining three islands (Bonaire, St. Eustatius, and Saba) are now municipalities of the Netherlands. Against the backdrop of domestic developments, Dutch trade and

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overseas colonies continued to be important to the economy, culture, and history of the country, though the Netherlands would never reach the same imperial heights that they had during the seventeenth century.

Delft and the Shifting Legacy of the “Golden Age” A tourist in Delft today has likely come for some of the most beloved art history of the “Golden Age”—this was the setting for the life and career of painter Jan Vermeer and the city gave its name to the blue and white aesthetic Dutch ceramics artists borrowed from Chinese porcelain imported on VOC ships. Unknown to many visitors, however, is that Delft was home to Hugo Grotius, so instrumental for Dutch rhetoric of fair trade despite actions of imperial exploitation. Traveling across the central square, the Markt, between the Vermeer Centrum (housed in the rebuilt St. Luke’s Guild Hall, and celebrating all things Vermeer and lamenting that none of his paintings remain in the city), and the art and history collections of Museum Het Prinsenhof (where Willem of Orange was assassinated), the visitor passes by a monument to Hugo Grotius, likely without a glance. (figure 2.11) The statue of Grotius stands proudly against the backdrop of the Nieuwe Kerk, facing the Stadhuis.92 The monument was erected in 1886, as part of a swelling nationalistic celebration of the founding fathers of the Netherlands. Grotius was celebrated in his lifetime and beyond, unlike Vermeer, who would be forgotten until the late nineteenth century, and who wouldn’t be a popular representative of the “Golden Age” until the twentieth century. It was the far-reaching consequences of Grotius’s arguments in the Mare Liberum that made the Dutch Republic a dominant European economy and culture in the seventeenth century. Grotius’s likeness brings us back to the mounted nautilus cup, as his gaze passes through the Stadhuis to the former Guildhall of the goldsmiths, now renovated as a restaurant. These craftsmen of Delft supplied the city’s wealthier residents with markers of status including the nautilus cup in plate 1, which so encapsulates the spirit of aspiration at the turn of the seventeenth century. That these aspirations and successes relied on espionage, monopoly, exploitation, and piracy is rarely remembered in celebrations of the “Golden Age,” yet this ungolden history is written in the archives, landscape, and art of this age. The collective memory of the overseas successes of the Dutch, no matter how they were achieved, is succinctly celebrated by a display in Het Prinsenhof, a few blocks beyond. (figure 2.12) Two of the three nautilus cups owned by the museum are displayed 92 The statue was made by Franciscus Leonardus Stracké (1849–1919). https://monumentenregister. cultureelerfgoed.nl/monumenten/525336, accessed December 8, 2022.

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Figure 2.11: Franciscus Leonardus Stracké, Monument to Hugo Grotius, 1886. Delft, Netherlands. Photograph author.

Figure 2.12: Display in Museum Het Prinsenhof, 2009. Photograph author.

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here, both by Delft workshops, alongside other silverwork. Above the case it says simply, “Rijk/Rich” —the wealth that was brought in via Dutch overseas trading networks are all that is celebrated here. However, the tension between the nautilus shells and the restrictive hold of their mounts reminds the viewer of where this wealth came from—these riches were brought to the Netherlands because of the Dutch control over sea routes and trade, a control that was enabled by Grotius’s persuasive argument for the freedom of the seas, the Mare Liberum. While the Dutch collective memory may look back on this period nostalgically as a “Golden Age,” the presence of the exotic nautilus shell under rigid Dutch control in the gilt silver mount reminds us of the tension between shell and silver, and free seas and Dutch monopoly, that gilded the Dutch Republic. The sheen and sparkle of the nautilus cups, their sheer gaudiness, helped to blind seventeenth-century and modern viewers to the often ugly means by which these riches were attained. In the next chapter, we turn to the end of the “Golden Age” in the second half of the seventeenth century, when still life paintings depict rich trade objects, including nautilus cups, celebrating trade, while visually concealing the reality of lost profits and declining international status.

Works Cited Archives Delft City Archive (Gemeente Archief). Archief van het Gilde van Goud- en Zilversmeden, 1502, 1536–1807, archive nr. 234. Inv. nr. 2: Ingekomen en minuten van uitgaande stukken van de dekens 1576–1727, 18th document Inv. nr. 10: Plakkaten en ordonnaties van de Staten van Holland en West-Friesland, de stad Delft en andere steden betreffende de goud- en zilversmeden, 1662–1733, various documents

Bibliography Abdurachman, Paramita R. ed. Cerbon. Jakarta: Yayasan Mitra Budaya Indonesia, Penerbit Sinar Harapan, 1982. Anderson, Carrie. “The Old Indies at the French Court: Johan Maurits’s Gift to Louis XIV.” Early Modern Low Countries, 3(1) (2019): 32–59. http://doi.org/10.18352/emlc.89. Antunes, Cátia. “From Binary Narratives to Diversified Tales: Changing the Paradigm in the Study of Dutch Colonial Participation.” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 131, nr. 3 (2018): 393–407.

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Arblaster, Paul. A History of the Low Countries. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Bass, Marisa A. et al. Conchophilia: Shells, Art, and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. Bergevelt, Ellinour and Renee Kistemaker, eds. De Wereld Binnen Handbereik: Nederlandse kunst- en rariteitenverzamelingen, 1585–1735. Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers, 1992. Bergevelt, Ellinour, Debora J. Meijers, and Mieke Rijnders, eds. Verzamelen: Van Rariteitenkabinet tot Kunstmuseum. Heerlen: Open Universiteit, 1993. van den Bergh-Hoogterp, Louise E. Goud en zilversmeden te Utrecht in de late middeleeuwen. The Hague: G. Schwarz/SDU, 1990, 2 vols. Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” In Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, edited by Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, 152–160. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. van den Boogert, Bob ed. Rembrandt’s Treasures. Zwolle: The Rembrandt House Museum, 1999. Boxer, C. R. The Dutch Seaborne Empire 1600–1800. New York: Penguin Books, 1965. Brienen, Rebecca Parker. Visions of Savage Paradise: Albert Eckhout, Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. Brook, Timothy. Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008. van der Brug, Peter H. “Unhealthy Batavia and the Decline of the VOC in the Eighteenth Century.” In Jakarta/Batavia: Socio-Cultural Essays, edited by Kees Grijns and Peter J. M. Nas, 43–74. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2000. Coomans, Henry E. “Schelpenverzamelingen.” In De Wereld Binnen Handbereik: Nederlandse kunst- en rariteitenverzamelingen, 1585–1735, edited by Ellinour Bergevelt and Renee Kistemaker, 192–203. Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers, 1992. Cordingly, David. Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life among the Pirates. New York: Random House, 1995. Daston, Lorraine and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750. New York: Zone Books, 1998. Dumbauld, Edward. The Life and Legal Writings of Hugo Grotius. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969. Emmer, Pieter C. De Nederlandse slavenhandel, 1500–1850. Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 2003. Gaastra, Femme S. The Dutch East India Company: Expansion and Decline. Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2003. van Gelder, Roelof and Jaap van der Veen. “A Collector’s Cabinet in the Breestraat: Rembrandt as Lover of Art and Curiosities.” In Rembrandt’s Treasures, edited by Bob van den Boogert, 83–88. Zwolle: The Rembrandt House Museum, 1999. Gerson, Horst. Ausbreitung und nachwirkung der holländischen malerei des 17 jahrhunderts, 2nd ed. Haarlem: De erven F. Bohn n. v., 1983.

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Grasskamp, Anna. Art and Ocean Objects of Early Modern Eurasia: Shells, Bodies, and Materiality. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. van Groesen, Michiel. The Representations of the Overseas World in the De Bry Collection of Voyages (1590–1634). Leiden: Brill, 2008. van Groesen, Michiel. “Global Trade.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Dutch Golden Age, edited by Helmer J. Helmers and Geert H. Janssen, 166–185. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Grotius, Hugo. The Freedom of the Seas, or The Right Which Belongs to the Dutch to Take Part in the East Indian Trade. Edited by James Brown Scott. Translated by Ralph van Deman Magoffin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1916. Hochstrasser, Julie Berger. Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Impey, Oliver and Arthur Macgregor, eds. The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. Israel, Jonathan. Dutch Primacy in World Trade: 1585–1740. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Israel, Jonathan. The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477–1806. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Jacobs, Els M. In Pursuit of Pepper and Tea: The Story of the Dutch East India Company. Zutphen: Walberg Pers, 1991. Keene, Edward. Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Kehoe, Marsely L. “The Nautilus Cup between Foreign and Domestic in the Dutch Golden Age.” Dutch Crossing 35, nr. 3 (November 2011): 275–285. Kehoe, Marsely L. “Dutching at Home and Abroad: Dutch Trade and Manufacture of Foreign Materials and Landscapes in the Golden Age.” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 2012. Kehoe, Marsely L. “Imaginary Gables: The Visual Culture of Dutch Architecture in the Indies.” Journal of Early Modern History 20 (2016): 462–493. Kehoe, Marsely L. Nautilus Catalogue, http://www.marselykehoe.org/nautilus, last updated May 5, 2021. Klooster, Wim. Illicit Riches: Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648–1795. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1998. Kohlhaussen, Heinrich. Nürnberger Goldschmiedekunst des Mittelalters und der Dürerzeit 1240 bis 1540. Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1968. Küchen, Ulla-B. “Wechselbeziehungen zwischen allegorischer Naturdeutung und der naturkundlichen Kenntnis von Muschel, Schnecke und Nautilus: Ein Beitrag aus literarischer, naturwissenschaftlicher und kunsthistorischer Sicht.” In Formen und Funktionen der Allegorie: Symposion Wolfenbüttel 1978, 478–514. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1979. Leonhard, Karin. “Shell Collecting. On 17th-Century Conchology, Curiosity Cabinets and Still Life Painting.” In Early Modern Zoology: The Construction of Animals in Science,

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Literature and the Visual Arts, edited by Karl A. E. Enenkel and Paul J. Smith, 177–214. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Levenson, Jay A., ed. Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the World in the 16th & 17th Centuries. Washington, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 2007. Lunsford, Virginia West. Piracy and Privateering in the Golden Age Netherlands. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Lunsingh Scheurleer, Th.H. “Early Dutch Cabinets of Curiosities.” In The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe, edited by Oliver Impey and Arthur Macgregor, 115–120. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. Markley, Robert. The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Meilink-Roelofsz, M. A. P. Asian Trade and European Influence in the Indonesian Archipelago between 1500 and about 1630. The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1962. Mette, Hanns-Ulrich. Der Nautiluspokal: wie Kunst und Natur miteinander spielen. Munich: Klinkhard & Biermann, 1995. Moer, A. van der. Een zestiende-eeuwse Hollander in het Verre Oosten en het Hoge Noorden: Leven, werken, reizen en avonturen van Jan Huyghen van Linschoten (1563–1611). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979. Montias, John Michael. Artists and Artisans in Delft: A Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. Nellen, Henk J. M. Hugo de Groot: een leven in strijd om de vrede, 1583–1645. Amsterdam: Balans, 2007. Nunn, George E. The Diplomacy Concerning the Discovery of America. Jenkintown, PA: Tall Tree Library, 1948. Pemberton, John. On the Subject of “Java.” Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Postma, Johannes Menne. The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade 1600–1815. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Prak, Maarten. The Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century. Translated by Diane Webb. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Reid, Anthony. Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce 1450–1680, 2 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988/1993. Rossacher, Kurt. Der Schatz des Erzstiftes Salzburg; ein Jahrtausend deutscher Goldschmiedekunst. Salzburg: Residenz Verlag, 1966. Rumphius, Georgius Everhardus. The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet. Translated and edited by E. M. Beekman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Rupert, Linda M. Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic World. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2012. Schama, Simon. The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. New York: Vintage, 1987.

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Schmidberger, Ekkehard ed. Nautilus: Zeitreise im Perlboot, Katalog zur Studioausstellung. Kassel: Staatliche Museen, 1996. Schmidt, Benjamin. Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Schmidt, Benjamin. Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Seed, Patricia. Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995. van Seters, W. H. “Oud-Nederlandse Parelmoerkunst: Het werk van leden der Familie Belquin, parelmoergraveurs en schilders in de 17e eeuw.” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 9 (1958): 173–238. Sint Nicolaas, Eveline et al. Slavery: The Story of João, Wally, Oopjen, Van Bengalen, Surapati, Sapali, Tula, Dirk, Lohkay. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum/Atlas Contact, 2021. Smith, Pamela H. and Paula Findlen, eds. Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe. New York: Routledge, 2002. Swan, Claudia, “The Nature of Exotic Shells.” In Conchophilia: Shells, Art, and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe, edited by Marisa A. Bass et al., 21–47. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. Tax, C. J. H. M. “Jan van Kessel en een Delftse nautilusbeker.” Antiek 27, nr. 6 (Jan. 1993): 307–312. Vink, Marcus. “‘The World’s Oldest Trade’: Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century.” Journal of World History 14, nr. 2 (June 2003): 131–177. Warren, Maureen. “Paper Warfare: Contested Political Memories in a Seventeenth-Century Dutch Sammelband.” Word & Image, 34:2 (2018): 167–175. Whitehead, P. J. P. and M. Boeseman. A Portrait of Dutch 17th Century Brazil: Animals, Plants and People by the Artists of Johan Maurits of Nassau. Koninklijk Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 87. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing, 1989. Woodard, Colin. The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down. Boston: Harcourt, 2007.

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3.

Gathering the Goods: Dutch Still Life Painting and the End of the “Golden Age” Abstract: In the 1660s, as the Dutch grasp on world trade began to wane, the subgenre of still life painting known as pronkstilleven (ostentatious still life) developed. These sought-after paintings depicted exotic Dutch trade objects in the Dutch home with striking illusionism. This chapter considers the irregularity of the trade in an often-depicted exotic item, pepper, noting a public anxiety about this trade, and offers a new reading of still life as reorganizing the far reaches of the Dutch East India Company into a smaller domestic setting. The Dutch global reach is revised to exist solely within the Dutch home precisely as spice monopolies are challenged and English and French trade grows. Keywords: global trade, pepper, domestic, still life painting

On a tabletop partly covered by a bunched-up Persian rug, a silver tray holds a delicate fruit-filled porcelain bowl and an elaborate metalwork mount, reminiscent of the nautilus mounts of chapter 2, elevating a delicate Venetian-style glass with red wine. (plate 4) The blade of a knife is anchored under the mount, and its marble handle rests under the bowl, projecting outwards. Behind the tray, a roemer of white wine stands on the tabletop, the raspberry-like prunts on the shaft just catching the light. Further in the background, a tall fluted glass about a third full of white wine or beer looms, light touching its rim.1 In looking at Willem Kalf’s 1663 still life, the viewer is convinced that this is a straightforward depiction of objects on a tabletop, devoid of narrative. Kalf persuades the viewer of the reality of this scene by portraying minute details, the basic formal aspects of the objects, as well as in the rendering of diverse surface textures and especially light reflections. Kalf created a coherent scene on this domestic tabletop. The light bouncing among the represented objects is the only action of this image, leading the viewer to examine each item in turn and its relationship to the next object. The porcelain 1

The general sourcing of these materials is discussed in Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade.

Kehoe, M.L., Trade, Globalization, and Dutch Art and Architecture: Interrogating Dutchness and the Golden Age. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463723633_ch03

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and the silver are highlighted with a white light, while the glass and gilded surface of the mount glow yellow. The knife handle throws a white highlight that shines improbably on the bowl’s surface. The upper curve of the porcelain bowl generates a white glow at the lower right curve of the red wine, while the carpet, table, and background absorb the light and fade from prominence. If the viewer looks beyond the lit surfaces of the objects, the illusion of this scene as real falls away. A third of the porcelain bowl is in shadow, not cast by the neighboring objects. The carpet extends halfway under the silver tray, yet doesn’t appear to impact the stability of its fragile objects. The tabletop floats, its support structure concealed by the carpet or simply not depicted. The glassware and orange leaves fade into a dark background, the imprecision of the dark space contrasting with the surface details of the objects. Convinced by the attention to surface details, the viewer is not likely to question the logic of the placement of objects or the reality of this space. Yet, the objects are essential to this painting: the types of object represented are what organize Dutch still lifes into subgenres, determining this to be a pronkstilleven, or ostentatious still life. These objects are depicted together because they are expensive objects, prized for their rarity and diversity of origins, as well as for their diversity of surface textures. As we saw in the previous chapter, control of the spice trade was the initial motivation for the Dutch entry into the vast trading network in the East and West, and within Europe, which made the types of objects represented in these still life paintings uniquely available in the Dutch Republic.2 Yet spices like nutmeg, mace, and cloves are rarely depicted in these paintings, small and indistinct as they are, with a dull surface that absorbs rather than reflects light. Pepper is the exception, and is highly recognizable not as small dried berries, but because of a telltale twisted paper that contains it.3 The subgenre of the pronk still life, characterized by the depiction of trade goods, Dutched these goods by reducing the narrative of global trade to the narrative of light reflections. The extreme distances that these objects traveled to arrive in the Dutch Republic are erased in this depiction, which replaces those long distances with the very close distances of light bouncing among forms on the canvas or panel. The Dutching that occurs is the erasure of geographic distance and specificity, and the reorientation of these objects squarely within the Dutch Republic. Slippage between the painting as a representation on one hand, and the objects represented, is typical of the genre of Dutch still life and literature about it, an approach that is necessary for understanding this body of work. 2 These same objects made their way to other regions of Europe, but it was in the Republic that many of these were first available, and indeed many of the goods imported were actually consumed by the Republic’s rising middle and upper classes. Lesger, The Rise of the Amsterdam, 204. 3 Hochstrasser determined that these are often almanac pages, Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade, 96.

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Of all the subjects of this book, still life has received the most treatment from scholars, who propose a variety of interpretations. In this chapter I make a case for considering both the objects and their representation and offer an understanding of the genre and its relationship to Dutch early modern trade. This genre was popular especially in the second half of the seventeenth century, a period which marked the slow end of the Dutch “Golden Age” while Dutch trade domination ebbed and flowed, followed by a slow downward slide through the eighteenth century. In opposition to the hopeful aspirations of the nautilus cup discussed in the previous chapter, the genre of pronkstilleven represents a grasping at past success, and a revision of this success to be located domestically within the Dutch Republic, rather than a celebration of the long distances and trade routes that were beginning to slip out of Dutch control. The pride of the Dutch in depicting these trade objects with painterly virtuosity obscures their anxiety that they might be ceding their control of overseas trade in this period, and is an essential part of the changing conception of the Dutch “Golden Age.” This chapter considers the subgenre of Dutch pronk still life against the background of economic developments in the Republic and especially in the pepper trade, indicating a disconnection between the celebration of trade in paint and Dutch peoples’ experience of trade in the real world.

Dutch Still Life: Defined by Objects Seventeenth-century Dutch still life is distinguished by its close attention to minute details, from the patterns of veins on a flower petal to the distortions of reflections on rounded surfaces. Dutch painters of still life show an interest in evoking the tactile qualities of diverse materials, focusing on the objects represented by arranging them in closeup, most often on a tabletop, against a monochrome background. As the seventeenth century progressed, the backgrounds are increasingly dark, out of which the brightly lit objects emerge as the singular focus. Dutch still lifes show relatively consistent groupings of object types, from which the genre can be divided further into subgenres. Many still life painters repeatedly represented the same groupings, either in the exact same arrangement or with slight variations, making distinguishing between original and derivative works challenging. Until the middle of the seventeenth century, Dutch still life painting was not referred to as a coherent genre; instead, the paintings were described in inventories by the types of objects represented, such as a breakfast or banquet piece. 4 The 4 The term stilleven seems to be of North Netherlandish origin, introduced to general usage in the mid-seventeenth century, yet these works were still usually referred to in inventories by their depicted objects, rather than their genre. Bergström, Dutch Still Life, 3–4; Montias, Artists and Artisans in Delft, 246;

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Figure 3.1: Willem Claesz Heda, Breakfast Still Life, 1637. Oil on wood. Louvre, Paris, France. INV1319. Photograph Gérard Blot. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

Figure 3.2: Abraham van Beijeren, Banquet Still Life, ca. 1660s. Oil on canvas. Hohenbuchau Collection, Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna, Austria. Inv.: HB 23. © Liechtenstein Museum / HIP / Art Resource, NY.

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focus on the part of seventeenth-century viewers of still life, at least the drafters of inventories, on the types of objects depicted, suggests that a recognition of these consumer goods was relevant to the viewers’ experience of these works. Contemporary terminology, and the observations of many scholars since, demonstrates that there are several nearly distinct subtypes of still life, which enjoyed greater popularity at different times. The main subtypes, roughly in the order they were produced, are flower and fruit painting, breakfast pieces (ontbijtjes), banquet pieces (banketjes), pronkstilleven (ostentatious still lifes), and vanitas.5 The earliest subtypes, flower and fruit painting, were first painted by Flemish artists in the end of the sixteenth century, both in the South Netherlands and later in the Dutch Republic, and show vases or baskets of flowers or fruit. Produced beginning in the early seventeenth century, breakfast pieces show modest meals, not always a morning meal, on a table, often in a monochrome palette, such as Willem Claesz Heda’s 1637 still life in the Louvre, which depicts a table half-covered with a white cloth, two plates holding berry pie slices, some nuts, beverages, and a saltcellar. (figure 3.1) The banquet piece, or banketje, develops mid-century from the breakfast piece, the table set with fancier dishes and food. In Abraham van Beijeren’s ca. 1660s piece in the Hohenbuchau Collection, an elaborate meal of shellfish, ham, and local and imported fruit spills across a tabletop strewn with expensive serving dishes. (figure 3.2) The expensive serving dishes depicted here transition this subgenre into the next. Into the third quarter of the seventeenth century, there is an increase in paintings of pronk, or lavish and rare objects, the main subject of this chapter.6 The vanitas type, containing skulls and other references to the passing of time and life, is produced throughout the century, though scholars have been over-eager to identify still life paintings as vanitas-themed, and many of these works could easily fit into the other subtypes.7 To these main subgenres, we might add the more specific subjects of the market piece, the game piece, the fish still life, the shell still life, the tobacco still life, and the trompe-l’oeil, which were painted in much smaller quantities than the others, and only by a few specialists.8 These still life categories are not entirely fixed, and often the terminology post-dates the period, so strict divisions are not imperative. and Chong, “Contained Under the Name of Still Life,” 11–13. Chong explains very clearly the first known usages of “still life” and also of the other terms used prior. 5 Bergström, Dutch Still Life Painting, vii. Bergström is one of the first modern scholars to differentiate the subtypes. 6 On pronk still life, see Bergström, Dutch Still Life Painting, chapter 8; Segal, A Prosperous Past, chapters 8–11; Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade, chapters 3–5; and on Willem Kalf specifically, Grisebach, Willem Kalf. 7 Chong, “Contained Under the Name of Still Life,” points out the different ways so-called vanitas objects can be and were interpreted, suggesting an overreliance on this type of reading among art historians. 8 Some artists were specialists in a specif ic type, while others worked more broadly. For example, Melchior d’Hondecoeter specialized in still lifes with dead game, and Ambrosius Bosschaert specialized

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In this chapter, the main subtype I discuss is the pronkstilleven, or still life of lavish and rare objects, which is primarily associated with the second half of the seventeenth century. “Pronk” comes from the Dutch verb pronken, to show off, so a Dutch burgher might display a high quality pronk still life in the home, either to show off his wealth and taste in the painting itself, or alternately, because the painting depicts pronkstukken (pronk pieces).9 A pronkstuck is a decorative object, like a nautilus cup, that is an expensive and lavish testament to the wealth and discernment of the owner. The term “pronk” sometimes has a slight negative connotation, such as to show off with something that does not actually belong to one, or something that was acquired in a questionable way.10 This simultaneous celebration of and discomfort with ostentation is also evident in the modesty of the Dutch townhouse, discussed in chapter 5. There is continuity between the banketje and the pronkstilleven, as many object types appear in both. The main difference between them is the broad display of the banquets, where a number of objects are spread across a tabletop, representing a rich meal with lavish accompanying objects, while the pronkstilleven are more intimate, with a smaller number of rich objects, generally with fewer foodstuffs. The objects in a pronk still life are arranged tightly, often in an asymmetrical triangular composition in a vertical format. The majority of pronkstilleven depict a shallow space against a dark background. The main painters of pronk, all active in the second half of the seventeenth century, are Willem Kalf (b.1619 Rotterdam, d.1693 Amsterdam), Abraham van Beijeren (b.1620/1 The Hague, d.1690 Overschie (Rotterdam)), and Jan Davidsz de Heem (b.1606 Utrecht, d.1683/4 Antwerp); Kalf’s follower Juriaan van Streek (b.1632 Amsterdam, d.1687 Amsterdam) and the German Georg Hinz (b.1630/1631 Hamburg, d.1688 Hamburg) were also prolif ic in this subgenre. Many of these artists repeat objects and compositions within their own work, and many have been imitated by later artists, introducing some confusion around dating and authorship. The objects in pronkstilleven are often lavish silver pieces, glassware, porcelain, and exotica, alongside imported foodstuffs. The painting by Kalf presented at the beginning of this chapter serves as a prime example of the type. (plate 4) The work contains expensive trade goods from within Europe and Dutch markets abroad. Such a collection of objects, or a representation of these object types, displayed in the

in flower paintings, while Willem Claesz Heda ranged from the breakfast piece to the banquet and pronk still lifes. 9 Hochstrasser has shown that many owners of still life paintings were also owners of pronkstukken, disproving the notion that still life painting is about aspirations to own such pieces, or moralizing against consumption: Hochstrasser, “Imag(in)ing Prosperity.” 10 Segal, A Prosperous Past, 15.

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home would be sure to impress a visitor.11 Jan Davidsz de Heem, who also painted flower pieces and banquets, was an early experimenter with the pronk type, such as in his 1634 Stuttgart painting. (plate 5) Here we see a lobster with citrus fruits and grapes, a nut, and what appear to be seeds on the left corner of the table. A glass in a gilded mount and a silver cup lie on their sides, and a nautilus cup stands upright with a lemon peel laid casually across it.12 A more architectural background than typical of the mature genre can be seen, though for the most part it provides an empty setting for this tableau. The chaos of the tipped glasses suggests that perhaps this meal is already completed, and will soon be cleared. A painting by Abraham van Beijeren draws from his banquet pieces, but is a more limited depiction of a lavish meal. (figure 3.3) Again, a bright red lobster is present in the foreground, here atop a silver tray between a tipped tazza and a peeled lemon. Fruits are included again, some in a porcelain bowl, and—barely visible at center—a glass with white wine. The pronkstuck in the center reflects the surrounding items, including a distorted self-portrait of the artist painting. This arrangement recedes into the background, with the brightest items in the foreground, while the glassware and grapes lose their forms in the inky blackness. Willem Kalf’s oeuvre represents the quintessential pronkstilleven around the 1660s. With his precise rendering of the surfaces of his objects and the light interacting among them, Kalf’s objects dissolve into his dark backgrounds, making the rendered details stand out boldly. This much-discussed example in Madrid shows a different group of objects than the work discussed above, centering a nautilus cup, Chinese sugar bowl and a half-peeled lemon, while repeating the silver tray, roemer and Venetian glass, and a similar carpet.13 (figure 3.4) The nautilus cup formed into a monster is similar to plate 1 and figure 2.2 from the previous chapter. Like plate 4, light and shadow activate this composition, the lid of the porcelain bowl reflecting the light of the nautilus mount, while the shell reflects a hint of the blue and white porcelain at its top left. The rounded bowls of the wine glasses are lit from below, presumably by the light bouncing off the back of the nautilus cup and the orange. Because many of the objects depicted in these paintings are products that arrived in the Dutch Republic as a result of the global trade network, scholars link these pronk paintings to Dutch trade in the period, from surveys like Mariët Westernmann’s that briefly mention still life to Julie Hochstrasser’s comprehensive 2007 study, Still Life and 11 Alan Chong makes a case for these paintings representing generous hospitality. Chong, “Contained Under the Name of Still Life.” 12 On shells in still life, see Bass, “Shell Life,” 79–87. 13 Lowenthal has established the precise sourcing of the images in this painting in Lowenthal, “Contemplating Kalf.” This work is discussed at length in Alpers, The Art of Describing, 114–115; Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 123–127; Mette, Nautiluspokal, 117–118; and Segal, A Prosperous Past, chapter 10.

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Figure 3.3: Abraham van Beijeren, Still Life with Lobster and Fruit, early 1650s. Oil on wood. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA. 1971.254.

Figure 3.4: Willem Kalf, Still Life with Nautilus Cup, 1662. Oil on canvas. © Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain. 1962.10.

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Trade.14 In chapter 2 I established the role of the nautilus cup, which makes regular appearances in this subgenre, as a product of trade as well as a representation of the Dutch Republic’s monopolistic intents. Objects like the nautilus cup, along with other metalwork and craft, demonstrate the skills of domestic craftsmen working with materials sourced abroad. Objects that were imported in their finished form from outside of the Dutch Republic include the Persian carpets that often (partially) cover the tabletop, though it is a distinctly Dutch practice to use these on the table rather than on the floor or wall, as can be seen in many Dutch genre paintings and sometimes in Dutch brown cafes and homes today. These paintings also often include delicate glassware, for which Venice was famous, although the Venetian style was being imitated in other urban centers of Europe as well.15 Stouter glassware is often from the German territories. Chinese porcelain appears regularly, or Japanese or European imitations, like Dutch and English delftware. The foodstuffs depicted range in origin, from stone fruits grown in the Republic and northern Europe, to citrus fruits from the Mediterranean, to locally available seafood from rivers and the North Sea. Pepper and salt were imported by the Dutch East and West India Companies (VOC and WIC), respectively, though salt was also imported via Iberian merchants. The beer shown is most likely local or north German, while the wine was imported from the Rhine Valley or France. Dairy products are a Dutch specialty, though the origin is impossible to determine from a painting: for example, the Dutch exported their finest butter all over Europe, and imported cheaper Irish butter for the regular citizen. Hochstrasser’s excellent and informative study explains the ways many of these products made their ways to the laid tables depicted in still life painting, and identifies that many of the earlier paintings, mostly breakfast pieces, depict locally produced items, while the later banquet and pronk paintings show costly imported goods.

Representing Objects in Dutch Still Life The division of Dutch still life painting into subgenres by the types of objects represented, both in the seventeenth century and today, indicates that the represented objects must play a large part in understanding this genre. It is as important to consider the representational mode of these objects, highly detailed and naturalistic depictions that impel the viewer to slip quickly into seeing objects, rather than painted objects. This is also typical of art historical writing on this genre, and 14 Westermann, A Worldly Art; and Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade. 15 Venetian glassblowers were brought to the Republic around 1600 to make glass beads for trade with Africa; it is possible that these Venetian-style glasses were made by the same transplanted artisans. Goedkoop and Zandvliet, The Dutch Golden Age, 136.

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nearly unavoidable. In this section I review the relevant approaches to interpreting still life in order to contextualize my approach for analyzing Dutch still life that embraces the slippage between object and representation. Still life painting as a genre had a low status in the Dutch seventeenth-century art theories of Karel van Mander, Philips Angel, and Samuel van Hoogstraten, which reproduced Leon Battista Alberti’s hierarchy of painting genres, placing the non-figural and non-narrative genres of landscape and still life at the bottom.16 However, considering the paintings as material culture, as they were purchased and viewed, it appears Dutch still life had a higher status in the eyes of consumers than theorists. Echoing my approach to what is represented in these paintings, object-based considerations of the place of these artworks in the art market and homes of this period tells a different story. Still life paintings were widely purchased and owned by Dutch people, and the range of prices paid meant these paintings were owned across middle- and upper-class households, where they were on view for the owners as well as guests and servants. Michael North made a comparison of the average prices and ownership rates of different genres of paintings across the seventeenth century, showing the hierarchy of the genres in terms of price and quantity, instead of their place in contemporary art theory, which raises still life’s position, especially by the final quarter of the seventeenth century.17 The increase in prices obtained for these works across the century suggests a growing consumer interest in this genre. This does not take into account the wide range of prices paid for still life paintings, depending on the artist, the size, and the subject.18 A highly illusionistic pronk still life would fetch a higher price than, say, a smaller and more loosely painted image of market vegetables. North also looks at household inventories from Delft and Amsterdam to assess the types of paintings owned by Dutch households.19 In Delft, the proportion of still life grows throughout the century (North looked at the decades between 1610 and 1680), surpassing portraiture in the 1660s, while in Amsterdam still life reaches a peak in the 1660s. John Michael Montias also noted a peak in still life in inventories in the 1660s.20 In the inventories, history painting starts out as the most popular genre, 16 The earliest accounts of Dutch still life are found in seventeenth-century Dutch treatises on art, such as Karel van Mander’s Het Schilderboek (1604), Philips Angel’s Lof der Schilder-Konst (1642), and Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst (1678). For an extended account of the hierarchy of genres, see Sullivan, The Dutch Gamepiece, introduction. 17 North, Art and Commerce, chapters 5 and 6. Religious and history paintings remained the most expensive, but still life reached a peak in the last quarter of the century, about even with landscape and ahead of portraits and architectural subjects: North, Art and Commerce, 99. 18 Some of the high prices are discussed in Jansen, “‘On the Lowest Level,’” 56. 19 North, Art and Commerce, 109. 20 Montias, “Works of Art in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam,” 352–353. On how inventories provide information about hierarchies of Dutch painting genres, see also Jager, “‘Everywhere Illustrious Histories That Are a Dime a Dozen.’”

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but loses out to landscape as the century wore on. The patterns of consumption tell a different story of the place of the genres of painting than seventeenth-century art theory, showing that the popularity of still life grows into the period that is the subject of this chapter, the second half of the seventeenth century. Similar to early modern descriptions of still life, modern scholarship on Dutch still life painting considers the objects depicted to be paramount. Until the second half of the twentieth century, the realistic qualities of these paintings were understood to be simply a measure of the skill of the artist, meeting the expectation of a high level of illusionism of Dutch art in this period. In the 1970s, scholars began to consider these illusions of reality as essential to understanding the genre. To fully appreciate still life, it is important to combine these two approaches: a study of the body of objects depicted and the “realism” of their representation. Several recent articles and volumes contain comprehensive literature reviews on still life, such as Hanneke Grootenboer’s and Elizabeth Honig’s studies.21 Rather than repeat their accounts, here I discuss the two arguments that have the most bearing on this study, to provide a context for understanding my interpretation of Dutch still life and the Dutch “Golden Age” economy. It is perhaps because still life appears devoid of a narrative, seemingly a simple accumulation of objects on a surface, that it has invited so many interpretive strategies. Many discussions of still life painting focus on finding a symbolic and moralizing meaning for the objects depicted, an iconographical message that is most appropriate for the subgenre of vanitas, and which has been ascribed too widely to the rest of the genre. This approach can be found across the literature on still life, and is especially prominent in the emblematic readings of Eddy de Jongh and followers.22 While some scholars are more subtle with their arguments than others, the idea of the still life as carrying a moral message dominates the studies of Dutch still life. Theorists as diverse as Julie Hochstrasser, Simon Schama, and Norman Bryson critique emblematic and iconological approaches, yet a moralizing message remains part of their readings. My approach also has a moralizing component: I am interested in understanding what the genre, specifically the pronkstilleven, says about Dutch early modern attitudes about global trade and the “Golden Age.” The erasures I discuss below contribute to the forgetting about the global and negative aspects of this period, the exploitation of people and places through the extraction of products, that is the subject of this book. That the objects depicted in the still life represent the types of consumer objects circulating in the early modern world is important to my reading of Dutch still 21 Grootenboer, The Rhetoric of Perspective; Honig, “Making Sense of Things.” 22 De Jongh, Still-Life in the Age of Rembrandt. For the general emblematic approach, see de Jongh, Zinne- en minnebeelden.

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life, especially when considering pronkstilleven, which depict expensive objects and celebrate their value. This object-based approach is central to the work of Hochstrasser, Schama, Bryson, and Honig.23 The represented object refers not to a specific item, such as the very studio prop used by the artist, nor to a symbolic meaning, but to the real body of objects accessible to the early modern consumer.24 This is the approach taken by Julie Hochstrasser, whose 2007 Still Life and Trade laid essential groundwork for my reading. Hochstrasser looks in depth at a number of object types represented in still life, organized by which trading network they were a part of: domestic, European, WIC, and VOC. Hochstrasser’s main concern is uncovering the labor, often forced, that enabled these commodities to enter the Dutch market, and she encourages the reader/viewer to reinscribe this history into the still life painting. I expand on her point about the erasure of the labor of trade to an erasure of the distance of trade, making this body of paintings part of a Dutch revision of their global “Golden Age.” The second group of scholars on which my interpretation relies approaches the still life via its representational mode, rather than what is pictured.25 The illusion of realism in Dutch still life is created by the detailed representation of objects, down to the reflection of light on diverse surfaces, and by the use of perspective which makes the spaces of these paintings appear real. This line of inquiry began with Roland Barthes’s 1972 essay, “The World As Object,” and has continued through the work of Svetlana Alpers, Hal Foster, Norman Bryson, Celeste Brusati, and Hanneke Grootenboer.26 Before Barthes, the realism of still life was taken for granted, not considered to be a subject for study. Barthes identified the “sheen” of still life painting as its most important organizing aspect, because it “lubricate[s] man’s gaze amid his domain, to facilitate his daily business among objects whose riddle is dissolved and which are no longer anything but easy surfaces.”27 Foster discussed the glanz, similarly looking at the reflections of light. Alpers, Brusati, and Grootenboer are 23 Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade; Simon Schama, Embarrassment of Riches; and Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, especially the “Abundance” chapter; Honig, “Making Sense of Things,” makes connections to collecting. 24 On the early modern consumer, see the essays of especially Jan de Vries, Peter Burke, and Simon Schama in Brewer and Porter, Consumption and the World of Goods; and Fairchilds, “Consumption in Early Modern Europe.” 25 These scholars join the debate about realism in Dutch painting in general, many viewpoints of which are included in Wayne Franits’s volume on Dutch realism: Franits, Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art. 26 Roland Barthes, “The World as Object”; Alpers, Art of Describing; Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked; Brusati, “Stilled Lives”; Brusati, Artifice and Illusion; Brusati, “Natural Artifice and Material Values”; and Grootenboer, Rhetoric of Perspective; see also Filipczak, “A New Studio Practice of Claesz and Heda”; Wollheim, “More Than Meets the Eye?”; Wolloch, “Dead Animals and the Beast-Machine”; and Heezen-Stoll, “Een Vanitasstilleven van Jacques de Gheyn II.” 27 Barthes, “The World as Object,” 108 for quotation, 107–108 for concept of sheen.

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concerned with the still life as a demonstration of the artist’s supreme skill, interest in reflection, and the use of perspective, respectively, all deriving meaning about the genre from the artists’ concern with the illusion of reality.28 Rather than positing a meaning for the objects depicted in the Dutch still life, these theorists look for meaning in the formal qualities of the paintings. The debate about what still life is really about cannot be resolved, and as Alan Chong reminds us, even in the seventeenth century, such works were understood to create multiple layers of meaning.29 In the final section of this chapter I demonstrate that there is a value in falling between these groups described above, as I look at the representational methods of these painters, especially their depiction of light reflections, while continuing to place great importance in the objects represented, as depictions of types meant to reference the real objects being collected, accumulated, consumed, and traded in the period. The still life painting is both a representation and a reference to a real body of objects, and thus working between these two approaches is necessary for interpreting the pronkstilleven. The following section focuses on one of these imported items, pepper, which was key to the initiation and success of the Dutch East India Company.

Pepper in Still Life and Trade I will focus here on the pepper trade, because it was the spice central to Dutch trade with the East, and also appears regularly in still life painting. Additionally, there is a broad range of data to enable study of its rate of importation, because pepper was included in every shipment arriving from the East. Pepper and the other spices of the East were the driving forces for the establishment of the VOC—in order to break the Portuguese monopoly on these commodities, the Dutch expanded the range and volume of their sea travel, and established this first international corporation. Historian Jonathan Israel argues that the rich trades, dominated by spices, overtook the bulk trade with the Baltic as the driver of the Dutch economy in the period.30 Anthony Reid, writing from the perspective of Southeast Asia, declares that pepper is the most important export: although it was priced lower 28 Alpers sees the artist competing against the craftsman who created the objects: Alpers, Art of Describing, 113–115. Brusati is particularly concerned with the self-portraits of artists which appear as tiny reflections on shiny objects within the painting, such as in figure 3.2: Brusati, “Stilled Lifes,” and Artifice and Illusion. Grootenboer focuses on the use of correct perspective as the way the Dutch still life convinces the viewer of its “reality,” and the consequent connections of contemporary theories of vision to this genre of painting: Grootenboer, Rhetoric of Perspective. 29 Chong, “Contained Under the Name,” especially 17. 30 Jonathan Israel, Dutch Primacy, introduction and 259.

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Figure 3.5: Willem Claesz Heda, Nautilus Cup and Plates with Oysters, 1649. Oil on wood. Staatliches Museum, Schwerin, Germany. Inv. nr. G68. Photograph BPK Bildagentur / Elke Wolford / Art Resource, NY.

Figure 3.6: Willem Claesz Heda, Still Life with Oysters, a Silver Tazza, and Glassware, 1635. Oil on panel. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA. 2005.331.4.

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Figure 3.7: Pieter Claesz, Still Life with a Turkey Pie, 1627. Oil on wood. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. SK-A-4646.

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than the other East Indian spices (nutmeg, mace, and cloves), it was exported in ten times the quantity.31 Pepper was imported in huge volume for consumers in the Republic and across Europe, and pepper overwhelmed the other products imported in Dutch ships: Els M. Jacobs evocatively describes how in addition to packaged pepper, loose peppercorns were poured around other packaged goods to fill in empty spaces.32 In addition to its importance to Dutch overseas trade, pepper has a recurring role in still life painting, depicted in the tiny cones of paper that were the typical way pepper was purchased. Two paintings by Willem Claesz Heda center a pepper cone. Under the featured nautilus cup, a cone of pepper spills into a plate of oysters in his Schwerin breakfast piece. (figure 3.5) In his New York painting, the pepper cone appears empty, but combined with the oysters and half-peeled lemon it can be assumed that this is a pepper paper. (figure 3.6) Pieter Claesz’ elaborate banquet piece shows at the foreground a typical combination of pepper, salt, lemons, and oysters and yet another nautilus cup.33 (figure 3.7) In this well-lit scene, a pewter plate holds salt and ground pepper together, mingling where the white linen tablecloth meets the carpet. Pepper is also referenced by the depiction of pepper shakers in still life paintings, as in David Davidsz de Heem’s still life, at right. (figure 3.8) This modest pepper shaker, despite its costly contents, is overshadowed by the gleaming oyster shell, even as the shell’s interior is reflected on the cylinder of the pepper shaker. In the early modern period most pepper was grown in India and Indonesia.34 The black pepper plant (Piper nigrum) originated around Kerala in India, and spread along the Malabar Coast (southwest India). It was transplanted to the island of Sumatra by the fifteenth century, where it also flourished and was cultivated for export, at the time mostly to China.35 Around 1500, all of Europe’s pepper came from India, but by the mid-seventeenth century Indonesian pepper dominated the market, as it was cheaper to cultivate there, and because of the European incursion into this region.36 The other types of pepper imported by the VOC, though in much smaller quantities, are white pepper and long pepper. White pepper comes from the 31 Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 2:7. 32 Jacobs, In Pursuit of Pepper and Tea, 91. On the market for goods arriving in or triangulated via Amsterdam, see Kistemaker and van Gelder, Amsterdam: The Golden Age. 33 Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade, 120 correlates dated banketjes and ontbijtjes including pepper by Pieter Claesz in the first half of the century with several peaks in pepper price, suggesting that he might have deliberately depicted pepper when the price was up. 34 Today Vietnam is the main exporter of pepper, and Brazil is also a major supplier, in addition to the historical producers. 35 Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 2:7 and 2:12. It is likely that Chinese traders were responsible for the transplantation of this crop. Reid maps out the expansion of pepper cultivation in Southeast Asia, 1500–1800, 2:9, map 2. 36 Ibid., 2:9.

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Figure 3.8: David Davidsz de Heem, Still Life, ca. 1668. Oil on canvas. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. SK-A-2566.

same pepper berries as black pepper, but through a more intricate process: before the berry dries, the ripe black exterior is removed, revealing a white kernel. The long pepper plant (Piper longum) produces a type of small cone with pepper berries on it, and was primarily grown in India. Pepper was used in European cooking for flavoring and food preservation. Pepper was a cash crop, cultivated by local farmers or enslaved people, although contemporary accounts describe the pepper-producing lands as lush and tropical, suggesting the landscape can essentially produce the spice itself.37 On the contrary, Anthony Reid estimates that at the peak of production in the middle of the seventeenth century, 200,000 people must have been working to cultivate that pepper, or 6 percent of the population of Sumatra, the Malay Peninsula, and Borneo.38 The farmers generally sold their products through local rulers or Indigenous traders, who paid exploitative rates, and these middlemen then supplied the European 37 See Hochstrasser’s discussion of Beverwijk (96), Linschoten (101–102), and Nieuhof (108–112) in Still Life and Trade. 38 Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 33.

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traders with the spice. While many of these farmers were cultivating their own land, others were enslaved by middlemen. The Dutch East India Company also enslaved workers whose tasks included harvesting spices. Reid describes conditions for these workers as “often harsh, with high mortality, few women, and a poor cultural life.”39 Considering the importance of pepper both as a regular subject in Dutch still life, and in the Dutch overseas economy, the question of its profitability and supply through the VOC is essential to consider in understanding this relationship. Close examination of the volume of pepper imported by each VOC fleet in the seventeenth century shows wild fluctuation, information that was available to the interested public in the Dutch Republic. In addition to handwritten accounts of prices on auction sheets, memoirs about trade goods, and personal correspondence about trade, this information was recorded in a comprehensive, and public, way in cargo lists that were compiled and published for each incoming fleet. Two types of publications provided this information, the Generale Carga and the reprinting of this record in early newspapers like Hollandse Mercurius (monthly, 1650–1690).40 The Generale Carga were printed as individual sheets by a contracted VOC publisher, presumably for distribution among the merchants purchasing bulk goods from the VOC for trade within the Republic and Europe. 41 The Hollandse Mercurius, addressing a wider audience, was compiled monthly as a small newspaper or newsletter, containing news from around Europe, such as notable births and deaths in the ruling families, accounts of battles and wondrous occurrences, and, most relevant for this discussion, news about ships coming in from overseas. The entire print run of the Hollandse Mercurius and a great number of the Generale Carga sheets remain in special collections and archives. 42 The Generale Carga were the source for newspaper publishers, who reprinted the Generale Carga word for word, with adjustment in format. For example, in 1690, four ships arrived 39 Ibid., 2:35. For his broader discussion of cash cropping, see his 2:32–36. 40 I am grateful that the Newberry Library in Chicago has the comprehensive set of the Hollandse Mercurius. Considering the yearly title page and pagination, their version appears to be an annual compilation of individual newsletters, reprinted as a bound volume in the year following initial publication. 41 On the distribution of economic information distribution in Amsterdam, see McCusker and Gravesteijn, The Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism, 43–83. 42 The data discussed in this section draws from the Generale Carga collected in the Dutch National Archives (Nationaal Archief), The Hague: Aanwinsten van de voormalige Eerste Afdeling van het Algemeen Rijksarchief, 14th century–1933, archive nr. 1.11.01.01, inv. nr. 541. Prijslijsten van goederen van de VOC; Archive of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), 1602–1795 (1811), archive nr. 1.04.02, inv. nos. 5003 and 5004, Ladinglijsten; Archive of J. Hudde, 1602–1703, archive nr. 1.10.48, inv. nr. 17, Gagelijsten van retourschepen. Additional Generale Carga are in the collection of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, Collectie prijscouranten, commerciële couranten, veiling- en ladinglijsten, 1580–1870, ARCH03972. More newspapers are always being added to KB (Nationale Bibliotheek), Delpher newspaper database, delpher.nl.

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Figure 3.9: “Generale Carga,” 1690. Nationaal Archief, The Hague, Netherlands, Archief van Johannes Hudde (1628–1704), archive nr. 1.10.48, inventory nr. 17. Photograph author.

Figure 3.10: “Generale Carga.” Hollande Mercurius 41 (1690) (Haarlem: Pieter Casteleyn), 336. Photograph Newberry Library, Chicago, USA.

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in the Republic that had left Batavia in March together, Prince-Landt, Borssenburgh, Hoogergeest, and Nieuwlandt. (figure 3.9) These carried a cargo of pepper, metals, wood, and Chinese textiles and porcelain. The Generale Carga lists the ship names, which chamber of the VOC they were supplying, the weight in pounds or number of pieces (for textiles and porcelain) of each item, concluding with the name of the VOC publisher that printed this sheet. This example also includes handwritten notes about the prices of each item, the amount sold, and the calculation of the subsequent value for each item and the total value: here an impressive 1,548,661 guilders and 13 stuivers. The corresponding account in the Hollandse Mercurius abandons the layout of the Generale Carga, reproducing the information as an indented header in italics, followed by the list of goods in a paragraph, and omitting the publisher’s information. (figure 3.10) This example shows the basic form both of these documents take, though some variations occur. Sometimes the Generale Carga lists the goods going to each chamber, or separates the cargos by ship. For the most part, the order of the goods begins with the spices followed by various raw materials and dyestuffs, and ends with textiles. That this specialized information for the merchant is reproduced in detail for the Dutch reading public shows that the minute details of Dutch imports were of interest to, and available to, the broader population. It follows that the wider public would also be aware of variations in this trade, providing cause for celebration or concern. Graph 3.1 shows the total volume of pepper imported in the handful of years that the extant Generale Carga and Hollandse Mercurius published information for all VOC ships arriving in the Republic (Table 3.1, at end of chapter).43 This information shows a gradual rise until 1670, followed by a sharp decline, with variation around 1660 and 1690. Extrapolating from the available data in order to provide a more consistent account, graph 3.2 shows the estimated imports for all the years in the seventeenth century for which there was some data provided in these publications—the forty-year run of the Hollandse Mercurius provides information nearly every year (Table 3.2). While this estimated data is necessarily less precise, it shows a larger picture of wide variations from year to year, with a peak in 1670, followed by a sharp decline that picks back up erratically in the next decade and through the 1690s. 43 Cross reference with the complete VOC shipping records confirms which years the extant Generale Carga and Hollandse Mercurius provided complete data: Koninklijk Nederlands Historisch Genootschap, The Dutch East India Company’s Shipping. This database includes the name of the ship, the captain, the location and dates of departure, arrival, and whether/when it called in the Cape. When white pepper was also included, I added this to the black pepper volume, since it comes from the same plant, but it should be remembered that the white pepper was more expensive. Black pepper is often also called brown pepper (zwart and bruin with many spelling variations). Data for the eighteenth century is much more complete, but less relevant to comparison to seventeenth-century still life.

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Graph 3.1: Volume of pepper imported by Dutch East India Company, for years in which entire fleet is known to author. Source: author; see Table 3.1 for data.

Graph 3.2: Estimated volume of pepper imported by Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth century. Source: author; see Table 3.2 for data.

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These trends can be compared to key events in Dutch history, most notably the Peace of Münster in 1648, the three Anglo-Dutch Wars (1652–1654, 1665–1667, and 1672–1674), and the Rampjaar of 1672. This data about supply is in accord with information compiled by other researchers about changes in pricing of pepper. Kristof Glamann follows the price of pepper over the course of the seventeenth century: prices rose, sometimes steadily, and sometimes steeply, from 1610–1627, followed by a decline; prices then peaked in 1639–1641, after which the market was oversupplied, causing the price to drop through the 1650s; from a low price in 1656, the prices rose through the 1660s and 1670s, and then the supply rose as well. 44 As with the supply data, this shows uncertainty and irregularity in prices in throughout the seventeenth century. Anthony Reid analyzed the selling price of pepper in Asia, the prices paid by foreign merchants to Indigenous traders and rulers, which also shows a great variation between about 1600 and 1650, with a general overall rise in price, and then a steep drop into the mid-1650s, followed by a trend in lower prices.45 Because of the steep drop in the 1650s, the producers of pepper in Southeast Asia were less interested in cultivating the cash crop, which in turn led to a lower supply. 46 The vagaries of supply and price need to be combined in order to assess the profitability of this trade, in addition to the demand for pepper and also the costs the VOC incurred to secure its import. Despite the careful organization of the company, and its often meticulous records, it is surprising and disappointing that the VOC compiled records of profits and costs only for the company as a whole, making it nearly impossible to isolate the profitability of a single commodity or region.47 However, the available information on price and supply fluctuation leads to the conclusion that after an initial steep rise in the fortunes of the pepper market, the second half of the seventeenth century was a time of turmoil for the pepper market, with rapid changes in price both at the source and in Europe, a fluctuation that was known to the consumers of this product, as the wide publication of this data suggests. Indeed, this period was a turning point for the VOC, and therefore of Dutch conceptions of their “Golden Age.” Various moments in the second half of the seventeenth century have been identified as the moment where the tides of Dutch fortune turned, and we can take a more distant view to see that across these several decades, peaks and troughs impacted Dutch confidence in their economy. Boxer identifies 1648—the year of the Treaty of Münster that established the Dutch Republic as a truly independent nation—as the peak of the Dutch “Golden Age.”48 44 Glamann, Dutch-Asiatic Trade, 73–90. Cited in Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade, 336, note 119. 45 Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 2:300, figure 41. 46 Ibid., 2:299–300. 47 De Vries and van der Woude, The First Modern Economy, 441. 48 Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne, 29.

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Jonathan Israel points to 1672 as the end of the zenith of Dutch trade, which had begun with the restructuring of Dutch trade after that same treaty. The cessation of the war with Spain allowed the Dutch to expand their efforts in trade, rather than military exercises, though it should not be forgotten that many Dutch trading activities, especially at the far reaches of their colonial holdings, were as much military as trade ventures. Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude’s far-reaching study of the early modern Dutch economy from 1500–1815 similarly shows a peak in Dutch trade in 1648, followed by three decades of challenges to the Dutch economy that would have far-reaching effects. 49 While tied to the successes of the VOC, these economic changes affected the Dutch Republic as a whole. The three Anglo-Dutch Wars of these decades provided a challenge to the Dutch Republic, but did not devastate trade. De Vries and van der Woude identify 1663 as the turning point of the entire Dutch economy, marking the end of the “Golden Age.”50 The challenges to Dutch monopolies in the East, especially by the English East India Company, and the trade restrictions imposed by Japan, would put pressure on VOC profits in the 1670s and 1680s. Els M. Jacobs’s study of the VOC in the eighteenth century shows that the VOC was too inflexible to accommodate these changes in supply and demand, a major element of the VOC’s decreasing profitability, which began a long downward slide around 1730.51 An interesting element of de Vries and van der Woude’s argument is that this was a downturn in the economy that was immediately palpable, rather than only apparent in retrospective. As a result, the Dutch government made heavy investments in the VOC, the Caribbean plantation system (slavery and sugar), and in whaling, all of which were expensive and risky—de Vries and van der Woude argue that this indicates awareness among the government of the impending downturn.52 Interestingly, when looking at the profit statistics of the VOC, this time period does not show a decline, merely a leveling of profits.53 The company remained profitable, but no longer showed the kind of astronomical gains that were necessary to sustain growth in this early capitalist economy, especially considering the huge costs of maintaining that company in military and personnel expenditures.54 The investments in the VOC also indicate why the company profits slowed: the VOC strengthened its military operations in order to maintain their current monopolies, and they expanded their product offerings in response to European demand, such 49 De Vries and van der Woude, The First Modern Economy, 675ff. 50 Ibid., 674ff. 51 Jacobs, Koopman in Azië. 52 De Vries and van der Woude, The First Modern Economy, 677–679. 53 Ibid., 448. 54 On the increasing costs of trade in the east, see chapter 4, especially the argument about Batavia’s marshland and the deadly malaria outbreaks that decimated the company workers.

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as more textiles, coffee, and sugar, areas in which the Dutch suffered competition at the source, and lower prices in Europe.55 These observations about the constricting economy of the Republic match up with my discussion above about the pepper trade, showing that in the second half of the seventeenth century, the VOC’s fabulous wealth begins to decline, while still life painting rose in popularity, particularly the pronkstilleven. In addition to the Dutch government’s acknowledgement and action on the crisis, this worry trickled down through the Republic’s populace. Despite Dutch pride in their trade primacy, expressed through the kinds of pronken that will be discussed in the final section of this chapter, signs of the impending downturn were obvious to the citizenry. These signs caused a warranted anxiety in the populace as prices rose and wages fell. City and agricultural land rents declined after reaching a peak in the 1660s, producing a temporary respite for renters, but ultimately making land investment values fall.56 Investment in building projects and polder creation ceased after 1672, as well as the building of Amsterdam’s new synagogue, ending major sources of employment for skilled workers.57 Dutch wages, which in 1660 were the highest in Europe, stagnated and then began to fall.58 The crisis was thus felt across all levels of society, not just for those involved in the pepper trade or who were acquiring still life paintings. Many scholars have pointed out a sense of anxiety inherent in seventeenthcentury still life painting. Simon Schama conceived of an “embarrassment of riches” across all aspects of Dutch life in the “Golden Age,” a deep sense of anxiety about the contradictions of Calvinist morality and material wealth—and certainly material wealth is represented in pronkstilleven. Hochstrasser considers the anxiety inherent in the repetition of forms as objects are rearranged by the artist in new combinations, following Hal Foster’s concern with the fetishization of these commodities.59 A body of breakfast pieces, like Willem Claesz Heda’s 1635 and 1649 pieces with overturned cups and broken glasses, suggest this anxiety was already established earlier. (figures 3.5 and 3.6) Norman Bryson identifies this type of still life as “still life of disorder.”60 Anxiety is also suggested by a feature common to many Dutch still lifes, the objects that protrude illusionistically from front edge of the table, representing an uncomfortable intrusion into the viewer’s space, as well as the precariousness of the arrangements. As the means for these piles of abundance 55 De Vries and van der Woude, The First Modern Economy, 678. 56 Ibid., 674—they point out that this was true in Amsterdam across all classes of housing. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade, 256–260; she reviews the literature on still life and anxiety, and includes a good discussion of this theme. See also Foster, “The Art of Fetishism.” 60 Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 121ff.

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being accumulated diminishes in the second half of the century, the pronkstilleven’s popularity increases. These paintings show wealth being celebrated and shown off, even as its potential for acquisition shrinks. Might this act of pronken, a boasting or showing off, suggest an anxiety that the wealth is slipping away? Do these paintings celebrate objects that had already arrived in the Republic in the previous decades, rather than the cargo of the next fleet? How do these paintings represent a revision in Dutch conceptions of their “Golden Age”? In the final section of this chapter, I will tackle these questions. The Dutch had indications that their economy would not continue to thrive as it had, even with the recognition of their statehood and the past decades of success, so if their visual culture suggests an anxiety, the anxiety was well founded.

Dutching Still Life The Dutch pronk still life depicts an accumulation of rich objects from around the world brought together and lying still on a tabletop. These paintings show a pride or showing off (pronken) about the trade prowess that brought these objects to the Republic, but also reorganizes those great distances. Instead of acknowledging the long distances to the Americas and the Maluku (formerly Spice) Islands, the tight compositions of objects share a small space, linked to one another by the play of light across their represented surfaces. This celebration of trade is undermined by anxieties about the present and inevitable future losses of the Dutch role in global trade. The Dutching that occurs in this case study is this erasure of geographic specificity, a suggestion that this scene is only Dutch, when really it combines objects from many areas of the world. This process of Dutching these objects through still life can be reversed by gaining an understanding of how these objects came to be in the Republic, demonstrating that the Dutching cannot be complete. The knowledge of where these diverse objects came from lends them a globalizing element, as the still life shows objects from across the world, as well as from within Europe. Here I trace the increasing erasure of distance in the depiction of trade in the Republic, culminating with the pronk still life. Celebrating the goods arriving in the Dutch Republic was a popular activity in the visual culture from the middle of the seventeenth century onwards, even as goods arrived in irregular volume and value. Proud of the height their trading empire had reached, Amsterdam erected a new town hall, beginning in 1648, designed by Jacob van Campen.61 The decoration of this building represents the great pride of the Dutch 61 Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, 46, 223–225, and on 117 he discusses the importance of this timing as a historical juncture in Dutch Republic’s development.

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Figure 3.11: Artus Quellinus I and workshop, The Four Continents Paying Homage to Amsterdam, design for the back pediment, Amsterdam Town Hall (now Royal Palace), ca. 1665. Terracotta. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. BK-AM-51-3.

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in their trading prowess, an opportunity for them to pronken. Schama points to an anxiety underlying this great pride, as seen in some contradictory imagery in the building’s frieze showing the worship of the Golden Calf from Exodus.62 Following van Campen’s designs, Artus Quellinus I and assistants completed a monumental pediment for the town hall, depicting Amsterdam, figured as a woman, receiving tribute from the world’s oceans; the model is shown here.63 (figure 3.11) Amsterdam, with hands outstretched, can nearly touch Europe and Asia—America and Africa wait patiently nearby to hand Amsterdam their goods. This body of visual culture depicts the goods of the world being given to Amsterdam from a very short distance, rather than them being taken from—or even traded fairly with—those faraway lands. Overseas trade is implied, but not shown, and the image does not account for the specific geographical sources and distances of products. This is surprising given how important it was for the Dutch gains in trade that they reached the sources of goods on their own, rather than purchasing them though a middleman like the Portuguese. Jan Vos’s 1662 Vergrooting van Amsterdam (the growth/expansion of Amsterdam) is a lengthy poem about the city’s development, celebrating trade and water traffic, with classicizing references to Roman gods.64 He writes about immigration to help build the city, both in construction and population growth, and about the importance of the products available in Amsterdam, including local dairy products and foreign-sourced flowers. He praises the merchant, acknowledges the importance of Swedish forests in providing wood for building, vaguely mentions the faraway lands they traded with (again by continent rather than with more specificity), and, most frequently, the bodies of water that bring the ships in, notably the rivers IJ and Amstel, and the “Zuider-meir” (Zuiderzee, since 1932 the IJsselmeer).65 The products brought into Amsterdam become conflated with the rivers on which they traveled, rather than where they originated. By implying that it was Amsterdam’s location at the meeting of bodies of water that fated the city to become a great trading center, this poem ultimately discounts the domination of overseas routes and celebrated negotiations at the source which were key to Dutch global success. Vos’s longest celebration, about six couplets, of a place outside of the Republic is about the mines of Sweden, from which copper, iron, and steel arrive thanks to the River IJ.66 Meanwhile, all the silver and gold from the Americas and Asia together 62 Ibid., 119–121. 63 Similar imagery showing off trade prowess is discussed in Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade, 18–20. 64 Vos, Vergrooting van Amsterdam. 65 For other Dutch poetry on water, see Schenkeveld-Van der Dussen, Dutch Literature in the Age of Rembrandt, 104–113. 66 Vos, Vergrooting van Amsterdam, 15: “Het kliprijk Zweedenrijk ontsloot het hardt gebergt, / Om kooper, yzer, staal, tot dienst van’t Y, te haalen.”

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are mentioned in a single couplet.67 The cargo lists of the VOC show that copper and other metals were imported in large volume from Japan, yet this specificity is elided in the poem.68 While Vos spends many lines in his epic poem celebrating trade, the specific places to which the Republic’s ships traveled are lost in descriptions of role of the local waterways in bringing them to the shores of Amsterdam. The still life paintings that are the subject of this chapter take this erasure of distance one step further, eliminating any reference to the sources of the items on the table, mixing together domestic, European, Asian, and American goods, essentially reorganizing the geography of trade. For example, the silver pieces in van Beijeren’s New York piece demonstrate Dutch metalwork skills, with silver sourced from the Americas, alongside porcelain from China, and foodstuffs from within Europe (though the citrus could be from northern Africa), balanced on a bunched-up Persian carpet. (figure 3.3) Such a table might be imagined to exist in one of the Republic’s wealthier cities, like Amsterdam, Delft, or Middelburg, but in reality exists only the artist’s imagination, suggested by studio props. Devoid of a narrative—depicting “stilled” life—these paintings show only one moment, freezing these objects on a table in the only place in the world they could all come together in this period: the Dutch Republic. The only action or movement occurring in the pronk still life is that provided by the bouncing of light around the canvas, between the depicted items—a movement created by the artist and followed by the viewer. As others have noted, a generic European exoticism developed into the eighteenth century, that juxtaposes improbable accumulations, like Black figures dressed in American Indigenous garb, set in an Asian landscape.69 These erasures go further than the moment I’m discussing, which is a specifically Dutch moment of anxiety as Dutch trade prowess falters.70 Of the painters of pronk, Willem Kalf exemplifies this trend most clearly, so I will focus on his work in this final section.71 67 Ibid., 28. 68 In addition to the cargo lists, see also the list of products available in each trading port the VOC visited, from 1701: Dutch National Archives (Nationaal Archief), The Hague: Archive of Jacob van Ghesel, 1757–1773, archive nr. 1.10.31, inv. nr. 195, Lijsten van de kantoren van de VOC in Indië en de daar verhandelde producten. (1701). 69 A salient example is the tile panel in the Rijksmuseum, ca. 1700 (BK-NM-12400-443). Chinoiserie is another example of this trend. 70 Benjamin Schmidt also noticed this trend in Dutch publication of travel books in this period. While he argues that this generalizes across Europe, and therefore is not specif ically Dutch, I counter that the continued domination of Dutch publishers of this genre is a way to assert Dutch control over visual culture, even if the Dutch no longer dominate trade. Benjamin Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism. 71 I focus on him also because of the recent exhibition of his work at the Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen, and the well-illustrated catalogue, which makes his work the most accessible. Van den Brink and Meijer, Willem Kalf.

Gathering the Goods: Dutch Still Life Painting and the End of the “Golden Age” 

Willem Kalf was born in Rotterdam in 1619, and was painting in Paris by 1642, at the age of 23.72 After three years in Paris, he returned to the Dutch Republic, working in Rotterdam, then Hoorn, finally settling in Amsterdam in 1653, where he lived and worked until 1693. Kalf’s time in Paris gives an international dimension to this artist—he began painting pronkstilleven there, while working with a circle of Flemish artists. His paintings remained popular in France well into the eighteenth century, and immediately after he left, local painters were already imitating his style and compositions. Despite this time in Paris, Kalf remains firmly identified as a Dutch artist. This work, one of the two earliest dated works, painted in Paris in 1643, depicts a typical pronk arrangement of objects: a porcelain dish filled with olives, a nautilus shell, textured glasses, a pumpkin, and a reflective tin flask. (figure 3.12) This composition shows the reflections Kalf would become known for, though it is highly imaginative for the flask to so clearly reflect the glass of red wine and the pumpkin.73 Unlike later works, the tabletop is well-lit, and there is a hint of architectural space in the background. As a still life painting, what is depicted is understandably devoid of narrative—the objects rest across the tabletop, and the only potential movement is the sense the viewer has that the nautilus shell might slip from the table, were it to be jostled. Potential movements like these are one aspect that leads scholars to identify some anxiety in the scene, despite it depicting objects stilled. A work dated 1653, the year he settled in Amsterdam, is more typical of the pronkstilleven that Kalf produced over the next decades. (plate 6) A small triangular group hangs over the edge of the table, a silver tray piled with a half-peeled lemon and an open pomegranate, next to a glass of white wine. Behind them stands a porcelain pitcher with metal fittings. The fruits are bright while the rest of the objects recede into an undefined background, a trait that is more typical of this subgenre of still life. In fact, we can barely see the edge of the wine glass, were it not for the tiny reflection at the top. Similarly-shaped reflections are visible on the gleaming porcelain. These create the illusion of the reality of the laid table—set up in the artist’s studio or in a patron’s home, the light from outside of the painting seems to interact with the objects within. Like the previous painting, these suggest the light source is outside the painting, coming from the space where the viewer stands. What is most interesting here for this project is the way the objects in the painting interact. Their unspoken connections to the places where they arrived from, the Mediterranean fruits and the Chinese porcelain, give way to the 72 Biographical information here is from the Boijmans catalogue, which draws partly on Grisebach: van den Brink and Meijer, Willem Kalf. 73 Ibid., 80: van den Brink and Meijer specifically contradict Grisebach’s identification of this as a silver flask—it seems to appear in another work by Kalf (cat. 21), where its material is more matte.

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Figure 3.12: Willem Kalf, Still Life with a Nautilus Shell, 1643. Oil on canvas. Musée de Tessé, Le Mans, France. Inv. LM10.89. Photograph Agence Bulloz. © RMNGrand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

Figure 3.13: Willem Kalf, Still Life with Columbine Goblet, ca. 1660. Oil on canvas. Detroit Institute of Arts, USA. Founders Society Purchase, General Membership Fund, 26.43.

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connections to one another made by the play of light. The light reflecting on the lower globe of the wine glass illuminates peaches slightly in the background, and the pomegranate provides a red highlight on the lower left of the glass. This play of light provides the painting with the slightest of narratives, that of light moving about the objects depicted. Accordingly, the viewer’s gaze moves around, impressed by the perceived virtuosity of the artist. This bouncing of light replaces the network of real movement across oceans that brought these objects to the table, reorienting the objects to one another, rather than the world outside of the painting. Another example by Kalf further explores the reflections among objects. (figure 3.13) Here the silver tray reflects light onto the by-now familiar porcelain bowl, and—most improbably—light and shadows onto the surface of the piece of fruit closest to us, an orange. Barely visible is the shallow wine glass at the center rear (again, only visible for the reflection at the top) and the carpet sinks into the background. All the action of this stilled life occurs in a very narrow plane bounded by the lemon peel, the tall goblet, and the stem of the tipped tazza. The connection among the objects has been redefined as this muted dialogue, rather than references to the world outside the painting and outside the Republic. This movement of light requires the objects to be shiny, which seems to be necessary for the pronkstilleven. The artists chose objects that would provide these types of reflections, even though there are other exotic and expensive objects being imported from around the world. The cargo lists show a wide variety of objects that never made it into still life painting: beyond raw materials like saltpeter (used for gunpowder) and benzoin (an ingredient in incense), textiles made up a large amount of the goods imported from the East, especially silks, and these seldom appear in still life. The expensive spices—nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves—rarely appear in these paintings alongside the less-expensive pepper that appears frequently. Spices, those most expensive and trade-motivating foodstuffs, are of course difficult to depict in detail—a pile of whole nutmegs would look like a pile of any other nuts, unless enlarged out of proportion. Pepper, imported in larger volume, was easier to reference because it could be depicted in twists of paper or peppershakers as discussed above. Instead of showing these types of goods that were so important to VOC coffers, painters show a preference for objects made of silver, glass, and porcelain, all materials with a high gloss. The focus on silver may show pride in Dutch craftsmanship, but glass and porcelain were made elsewhere, despite local attempts to imitate these wares.74 This recalls Foster’s Freudian glanz (reflection), and Barthes’ sheen—I read this instead as an erasure of the trade network that brought these objects to the Dutch table, replacing it with a reorganized and revised geography of trade, present 74 Especially delftware: see Jörg, Oosters porselein Delfts aardewerk.

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now only in the Republic, rather than along trade routes. Seventeenth-century viewers prized these reflections, as Celeste Brusati’s reading of Karel van Mander on reflexy-const, or art of reflection, makes clear.75 Brusati describes reflexy-const moving the viewer’s gaze around the painting, asking the viewer to compare the objects and textures of the various objects, encouraging the consideration of relationships between objects and of the skill of the artist. She thus marries an understanding of the objects with the pictorial mode used to represent them, allowing for a deeper approach than the symbolic reading of object types preferred by the iconologists. Brusati also points out that Kalf is tricking the viewer into believing he represented the objects faithfully, when in fact he provided only enough details to make us believe he has. She notes how the edges of the glassware disappear against the background, and their outline is only implied by other details.76 The richness of the objects remains a subject of the pronkstilleven, though the objects appear chosen for their ability to reflect light in a variety of ways. The shine or sparkle of the object becomes the means of reorganizing the object types into a tight network within the painting. Bringing together these objects on a tabletop removes them from the context of trade, fixing them into the domestic sphere, where the long journeys that brought them here are knowable, but not visually apparent. Hochstrasser’s 2007 Still Life and Trade is an invaluable companion to these paintings, filling in the untold stories of these goods, but the viewer has to work to see these connections since the painting obscures them. This Dutching of the objects of still life, through the means of illusionistic depiction, serves to make the far reaches of the Republic appear unimportant—it is only the riches that have already arrived in the home that matter. This mirrors the disavowal of the importance of the colonial reach, and of hybridity, that were discussed in chapter 1. This is the beginning of the erasure of the global and hybrid elements of the Dutch “Golden Age,” which this book attempts to remedy. The pronken that occurs in these paintings boasts of a rich Dutch Republic, rather than a rich global empire, and the flowering of the pronkstilleven while the “Golden Age” begins to wane is timely. The still life painting nostalgically celebrates this recent past, reimagining it to mask present anxieties. As the Republic loses its grip on its monopolies, and the consumers of Europe demand goods that are subject to more competition, like tea and sugar, England and France began to make inroads into the free seas until then controlled by the Dutch. Coming full circle, I end with the painting that began this chapter, Kalf’s still life in Cleveland. (plate 4) The light reflecting between the European glassware and the Chinese porcelain inches away reminds us of the wide distances that have 75 Brusati, “Natural Artifice,” especially 152ff. 76 Ibid., 157.

Gathering the Goods: Dutch Still Life Painting and the End of the “Golden Age” 

become small through the efforts of the Dutch merchant ships. No longer will such objects be imported and created in the Republic at such an astonishing rate—the fortunes of the VOC and the Republic begin to wane at this point, until they become the dream of the past. This sparkling light informs us that the “Golden Age” of the Republic is coming to an end, and the revision of this past is commencing. This “Golden Age” will be a time that subsequent generations of Dutch people will look back on proudly, even as they revise this past for the needs of their present. Continuing this investigation of the concept of the Dutch “Golden Age,” the next chapter considers a revision of the understanding of proper Dutch behavior in the eighteenth century, as administrators in the VOC headquarters in Batavia (Jakarta, Indonesia) sought to curb ostentatious behavior that threatened to expose the careful hierarchy of this colonial city. These administrators reimagined “Golden Age” social behavior as a flat hierarchy, with all citizens expressing themselves in sober dress and comportment, a myth of the past contradicted by the hierarchy inherent to the city’s seventeenth-century design.

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Tables Table 3.1 Volume of pepper imported by Dutch East India Company, for years in which entire fleet is known to author. Sources: Hollandse Mercurius and Cargo Lists in Nationaal Archief, The Hague, Archief van Johannes Hudde (1628–1704), archive nr. 1.10.48, inventory nr. 17. Data combines black and white pepper and is converted to lbs. Data only for years with full fleet (individual named ships) cargo is known, by comparison with named ships in The Dutch East India Company’s shipping between the Netherlands and Asia 1595–1795, Koninklijk Nederlands Historisch Genootschap, http://www.historici.nl/Onderzoek/Projecten/DAS/, accessed 20 November 2011. Year

Total Imports of Black and White Pepper, in pounds

1635 1653 1654 1657 1658 1659 1661 1664 1667 1670 1687 1688 1689 1694 1695 1696

2,180,067 3,258,378 3,430,930 5,897,289 5,779,949 4,732,333 5,531,608 6,362,614 4,887,451 9,256,268 3,775,021 4,961,981 4,614,862 4,489,036 4,543,455 3,268,909

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Table 3.2 Estimated volume of pepper imported by Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth century. Sources: Hollandse Mercurius and Cargo Lists in Nationaal Archief, The Hague, Archief van Johannes Hudde (1628–1704), archive nr. 1.10.48, inventory nr. 17. Data combines black and white pepper and is converted to lbs. Known pepper cargoes averaged and estimated over annual fleet size, by comparison with named ships in The Dutch East India Company’s shipping between the Netherlands and Asia 1595–1795, Koninklijk Nederlands Historisch Genootschap, http://www.historici.nl/Onderzoek/Projecten/DAS/, accessed November 20, 2011. Year

Documented Imports of Black and White Pepper, in pounds

Number of Ships Carrying Documented Pepper Imports

Annual Fleet Size

Extrapolated Total Annual Imports of Black and White Pepper, in pounds

1635 1652 1653 1654 1655 1657 1658 1659 1660 1661 1662 1663 1664 1665 1666 1667 1668 1669 1670 1671 1672 1675 1676 1680 1681 1683 1685 1686 1687 1688 1689 1690 1691 1692 1693 1694 1695 1696 1697 1698 1699

2,180,067 4,621,522 3,258,378 3,430,930 6,935,608 5,735,452 5,779,949 4,732,303 322,464 5,531,608 4,990,730 5,535,415 6,362,614 4,907,306 1,647,228 4,159,000 6,961,352 8,106,675 9,256,268 6,185,335 5,918,906 7,768,228 6,288,490 2,720,728 6,718,986 3,135,368 2,348,036 3,517,938 3,774,911 8,688,753 4,614,862 6,527,343 2,823,987 7,681,625 3,136,831 4,489,036 4,543,445 3,268,909 6,265,427 3,137,431 4,770,755

6 6 8 8 14 7 12 9 2 9 10 11 11 11 7 12 16 19 19 18 14 17 12 8 18 9 9 14 15 25 15 15 9 16 9 12 15 12 19 10 17

6 11 8 8 14 7 12 9 13 9 6 11 11 6 10 10 15 18 19 22 15 14 10 12 13 8 14 15 15 14 15 13 10 9 16 12 15 12 16 21 16

2,180,067 8,472,790 3,258,378 3,430,930 6,935,608 5,735,452 5,779,949 4,732,303 2,096,016 5,531,608 2,994,438 5,535,415 6,362,614 2,676,712 2,353,183 3,465,833 6,526,268 7,680,008 9,256,268 7,559,854 6,341,685 6,397,364 5,240,408 4,081,092 4,852,601 2,786,994 3,652,500 3,769,219 3,774,911 4,865,702 4,614,862 5,657,031 3,137,763 4,320,914 5,576,588 4,489,036 4,543,445 3,268,909 5,276,149 6,588,605 4,490,122

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Works Cited Archives and Databases Dutch National Archives (Nationaal Archief), The Hague. Aanwinsten van de voormalige Eerste Afdeling van het Algemeen Rijksarchief, 14th century–1933, archive nr. 1.11.01.01, inv. nr. 541. Prijslijsten van goederen van de VOC. Archive of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), 1602–1795 (1811), archive nr. 1.04.02, inv. nos. 5003 and 5004, Ladinglijsten. Archive of Jacob van Ghesel, 1757–1773, archive nr. 1.10.31, inv. nr. 195, Lijsten van de kantoren van de VOC in Indië en de daar verhandelde producten. (1701). Archive of J. Hudde, 1602–1703, archive nr. 1.10.48, inv. nr. 17, Gagelijsten van retourschepen. International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. Collectie prijscouranten, commerciële couranten, veiling- en ladinglijsten, 1580–1870, ARCH03972 KB (Nationale Bibliotheek). Delpher newspaper database, delpher.nl. Koninklijk Nederlands Historisch Genootschap. The Dutch East India Company’s shipping between the Netherlands and Asia 1595–1795. http://www.historici.nl/Onderzoek/ Projecten/DAS/EnglishIntro.

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Jager, Angela. “‘Everywhere Illustrious Histories That Are a Dime a Dozen’: The Mass Market for History Painting in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam.” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 7:1 (Winter 2015). http://doi.org/10.5092/jhna.2015.7.1.2. Jansen, Guido M.C. “‘On the Lowest Level’: The Status of the Still Life in Netherlandish Art Literature of the Seventeenth Century.” In Still-Life Paintings from the Netherlands 1550–1720, edited by Alan Chong and Wouter Kloek, 51–57. Zwolle: Waanders, 1999. Exhibition catalogue. de Jongh, Eddy. Zinne- en minnebeelden in de schilderkunst van de zeventiende eeuw. Amsterdam: Nederlandse Stichting Openbaar Kunstbezit, 1967. de Jongh, Eddy. Still-Life in the Age of Rembrandt. Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery, 1982. Exhibition catalogue. Jörg, Christiaan J. A. Oosters porselein Delfts aardewerk, Wisselwerkingen. Groningen: Uitgeverij Kemper, 1983. Kistemaker, Renée and Roelof van Gelder. Amsterdam: The Golden Age, 1275–1795. New York: Abbeville Press, 1983. Lesger, Clé. The Rise of the Amsterdam Market and Information Exchange. Translated by J.C. Grayson. Hants: Ashgate Publishing, 2006. Lowenthal, Anne W. “Contemplating Kalf.” In The Object as Subject, 29–39. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. McCusker, John J. and Cora Gravesteijn. The Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism: The Commodity Price Currents, Exchange Rate Currents, and Money Currents of Early Modern Europe. Amsterdam: Nederlands Economisch-Historisch Archief, 1991. Mette, Hanns-Ulrich. Der Nautiluspokal: wie Kunst und Natur miteinander spielen. Munich: Klinkhard & Biermann, 1995. Montias, John Michael. Artists and Artisans in Delft: A Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. Montias, John Michael. “Works of Art in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam: An Analysis of Subjects and Attributions.” In Art in History, History in Art, edited by David Freedberg and Jan de Vries, 331–372. Santa Monica: The Getty Center, 1991. North, Michael. Art and Commerce in the Dutch Golden Age. Translated by Catherine Hill. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Reid, Anthony. Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce 1450–1680, 2 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988/1993. Schama, Simon. The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. New York: Vintage, 1987. Schenkeveld-Van der Dussen, Maria A. Dutch Literature in the Age of Rembrandt: Themes and Ideas. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 1991. Schmidt, Benjamin. Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

Gathering the Goods: Dutch Still Life Painting and the End of the “Golden Age” 

Segal, Sam. A Prosperous Past: The Sumptuous Still Life in the Netherlands, 1600–1700. The Hague: SDQ Publishers, 1988. Exhibition catalogue. Sullivan, Scott A. The Dutch Gamepiece. Totawa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld Publishers, 1984. Vos, Jan. Vergrooting van Amsterdam. Amsterdam: Jacob Lescaille, 1662. Facsimile available at http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/Dutch/Ceneton/Facsimiles/VosVergrootingAmsterdam1662/ source/vosverg01.htm, accessed January 9, 2012. Vries, Jan de and Ad van der Woude. The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Westermann, Mariet. A Worldly Art: The Dutch Republic 1585–1718. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1996. Wollheim, Richard. “More Than Meets the Eye?: Dutch Still-Life Painting.” Modern Painters 12, nr. 4 (Winter 1999): 68–71. Wolloch, Nathaniel. “Dead Animals and the Beast-Machine: Seventeenth-Century Netherlandish Paintings of Dead Animals, as Anti-Cartesian Statements.” Art History 22, nr. 5 (December 1999): 705–727.

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4. Dutch Batavia: An Ideal Dutch City? Abstract: Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia) was planned from its inception as an ordered, gridded, and canalled eastern trading capital, and should have represented a Dutch ideal, yet it failed from the outset, as stagnant canals spread disease and the social order fragmented. This chapter argues that hierarchy in this city, rather than a deviation from Dutch values, is integral to both this colonial environment as well as Dutch planning more generally. The betrayal of Dutch social values, instead, was that the hierarchy in Batavia was made visible in behavior, dress, and the form of the city itself, as seen in representations of the city in text and image. Dutch hierarchies were meant to remain hidden under a pretense of egalitarianism. Keywords: city planning, hierarchy, sumptuary laws, grid

In the foreground of Andries Beeckman’s The Castle of Batavia (1661), a merchant in European attire strolls through a marketplace with his Eurasian wife on his arm, as a small servant struggles to hold a parasol above their heads.1 (plate 7) This parasol was meant on the one hand to protect them from the harsh tropical sunlight, and on the other to function as a status symbol, an aspect underscored by the presence of the servant. In 1647, such markers of status had been outlawed for all but the very highest-ranking Dutch East India Company (VOC) officers, namely the governor-general and his council—others could only use a parasol if holding it themselves.2 Dutch Batavians, however, much like the merchant in Beeckman’s 1 This chapter f irst appeared as an article in the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art in 2015, and is reproduced here with permission of the journal. Then-editor of the journal, Alison Kettering, and reviewer Julie Hochstrasser provided invaluable advice and editorial assistance. 2 Van der Chijs, Nederlandsch-Indisch Plakaatboek, 2:111. This law was inspired by complaints by the Dutch government about VOC employees using the parasol regardless of their station or need for shade (“Vooral in het gebruik van ‘kieppesollen’ [zonneschermen] was groot misbruik ingeslopen. Een iegelijk ‘indifferent sonder aensien van qualiteyt ofte conditie’, liet zich die door slaven boven het hoofd houden, ‘meerder tot pompeusheyt, als uyt eenige nootwendicheyt.’”) and concludes that if one needs the parasol for shade or because of rain, then he must carry the parasol in his own hand. (“Waneer men eene zonnescherm gebruiken wilde ‘tot schutsel van de son ofte voor de regen ofte om andere redenen,’ dan moest men die ‘selffs in de hand houden ende draegen.’”) In 1733, the right to use a parasol carried by

Kehoe, M.L., Trade, Globalization, and Dutch Art and Architecture: Interrogating Dutchness and the Golden Age. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463723633_ch04

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painting, continued to display their wealth and status through ostentatious dress and behavior, thus muddling the expression of proper social rank. High-ranking VOC officials and later observers considered this behavior very unDutch. Such displays violated social decorum and undermined the cohesion of what was already a worryingly small minority Dutch population among the city’s diverse ethnicities. Observers then and now have suggested that obsession with rank was not a Dutch behavior, but rather a sign of the influence of local cultural practices, challenging the Dutchness of the colonizers. This eighteenth-century concern with what is and is not Dutch redefines Dutch culture as egalitarian, and implies that this trait is inherent and hearkens back to the so-called Dutch “Golden Age” of the previous century. This chapter will argue the contrary, that hierarchy is intrinsic to this city, and to Dutchness in general, and that what was at issue was the exposure of what was meant to be a more subtle, hidden hierarchy. The very form of this city—the plan of streets, canals, walls, and city blocks—shaped the experience of people living and working in Batavia, and sorted this population into ranks that reflect Dutch, and colonial, values. The Dutch citizens of Batavia were a small group, overwhelmed by the larger Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, and enslaved populations. In order to dominate these groups, the Dutch Batavians faced contradictory demands: to appear as a cohesive and culturally Dutch group, intent, in theory, on avoiding ostentatious displays of status, yet keen to exert their dominance over the other groups. This tension led in practice to showy displays of status through costume, behavior, and the accumulation of large retinues of personal slaves.3 These displays included the adoption of local symbols, like the parasol, in addition to practices more familiar to a European population, like the wearing of fine textiles and jewelry and the outfitting of carriages. Various governors-general of the Dutch East Indies introduced sumptuary codes during the city’s company period (1619–1795) in attempts to regulate this behavior. For the most part, these codes allowed only the very top of Dutch Batavian society, the governor-general and his family, and later some high-ranking officers, to display its status. The remaining Dutch population was denied the major markings of prestige, in essence flattening the hierarchy within the Dutch population, and in theory leading to more social cohesion. The very need a servant was extended more widely, but the fine was doubled for violating this ordinance (4:333–336). The sumptuary codes were established by decree of the governor general, in many cases in response to complaints from the Heren XVII (advisory board, headquartered in the Republic) of the Dutch East India Company; they have been compiled, along with all other decrees of the governor and his council, in multiple volumes of the Plakaatboek. 3 Subsequent regulations also governed one’s movement through the city: a law of 1704 regulated the types of carriages and coaches in which Batavians could travel, and this was reiterated in 1729. Van der Chijs, Nederlandsch-Indisch Plakaatboek, 3:536–538; 4:236.

Dutch Batavia: An Ideal Dutch City? 

Figure 4.1: Aelbert Cuyp, The Commander of the Homeward-Bound Fleet, ca. 1640–1660, oil on canvas. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Netherlands. SK-A-2350.

Figure 4.2: Jacob Coeman, Pieter Cnoll, Cornelia van Nijenrode, Their Daughters, and Two Enslaved Servants, 1665, oil on canvas. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Netherlands. SK-A-4062.

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for these laws, and their repetition and reissuance, demonstrate that the Dutch Batavians were constantly violating these ordinances, acting above their status and outside of Dutch social norms. 4 Aelbert Cuyp’s The Commander of the Homeward-Bound Fleet, painted between 1640 and 1660, shows a Dutch commander, probably Jakob Martensen, and his wife, standing on a rise with a view of the harbor of Batavia with the fort at center background.5 (figure 4.1) This couple’s sober dress befits Dutch expectations of propriety better than Beeckman’s supercilious merchant, but even here the couple violates the 1647 rule outlawing the servant-held parasol. The appearance of the parasol in this commissioned portrait functioned as a Batavian marker of superiority. Regardless of whether Martensen and his wife had actually walked along the orderly canals of Batavia, like the one beside the marketplace in Beeckman’s painting, with such a servant in tow, apparently they wanted to be depicted doing just that in order to outwardly assert their dominance with an element of local color. A third example of a painting that defied traditional Dutch social decorum depicts senior merchant Pieter Cnoll, who in 1665 commissioned a family portrait of himself and his wife, their two daughters, and two enslaved servants.6 (figure 4.2) The forthcoming 1680 code would outlaw the finery paraded here: the women’s pearls and Pieter’s gold buttons and buckles.7 The presence of the servants also signals Cnoll’s high status, though they represent only a small number of the fifty people he enslaved. In 1754, the most expansive set of laws, the “Measures for Curbing Pomp and Circumstance,” established standards ranging from the costuming of coach horses to the types of cushions that could be used in a coach for a funeral procession.8 This code also established a range of fines for violation of the rules: the lower one’s class and ethnic status, the higher the fine. Jean Gelman Taylor writes about these codes in her volume about social relationships in eighteenth-century Batavia, declaring the 1680 codes to be about “bring[ing] 4 It should be noted that sumptuary laws were rarely imposed in the Dutch Republic. See Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, 182, 186–187, and 634n113. 5 Kees Zandvliet discusses the identification of the figures, and possible alternatives. Zandvliet, Dutch Encounter with Asia, 182. 6 All the figures have been identified, even the servants, see Zandvliet, Dutch Encounter with Asia, 200–202. Maria Holtrop identifies the male servant as the enslaved Indonesian national hero Surapati: Holtrap, “Surapati,” 180–186. 7 Van der Chijs, Nederlandsch-Indisch Plakaatboek, 3:47–48. The code is vague enough to seem to forbid jewels to anyone but the family of the governor general and his council: “Alleen de vrouwen, kinderen en weduwen van den Gouverneur-Generaal en Raden van Indië mogten juweelen, enz. dragen.” 8 The regulation was entitled “Maatregelen ter beteugeling van pracht en praal.” Van der Chijs, NederlandschIndisch Plakaatboek, 6:773–795. Some violations that might be identified in portraiture include that a woman’s social rank determined what size and value of pearls she was allowed to wear (an expansion of the 1680 regulations) and which men might wear what type of gold or silver border or fasteners on their coats (6:784–786).

Dutch Batavia: An Ideal Dutch City? 

practice into line with Dutch habits, while the other [1754 codes] marks a colony that had renounced the pretense of being Dutch in spirit.”9 I maintain that the behavior that prompted the establishment of sumptuary codes was considered problematic not for being unDutch, but for exposing the hierarchical nature of Batavian society. While some manifestations of this prestige were borrowed from the local population, the preoccupation of Dutch Batavians with social position and trappings of prestige is not unique to this colonial environment, and relates to the Dutch pronken discussed in chapter 3.10 Instead, Batavia reveals the hierarchies inherent in Dutch society both at home and abroad in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some of the performance of status as it related to local practice—like the parasol—was common in colonial societies.11 The co-opting of local symbols proved effective both for asserting dominance and complicating the colonizer’s outsider role. Colonizers shared the same anxieties about maintaining control as the indigenous rulers who exhibited the same ritualistic forms of display—only more so, given their tenuous status within the larger population of Batavia and throughout the East Indies.12 The very assertion of dominance led to discomfort for Dutch colonizers, and, I contend, the Dutch way of enforcing hierarchy was thus to conceal their dominance so that social divisions appeared to develop unconsciously rather than through overt regulation. Instead, the built environment of Batavia was meant to do the work of shaping the city’s diverse population into a hierarchy that served colonial needs. This desire to avoid obvious signs of dominance accords with the undeserved reputation of the Dutch in the VOC period as being just traders, not colonists, in opposition to the other European colonial powers.13 The very form of Batavia, which was built following certain seventeenth-century Dutch urban planning principals, served the interests of the VOC by arranging Batavian society into a hierarchy headed by the Dutch. This city, filled with Dutchstyle buildings (visible in the backgrounds of Beeckman’s and Cuyp’s paintings), provided a recognizable and reassuring statement of Dutch identity for the top segment of Batavian society, which, while unified, could dominate the remaining 9 Taylor, Social World of Batavia, 66. The sumptuary laws were revoked in 1795 with the dissolution of the VOC, in order to abolish demonstrations of rank (van der Chijs, Nederlandsch-Indisch Plakaatboek, 12:137–142). On these laws, see also Abeyasekere, Jakarta, 36–38. 10 Adam Clulow has examined the Batavian sumptuary laws and their motives carefully, and has argued persuasively that the ostentatious behaviors of Batavians, particularly of high rank, was key to their reputation in the greater region. Clulow, “‘Splendour and Magnificence.’” 11 On the Chinese source of the parasol, and the Chinese in Batavia more generally, see Odell, “Public Identity and Material Culture.” See also the work of Leonard Blussé on the Chinese of Batavia, for example, Blussé, Strange Company. On Indonesian social behaviors of dominance, see Keane, Signs of Recognition. 12 See Bhabha, “The Other Question.” 13 On how the rhetoric of the colonial powers furthered this reputation, see Schmidt, Innocence Abroad; and Greer, Mignolo, and Quilligan, Rereading the Black Legend.

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population (plate 7 and figure 4.1; see also figures 4.8 and 4.9). Concealed in the Dutch gridded plan are the barriers to movement that organized the Batavians into distinct ethnic groups, with varying levels of access within the city. Unbridged canals subtly separated populations while city walls enforced divisions codified in law. My argument builds on the work of scholars of the colonial built environment, such as Swati Chattopadhyay and Brenda Yeoh, who elucidate the segregation of Calcutta and Singapore, respectively.14 These authors look at how colonists and the colonized functioned within these already-built cities to create and reinforce colonial social stratification. Batavia is different from these two cities in that its architecture and layout in themselves enacted this segregation. Examining Batavia’s plan and its relationship to seventeenth-century Dutch planning principles, I argue that it is misleading to understand Batavia, as some scholars have, as representing a pragmatic and egalitarian order that was later corrupted by the colonial situation. In fact, the social stratification and segregation of Batavia derived in certain ways directly from its Dutch plan. The ideals of Dutch city planning in the seventeenth century in fact evince a hidden hierarchy, but a hierarchy nonetheless, and expose how the “Golden Age” was reimagined in the eighteenth century. The 1754 Sumptuary Codes, which drew attention to the social stratification of Batavia, represent an eighteenth-century attempt to define proper Dutchness as unostentatious behavior and dress, avoiding the overt expression of social hierarchy. This examination of Batavia shows that the allegedly Dutch traits of plainness and egalitarianism were in fact invented, contrary to the reality of life in the colonial capital, and indeed in the Dutch Republic itself. This chapter will examine how the plan of Batavia fostered social and ethnic hierarchies, through subtle means that enabled a pretense of equal access.15 This pretense remains an important part of Dutching, enabling a rhetoric of innocence and egalitarianism that persists today.

The Founding of Batavia The Dutch East India Company (VOC) was chartered in 1602 as a privately f inanced trading company, which represented the Dutch Republic economically and militarily throughout Africa and Asia, as discussed in chapter 2.16 The founding 14 Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta; and Yeoh, Contesting Space. 15 Jan Blanc notes that social hierarchies, and one’s potential mobility among classes, are part of what distinguishes the seventeenth-century Dutch “Golden Age” from the classical utopian golden age. Jan Blanc, “Gouden Eeuw,” 90–93. 16 The authority on the early Dutch Republic is Israel, Dutch Republic; for an introduction to Dutch as traders, see Boxer, Dutch Seaborne Empire.

Dutch Batavia: An Ideal Dutch City? 

of Batavia on the island of Java in 1619 was key to the success of the VOC, and marked their increasing domination of Europe’s burgeoning global trade after only two decades of involvement. This city would have lasting consequences in the region, as it would remain the capital of the colonial Dutch East Indies into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—becoming Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, after independence. In 1618, the new governor-general of the VOC, Jan Pietersz Coen (1587–1629; governor-general 1618–1623 and 1627–1629), chose a location and initiated a series of events that led to the establishment of the city of Batavia. Coen recognized the need for an eastern capital for the VOC, which would serve as an administrative center and warehouse, where goods could be collected and shipped back to Europe. At this point, the VOC was not interested in acquiring territory beyond a secure location for a harbor, town, and fort. However, Dutch-controlled territory expanded incrementally through trade and diplomatic efforts and as more land was needed for food production and eventually plantation farming, with the dissolution of the VOC two centuries later and the beginning of formal governmental colonization. Coen chose as his site an inhabited harbor on the northern coast of Java, one of the larger islands in the archipelago. Controlling this location allowed the Dutch to bypass the contested Strait of Malacca and to control traffic passing through the Sunda Strait. As had been discovered by Indonesians long before the arrival of Europeans, the mouth of the Ciliwung River, with its easy access to the inland area and a supply of fresh water, was an ideal location for a harbor. The site already boasted a centuries-old city, Jayakarta (from which the modern city derives its name), a trading center within the region, inhabited by locals as well as Arab, Chinese, Portuguese, and English merchants.17 With permission from the local ruler, the Dutch had established a fort in Jayakarta. Exploiting the political instabilities of the region, Coen was able to easily take over the city in May of 1619.18 After razing Jayakarta, Coen wanted to name the new VOC city “New Hoorn” after his birthplace, but the VOC overruled him and made the name Batavia official.19 The naming of this city was an important step in marking the region as Dutch—”Batavia” was the ancient Latin name for a people in the region of the Netherlands and the history of the Batavians is an important founding myth in the Dutch collective identity.20 In the second half of the seventeenth century, a number of factors combined that would cause a slow decline in the fortunes of the VOC, which ultimately resulted 17 The foremost source on the history of Jakarta is Abeyasekere, Jakarta. This reference, 4–5. 18 The oddly fortuitous series of events is detailed in Abeyasekere, Jakarta, 11–12. 19 Israel, Dutch Republic, 323. 20 This began in the early sixteenth century when Tacitus’s Germania was rediscovered. Leerssen, National Thought in Europe, 39ff.

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Figure 4.3: Waere affbeeldinge Wegens het Casteel ende Stadt Batavia, 1681. Nationaal Archief, The Hague, Netherlands. 4.VELH Kaartcollectie Buitenland Leupe, supplement, nr. 430.

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in bankruptcy at the close of the eighteenth century.21 These factors included a shift in European tastes, a decline in profitability, reduced access to the staples of the spice trade, namely pepper, and a decline in the Asian supply of precious metals to the VOC.22 Health problems in the city of Batavia contributed to growing personnel costs, as more and more of the soldiers and company employees arriving in the city succumbed to malaria and needed to be replaced.23 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Dutch government took over administration from the VOC, officially colonizing the region, until independence was declared in 1945 and reluctantly granted in 1949.

The Plan of Batavia My analysis of the city of Batavia focuses on the historic core of the city, visible in the backgrounds of plate 7 and figure 4.1. This core was established in 1619 and completed as a walled city with numerous canals by the middle of the century. While city maps provide data for my exploration of the form of the city, this evidence requires caution, as cartography is not simply an objective rendering of space.24 For example, the 1681 map explored in detail here is a close copy of a 1650 original, which fails to note a major population shift of enslaved people to a neighborhood just south of the city walls in 1664. (figure 4.3) That the newer map was not updated to reflect the change may indicate a disregard for the enslaved population.25 It is also misleadingly titled “true image of the castle and city Batavia on Java,” despite being outdated. 21 It is interesting to note that the sumptuary laws became necessary after the city and the VOC began their slow decline. 22 Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude specifically identify 1663 as the turning point after which profits slow: de Vries and van der Woude, The First Modern Economy, 675ff; Els M. Jacobs shows that the VOC was too inflexible to accommodate these changes in supply and demand. Jacobs, Koopman in Azië. See the discussion in chapter 3. 23 Because of new saltwater ponds established along the shore of Batavia, a strain of malaria began affecting new arrivals in the city; the mortality of VOC employees increased from 6 percent within the first year of arrival to 50 percent beginning in 1733. This incredible strain on the employees of the VOC meant that the company dramatically increased the number of employees they recruited and sent to the East. This cost the VOC terribly and destroyed the profitability of the company in the eighteenth century. Van der Brug, “Unhealthy Batavia.” 24 Elizabeth Sutton has explored this issue in the case of Dutch colonial Brazil: Sutton, “Possessing Brazil in Print”; and in her book, Capitalism and Cartography. 25 By comparison, Linda Rupert suggests that the mapmakers of Willemstad, Curaçao, depicted the lowerclass, and primarily African-derived, neighborhood of Otrobanda as undeveloped and disproportionately small to similarly dismiss this population in the capital of the Dutch West Indies. Rupert, Creolization and Contraband, 128–131.

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Before the VOC gained control of the area, all VOC residences and warehouses had been located within the previously established fort, Kasteel Batavia. An early map of 1619 shows the location and arrangement of the fort, plans for its potential expansion, and a possible city location. (figure 4.4) The first half of the city stretched south from the fort along the eastern bank of the river, with clearly plotted rectilinear blocks.26 (figure 4.5) By 1650 the city had taken on its core appearance—the river had been straightened and the walls, completed in 1645, surrounded a roughly rectangular area straddling the river—this is the historical center of the city of Batavia, now called the kota in Jakarta (see figure 4.3).27 My analysis focuses on this 1681 map, multiple copies of which remain in libraries and special collections, and which is itself a close copy of a 1650 original by Clement de Jonghe: its regular reproduction in different formats and languages suggests a wide perception that this map was highly representative of Batavia.28 This map shows the complete walled city in detail, along with the beginnings of expansion outside the walls.29 The placement of walls, streets, canals, and bridges in an eighteenth-century map, representing a 1770 survey, is consistent with the one from 1681, suggesting that these maps represent the actual built environment of Batavia. (figure 4.6) A comparison of these two maps also shows that there was very little alteration to the city’s form in the ninety years between their respective creations. Expansion beyond the walls continued over the following centuries, and in the early nineteenth century the walls and fort were demolished.30 26 A comparison to the contemporary Dutch colonial city of New Amsterdam (New York) shows a distinct difference in levels of planning: New Amsterdam developed organically, not following a grid, while Batavia was planned from its inception. This difference distinguished between the relative importance of these cities: Batavia was the VOC’s eastern capital, while New Amsterdam was a small and unstable outpost. Manhattan’s grid is not an extension of New Amsterdam, but a plan imposed in 1807; see Higgins, The Grid Book, 69. 27 Abeyasekere, Jakarta, 15. See also Leonard Blussé, “An Insane Administration and an Unsanitary Town”; these authors discuss earlier documents about the city, such as Stamford Raffles’s description from 1817. 28 The map illustrated here was published in 1682, after being redrafted in 1681 by copying the 1650 version. Both the 1650 and 1681 versions exist in multiple copies, published throughout the following centuries. Bea Brommer, co-author of Historische plattegronden van Nederlandse steden, interprets the relationship between these maps and the historic situation of Batavia differently, personal communication, 2019 and 2021. 29 This map was produced directly after the establishment of the 1680 sumptuary laws outlawing the wearing of jewels or golden costume refinements for all but the highest-ranking VOC officials. 30 With the dissolution of the VOC, and the Napoleonic Wars, Batavia’s footprint changed: it was Herman Willem Daendels, a governor-general appointed by Napoleon’s brother Louis, who destroyed the fort and the city walls, and built a new fort outside the city. In 1811, Batavia was lost to England and was ruled until 1816 by British Lieutenant-Governor Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles, the founder of Singapore. He oversaw the building of a large English-style green south of Batavia, which shaped the suburb, Weltevreden, that grew up around it, resulting in the city having a different urban footprint than

Dutch Batavia: An Ideal Dutch City? 

Figure 4.4: Plan van ‘t fort en omleggende land Jacatra, detail, 1619, manuscript. Nationaal Archief, The Hague, Netherlands. 4.VEL Kaartcollectie Buitenland Leupe, nr. 1176.

Figure 4.5: Jacob Cornelisz Cuyck, Plan of Batavia, 1629, copy by Hessel Gerritsz, 1630, manuscript. Nationaal Archief, The Hague, Netherlands. 4.VEL Kaartcollectie Buitenland Leupe, nr. 1179B.

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Figure 4.6: Plan der Stad en ‘t Kasteel Batavia. Made under the direction of P.A. van der Parra in 1770, printed in Amsterdam by Petrus Conradi in 1780. Leiden University Library, Netherlands, Digital Collections. COLLBN Port 57 N 50.

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The city plan in the 1681 and 1770 maps is rectangular, divided in two longitudinally by the straightened Ciliwung River, here labeled the Groote Rivier (Large River). These two halves are offset, apparently because of the uneven coastline and the situation of the fort. Within the walls, the city blocks are separated by streets and canals that run on a grid, the only exception to perfect right angles being the area of the city directly west of the fort. The city wall has regular bastions and is protected by an outer canal. The fort also has water surrounding it. The historic city seems to have been plotted by extending the lines of the fort, so that the grid is aligned along a basically north-south axis, rather than being related to the diagonal shoreline. The diagonal jog of the northwest corner of the city seems to have been designed to add a level of protection for the fort and visibility over more of the harbor. The relation of the bastions to the grid in the western half of the city appears to have been more consciously planned than the position of their older counterparts—there are fewer of them and presumably they were more effective, with each aligned with a road or canal to provide efficient provisioning.31 This half of the city plan also provides nearly every road and block division with a canal, while the older half has more roads and smaller blocks that lack canals, differences that enabled varying levels of access to foot and water traffic.

A Dutch City in the Tropics Founded by the VOC over the ruins of Jayakarta, Batavia was built as a Dutch colonial city, and remained under Dutch control for over three centuries. The ownership of the city was apparent in part because of Batavia’s important role in the VOC network, and additionally because aspects of the built environment consciously evoked the cities of the Dutch Republic, Dutching this foreign landscape. This occurred both through the diffusion of building forms and materials and through the imposition of Dutch city planning principles on the Southeast Asian landscape. The city was widely perceived to be Dutch, despite company ownership and a very diverse population, as is apparent in travelers’ accounts of the city and abbreviated visual descriptions of the city. Batavia’s canals, Dutch-style vernacular architecture, and grid plan augmented the association of the metropole with the periphery. For many Dutch Batavians, inhabiting a Dutch city in the tropics was a way to remain Dutch Batavia. Returned to Dutch hands in 1816, the city retains its basic original shape, the rectangular city can still be seen in Jakarta’s historic district today, minus the walls, and with most canals filled in and converted to roads. 31 Kostof, The City Shaped, 190, points out the usefulness of clear connections between the bastions and the roads or supply routes.

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connected with the Republic, shoring up a Dutch collective identity. For other residents of the city, it was a reminder of the dominance of the Dutch social group. The canals of historic Batavia, used for drainage, transportation, and protection, strike one immediately as typically Dutch. Canals are a Dutch specialty, still present across the Netherlands today. They functioned as a means of draining the Low Countries, much of which lies below sea level, in order to carve out more usable land for building and agriculture. The familiarity of the low-lying land around the port of Jayakarta likely attracted the VOC, which decided to continue the Dutch fight against water in the colonies, though not as successfully as at home. Proper Dutch canals regularly flush their contents out to the larger body of water. Batavia’s canals, however, became less functional over time because of irregular water flow from inland, leading to canals with shallow, stagnant water that were unable to flush the city’s sewage into the sea. In his account Oud en nieuw Oost-Indiën (1724–1726), François Valentijn mentioned periodic silting due to monsoons and disruptions caused by earthquakes, which also contributed to the extension of the coastline farther into the harbor.32 The canals smelled terrible, and the residents of Batavia blamed this stinky air for the incidence of disease. Even though the climates in the Netherlands and the Indonesian archipelago differ greatly, this was not considered when the city was planned—the Dutch designers mistakenly presumed their model would function throughout the world. Despite these shortcomings, most of Batavia’s canals were retained throughout the VOC period rather than being replaced with more successful and healthful alternatives. When in their best condition, the canals of Batavia were more attractive than the canals at home in the Republic. Long and straight, the city’s canals were lined on either side with trees and roads, enabling more efficient and pleasant transportation. The most celebrated of these canals was the Tijgersgracht (Tiger’s Canal), the southern half of the canal that bisected the older eastern half of the city. Many of the canals in the Republic were narrower and curving, built around existing structures, while in Batavia the canals were planned from the inception of the city and forced to follow the city’s grid. Johannes Nieuhof, who visited and lived in Batavia in the 1650s and 1660s, as well as the previously mentioned eighteenth-century visitor François Valentijn, included in their descriptions special mention of the straightness of the streets, suggesting that this distinguished the city.33 While grids are evident in many Dutch urban plans, these authors’ observations underscore that visitors found the rectilinear shape of this city notable. The city’s basic rectangular gridded shape, its walls and canals, form the basis of an abbreviated image of Batavia on a French map of the north coast of Java of 1720. (figure 4.7) Here, Batavia is a square, one 32 Valentijn, Oud en nieuw Oost-Indiën, 4:231. 33 Valentijn, Oud en nieuw Oost-Indiën, 4:232; Nieuhof, Gedenkwaerdige zee en lantreize, 199.

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quarter of which is dedicated to the fort, with a roadstead enabling the passage of ships through the harbor, which by then was partially silted up. This much-simplified diagram of the city suggests that the draftsman recognized these traits as characteristic and essential for the city’s representation. In addition to the city’s canals and Figure 4.7: Carte de l’isle de Iava ou sont les villes de Batauia et its rectilinear grid, the buildings that Bantam, detail, ca. 1720, watercolor. Newberry Library, Chicago, filled it contributed to the experience USA. of the city as Dutch for residents and visitors alike. This architectural Dutching will be considered in greater depth in chapter 5, where both the export of the Dutch townhouse, and twentieth-century renovations emphasizing their Dutch characteristics, contribute to changing perceptions of cultural identity. While Batavia’s public buildings, such as the city hall (Stadhuis), were built in a stripped-down neoclassical form, the vernacular architecture of the city recalled the domestic architecture of the home country. Few of these buildings remain, though some evidence exists in early twentieth-century photographs. (figure 4.8) As in the cities of the Republic, residential plots in Batavia were deep and not wide, with narrow street façades and step- and spout-gabled rooflines.34 Diffusing these building forms into a tropical climate required a major shift to accommodate the more extreme sun and rainfall: rotating the gable ninety degrees created a deep overhang across the façade, which provided shade and deflected rain from the building’s walls.35 Dutch builders may have drawn inspiration from Javanese indigenous architecture, as some local forms share this feature of a projecting roofline.36 The steep roofs and step- and spout-gables were retained, providing a recognizably Dutch visual marker, though here the gables awkwardly protrude from roofs and serve to indicate dividing walls. These can clearly be seen in engravings of the city reproduced in Nieuhof’s Gedenkwaerdige zee en lantreize door de voornaemste landschappen van West en Oostindien.37 (figure 4.9) Some local building materials were used in the construction of these houses, but it has often

34 On Dutch buildings in Batavia and across their global empire, see Temminck Groll, Dutch Overseas. 35 The concept of architectural diffusion is explained in Kniffen, “Folk Housing: Key to Diffusion.” 36 Temminck Groll asserts that these forms must derive locally: Temminck Groll, Dutch Overseas, 137. 37 I have argued elsewhere that some of the Dutch-style buildings in the background of city views in this volume were added by the Amsterdam-based engravers of the drawings provided by Nieuhof, as a kind of architectural staffage that stands in for Dutch building types. Kehoe, “Imaginary Gables.”

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Figure 4.8: Seventeenth-century houses in Batavia, on the Spinhuis Gracht, photograph ca. 1920. Leiden University Library Digital Collections, Netherlands. KITLV 88700.

Figure 4.9: Johannes Nieuhof, Tijgersgracht, 1682. Johannes Nieuhof, Gedenkwaardige Brasiliaense zee- en landreis (Amsterdam: Widow of van Jacob van Meurs, 1682), between 198–199. Columbia University Libraries, USA.

Dutch Batavia: An Ideal Dutch City? 

been noted that the bricks, rather than being produced locally, arrived in Batavia from the Republic as ballast in ships.38 A further indication of how those who had never visited Batavia perceived the city can been seen in vague cityscapes, as in the background of Aelbert Cuyp’s double portrait of 1640–1650 (see figure 4.1). This painting, of course, cannot be used as evidence of an authentic view of the city, as it was painted in the Netherlands rather than on site, and an accurate view of the city was never the painter’s aim. The couple stands in front of the harbor of Batavia with the city in the background. Although Cuyp had little access to visual descriptions of the city, as the main sources had yet to be published, he nevertheless created a convincing imaginary view. To identify this as Batavia, he indicated a fort at center, while at right are stock buildings—narrow two-story homes with step gables. A row of trees is visible above the houses, perhaps indicating the tree-lined Tijgersgracht; if so, this residential section is misplaced, as a more accurate view would indicate large warehouses in this quarter. This rendering of the city seems to have exaggerated the similarities of Batavia to home in order to secure it in the public imagination as Dutch. The founders of the city of Batavia intended that it should look and feel Dutch as a means of establishing a dominant and cohesive Dutch population in a context of Dutch colonialism. For Dutch residents, surrounded by a tropical foreignness and trading with local Javanese, Chinese, and other European merchants in Batavia, the comforts of home were far away. Because the status of the Batavians as Dutch was constantly challenged by the diverse population and tropical environment, it was important to create a Dutch environment in the tropics that would recall the comfort of daily life at home in the Dutch Republic, thus reinforcing the residents’ identification as Dutchmen. When returning from a trading voyage to Japan, a Dutch merchant could come home to Batavia, stroll Dutch streets along Dutch canals, populated by Dutch townhouses. This would go a long way toward mitigating any feelings of foreignness or alienation in his experience of the place, counteracting its settlement by a very mixed group of people, the warm humid air, and the unfamiliar odors of the tropics.

Dutch City Planning Principles in the Seventeenth Century The characteristics that were perceived as Dutch in Batavia, the canals and grid, fit into a larger model of seventeenth-century Dutch urban planning, both in the Dutch Republic and its overseas settlements. The city plan also reflects the theoretical models of the mathematician and engineer Simon Stevin. The seventeenth-century 38 Temminck Groll, Dutch Overseas, 70.

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Dutch oversaw the building of new cities and the expansion of established cities throughout the world. Several scholars have discussed the qualities of Dutch urban planning in the period, but there is more to say about the importance of hierarchy in their examples. Batavia offers a prime case study for exploring the idea of control imposed by the built environment. Here was a newly built city, with a population we know to have been strictly divided and hierarchically structured, yet the urban fabric hid these inequalities through the misleading appearance of equal access and potential mobility throughout the city. The very real social stratifications were further exacerbated by ostentatious dress and behavior that underlined the city’s inhabitants’ concern with rank. I shall suggest that in Batavia the restrictions placed upon inappropriate displays of rank developed precisely because these displays exposed too conspicuously the inherently hierarchical nature of the city’s environment and its population, which contradicted the perceived Dutch trait of egalitarianism. A remarkable consistency exists among Dutch seventeenth-century urban plans, both for cities in the Dutch Republic and for overseas settlements. Remaining evidence of these plans shows formal as well as ideological similarities, which suggest a shared Dutch ideology of the city, regardless of differences among individual planners and despite the absence of a centralized urban planning authority. In that regard, the Dutch situation contrasts with, for example, the Spanish Laws of the Indies, which stipulated a common framework for the arrangement and government of all Spanish colonial cities.39 Dutch colonial cities were subtly differentiated from the cities of the Dutch Republic: Dutch seventeenth-century urban planning generally made use of a rectilinear grid adapted to local circumstances and included canals or manipulated waterways and bastioned walls, but the overseas settlements made additional allowances for protection, with forts that had military, administrative, and trading functions. Remco Raben sees the form of Dutch colonial cities as indicative overall of a careful pragmatism, while Charles van den Heuvel focuses on the Dutch grid, noting its flexibility and adaptability to many landscapes. 40 Ron van Oers asserts that Simon Stevin’s “Ideal Plan for a City” was the organizing 39 The Spanish Laws of the Indies, issued by the crown, purportedly set out a city plan to be imposed on Spanish colonies, though a closer look at the original text shows that this document is mostly concerned with the site and government of these cities, and calls for a grid city with a central plaza, but further details are lacking (for instance, no plan is provided). Like Dutch colonial cities, Spanish colonial cities were usually built on a rectangular grid, but they did not incorporate waterways and were less concerned with enabling trade through careful connections to the harbor. The Spanish colonies were more overtly concerned with maintaining royal and religious authority through a top-down implementation of urban planning. On the Laws of the Indies, see Fraser, Architecture of Conquest; and Crouch, Garr, and Mundigo, Spanish City Planning in North America. 40 Raben, “Klein Holland in Azie”; and van den Heuvel, “Multilayered Grids and Dutch Town Planning.”

Dutch Batavia: An Ideal Dutch City? 

factor for Dutch colonial cities, with its underlying principles of spatial and societal order, protection, and water control. 41 Each of these scholars notes in passing the hierarchies established by the city plans, but my reading emphasizes the hierarchical aspect of such plans, a hierarchy that subtly enforces a social order while disguising it under the appearance of a regular grid that seemingly promotes egalitarianism. Several prominent examples demonstrate general Dutch urban planning principles in the seventeenth century: Simon Stevin’s ideal plan, the development of the Dutch grid, and finally the expansion of Amsterdam. As a Dutch-planned city, Batavia demonstrates these principles and, as I will establish, it more fully manifests the hierarchy already inherent in Dutch seventeenth-century planning. As a new-built city, not subject to the constraints of previous infrastructure, Batavia reveals the hierarchical social divisions that were the goal of Dutch planning in the period. Simon Stevin’s “Ideal Plan for a City” looms large in discussions of Dutch urban planning in the seventeenth century, and particularly in the plan of Batavia, to which it bears some resemblance. Stevin’s plan indicates his primary planning principles, which are also apparent in built Dutch cities, suggesting either that Stevin was a source for these plans, or that Stevin’s plan itself reflected Dutch planning ideals more generally. Stevin described and illustrated his ideal plan in his Materiae Politicae (1650), in a chapter entitled “Distinguishing the Order of Cities” (Onderscheyt vande Oirdeningh der Steden). He set out what appears to be an evenly measured and balanced city. 42 (figure 4.10) Stevin died in 1620 leaving several works that would be published posthumously in 1650, including the ideal plan and the beginnings of his work on house building.43 Stevin provided plans for the Dutch military up until his death, and he appears also to have advised the VOC on town planning in 1618, though there is no conclusive evidence that he actually plotted the VOC’s cities. 44 Stevin’s plan differs from other seventeenth-century ideal plans because of its rectangular shape, which is reminiscent of a Roman military camp (castrum), a type Stevin was familiar with from his military engineering work. 45 Stevin preferred a 41 Van Oers, Dutch Town Planning Overseas, 10–11. 42 Stevin, Materiae Politicae, chapter 1: “Distinguishing the Order of Cities” (“Onderscheyt vande Oirdeningh der Steden”). I consulted the copy held in the Newberry Library, Chicago. 43 Dijksterhuis, Simon Stevin, is the most comprehensive source on the life and works of Stevin; see also the compilation and translation of his major works: Stevin, Principal Works; and van den Heuvel, ‘De Huysbou.’ 44 Zandvliet, Mapping for Money, 139; van Oers, Dutch Town Planning, 78–79; Raben, “Klein Holland,” 48. 45 This contrasts with most European cities designed for military defense in Stevin’s period, which tended to be more circular, such as the contemporary nine-bastioned star-shaped Palmanova outside of Venice. Kostof, City Shaped, 160ff.

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Figure 4.10: Simon Stevin, Ideal Plan for a City, 1650. Simon Stevin, Materiae Politicae. Bvrgherlicke Stoffen: vervanghende ghedachtenissen der oeffeninghen des doorluchtichsten Prince Maurits van Orangie (Leiden: Justus Livius, 1650). Newberry Library, Chicago, USA.

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rectangular city because the land within would be divisible into regular parcels, rather than the irregularly shaped blocks formed by rounded plans. 46 Like the Roman castrum, Stevin’s plan has an unimpeded wide street running through the center, which he, fitting the Dutch context, envisioned as a canal. Bisecting this is a series of open spaces and important buildings, an axis of public space. Stevin elaborated on the Roman square city plan, while emphasizing the Dutch elements of water control and spatial and societal order. Water determines much of the form of Stevin’s ideal city plan. A canal bisects this rectangular city horizontally and passes through the walls on either end. A secondary rectangular canal, which echoes the shape of the city, connects to the main canal at either end just inside the walls. 47 A moat surrounds the city walls, which has a defensive function, strengthening the function of the wall as barrier between the city and the surrounding area. This extensive use of water is typical of many Dutch cities. The city is divided into four bands by the canals, and each of these is divided into square blocks of equal size, arranged in bands three deep. An axis perpendicular to the main canal divides the city in half vertically, and along this axis are spaces and buildings necessary to the function of the city: markets, city hall, the exchange, a church, and the royal palace. This vertical division of public buildings and the horizontal division of the main canal divide the city into four quadrants, each of which has its own specialized market in line with the main market or exchange, and its own church adjoining the canal. This subdivision suggests that the citizens could be organized into four groups with equal access to public buildings, or that it could be divided into equal-sized groups by religious affiliation. 48 The standardized blocks throughout the city convey a sense of fair and democratic division of building parcels of equal value, but a further look reveals a hierarchy at work. The blocks along the canals are of higher value because of their easier access to transportation and to the pleasant views of the canals. The blocks closer to the central vertical axis have a privileged proximity to public buildings. The double band of blocks at top and bottom of the plan has no access to canals. That 46 “Because in pentagonal and polygonal Cities, even if they are round with a convenient market in the centre and streets running up to the bulwarks, everything in a symmetrical order, however, many houses, blocks and plots become irregular and wider to one end than to the other.” Stevin, Materiae Politicae, 17, quoted and translated in van Oers, Dutch Town Planning, 83. 47 The right angles of this canal at the corners were ill-advised—water does not flow as easily at a corner and this would prove a problem with Batavia’s canals. See de Haan, Oud Batavia, 1:254. 48 Van Oers points out four specifically Dutch features of this plan: the integrative role of water, the centrality of trade rather than the royal house, the attention to social and public functions, and religious tolerance as shown by the five church plots (the central one would belong to the state religion, but the other four could be purposed as befitted the population). Van Oers, Dutch Town Planning, 81–87.

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Stevin envisioned this location for laborer’s residences shows he saw this as a less desirable zone. 49 Van Oers points out that a hierarchy is clear in the positioning of the school (Hoogschool) on the canal, opposite the town hall (Stadthuÿs), in relation to the poorhouse (Armhuÿs), which is hidden from public view behind the school—the poorhouse is a less desirable public building and is thus isolated from the preferred public buildings.50 Similarly, the two buildings that flank the town hall are both punitive, the prison (Vangenis) and the workhouse (Tuchthuÿs). These are in a position semihidden from the open exchange square, yet are still centrally located and able to be surveilled from the town hall.51 As an ideal city, Stevin’s plan expresses his ideals for a Dutch city and thus for the people living in that city. His plan encourages residents to trade goods, defend themselves from outsiders, and, above all, develop a social hierarchy. Central to my reading of Stevin’s plan is the hierarchy encoded in its gridded design. A grid conceals hierarchy through its apparent egalitarianism; it retains the appearance of a uniform division of space that upon further examination proves otherwise. A careful examination of the placement of public buildings and the ease of access to transportation shows that certain positions on the grid are more desirable, a point made in Stevin’s city and especially strongly in the case of Batavia. The following discussion of the grid, both in the Netherlands and in general, demonstrates the inherent hierarchies of this form, despite arguments that it is merely practical or rational or, indeed, egalitarian. Charles van den Heuvel sees the seventeenth-century Dutch grid as deriving not from Stevin’s plan but from indigenous systems of land parceling in the Low Countries.52 In city expansions and polder developments, land was generally divided on a gridded system.53 This, he argues, was the result of previous efforts to drain land through controlled waterways; these canals provided the beginnings of a rectilinear framework, on which a gridiron division of space was then overlaid.54 49 Van Oers, Dutch Town Planning, 83n29. Hierarchy is an aspect that Ron van Oers downplays in his analysis, including it as a subargument to his larger point about the importance of water control for this city. 50 Van Oers, Dutch Town Planning, 83. 51 On surveillance and the built environment, see Andrzejewski, Building Power, chapter 1. 52 Van den Heuvel specif ically disputes Ron van Oers’s thesis that Stevin’s plan was the basis for Batavia’s layout, focusing instead on the earlier development of the grid in polder planning. He offers this hypothesis, which he describes as two layered grids (van den Heuvel, “Multilayered Grids,” 39), as an alternative source for the grid of Dutch cities abroad, countering Van Oers’s reliance on Stevin’s ideal plan. He argues further that the primary concern of the grid in its military application is flexibility in relation to the landscape and the temporality of the arrangement, which is useful for understanding the development of colonial cities. 53 Van den Heuvel, “Multilayered Grids,” 33–35. 54 In the 1611 expansion of Leiden, to take one of Van den Heuvel’s examples, the preexisting waterways appear to have determined the grid format. Van den Heuvel, “Multilayered Grids,” 31.

Dutch Batavia: An Ideal Dutch City? 

The Dutch grid, following van den Heuvel, was a practical way of evenly parceling land on an existing canal framework, an argument that echoes Stevin’s justification for a rectangular city, and Raben’s hypothesis of Dutch pragmatism. These and related explanations exclude the inherent hierarchy of the grid. Van den Heuvel notes a further source of the Dutch grid, which also derives from Stevin, but from a different text than the ideal plan. Stevin provided instructions for establishing military camps in his Castrametatio, published in 1617.55 Stevin suggested that a military camp should begin on paper with a rectangular outline, and then squares and rectangles representing the military quarters should be cut out and arranged on the outline until a satisfactory arrangement is determined. The way these elements were to be arranged demonstrates that this project was essentially hierarchical. The central position is assigned first, to the highest-ranking officers, and then the rest of the units are arranged around them. In this pragmatic grid, spatial proximity to the highest-ranking officers reflects one’s position in the military hierarchy, a demonstration that this grid is important for its sensitivity to rank rather than its even parceling. The consistent use of gridded divisions in different types of Dutch planning indicates a general Dutch impulse to use the grid as a means for creating and dividing land, which perhaps cannot be traced to a specific source. A final consideration is that a grid is more than simply a logical way to parcel land. Grid plans have been identified by some scholars with Dutch egalitarianism and pragmatism, as the Dutch preferred a simple grid to the baroque diagonals created in other European cities in the period.56 In contexts outside of the Dutch situation, the grid has been described as a means of ordering a population, an argument I find particularly cogent for understanding Batavia. Hannah B. Higgins has argued that the grid above all provides social organization: “It systematizes the relationship between the individual body and the acculturated spaces of our towns and cities, not in terms of the organic forms dictated by nature, but in terms of organized social systems.”57 Dell Upton, in his discussion of early American cities, argues that the grid was a way of spatially defining the social, political, and economic order, what he terms the “spatial imagination.”58 His exploration of the grid in prison planning 55 Stevin, Castrametatio. Pages 32 and 33, with the diagram, are reproduced in van den Heuvel, “Multilayered Grids,” 39. Van den Heuvel additionally notes (37) that Stevin’s instruction took into account marshy landscape for plotting the camp’s outline, a feature shared with the locations chosen for overseas settlements, always near a coastline and ideally also a river. 56 Spiro Kostof criticizes E. A. Gutkind’s interpretation of the Dutch grid as representing “Calvinist dogmatism and democratic equalitarianism,” suggesting instead that it shows a “pragmatic bourgeois mercantilist culture.” Kostof, City Shaped, 100. On the grander aesthetic concerns of the capital city of the Republic, see Tucker, “Urban Planning and Politics.” 57 Higgins, The Grid Book, 50. 58 Dell Upton, Another City, chapter 6, esp. 122.

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shows that the use of the grid to determine social relationships, even punitive ones, was an advantage noted by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century builders and theorists.59 A grid is a means of concealing unequal access to shared resources through ostensibly evenly ordered space, a format that always provides a matrix for hierarchical social order. Its use in urban planning means the city’s form does the work of organizing the population, in the absence of, or with minimal, overt regulation of the populace. In a gridded city like Stevin’s ideal one or in a place like Batavia, the social order, the organization and divisions of the population, is made explicit by the canals and parceling of land. The hierarchies of Dutch city planning can be found in the Dutch Republic as well; it is not solely a concern of the colonial city, military encampments, or of Simon Stevin. The third expansion of Amsterdam, begun in 1613, demonstrates this. The expansion added to the west of the city the famous Ring Canals (from the center of the city outward: the Herengracht [Gentlemen’s Canal], Keizersgracht [Emperor’s Canal], and Prinsengracht [Prince’s Canal]) and the more modest residential area, the Jordaan.60 (figure 4.11) The expansion was necessitated by the rapid growth of the city’s population from the end of the sixteenth century through the seventeenth. The extension was physically shaped by the existing city, which it wrapped around. The Dutch planning principles outlined above can be seen to some degree in this section of the city: water control through canals and locks, gridded division of space, emphasis on the efficiency of transportation, and the distribution of public buildings. The clearest example of a subverted and particularly Dutch hierarchy is seen in the naming of the canals: the Herengracht was the most prestigious address, reflecting the high position of the non-aristocratic leaders of the city, a newly risen class in the Republic. Following this, the emperor and then the prince, out of the expected order, seem to reflect less concern for strict ranking. However, all three canals were prestigious addresses, and the differences between them were negligible. A more compelling consideration is the relationship between the canal belt and the often-overlooked Jordaan, which made up the majority of the expansion. The Jordaan, now a quiet residential area, was historically the working-class quarter of the city. It is morphologically differentiated from the canal belt by the orientation of its grid, with streets and canals at a forty-five-degree angle to those of the canal belt. This contrast is by circumstance rather than design; reflecting Van den Heuvel’s argument of practicality, the orientation of the Jordaan’s grid reflects the preexisting manipulated water system. The canal belt was created through an expensive reorientation of the existing water system to wrap around the city’s core, and there were simply not enough resources available to expand 59 Ibid., 261. 60 Abrahamse, De Grote Uitleg van Amsterdam.

Dutch Batavia: An Ideal Dutch City? 

Figure 4.11: A. Besnard after Daniël Stalpaert, Map of Amsterdam with plan for the Fourth Expansion, ca. 1663–1682. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. RP-P-AO-20-33.

this engineering project through the Jordaan.61 Additionally, before the planners were able to begin reorganizing the structure of the Jordaan, this area had given rise to a great deal of illegal infrastructure—houses had been built along the old footpaths in this angled orientation. By leaving the illegal buildings in place, the city of Amsterdam avoided the expensive project of reorganizing the urban infrastructure and also avoided the social and political conflicts that would result from destroying the illegal settlements. A class division is built into the landscape of Amsterdam’s third expansion by the uneven investment in the canal and road infrastructure. While it might be possible for this to be read as a support for seventeenth-century “squatter’s rights,” it was also a convenient argument for not spending already tight resources on the Jordaan. Amsterdam’s third expansion demonstrates a reordered hierarchy through the naming of the prestigious canals, and it also embedded a continuing class hierarchy through the relationship of this smaller portion of the expansion to the Jordaan. The hierarchies apparent in these examples are essential for understanding Dutch seventeenth-century urban planning, especially as it extends to Batavia. 61 Feddes, A Millennium of Amsterdam, 86; and Abrahamse, De Grote Uitleg van Amsterdam, 75–77 and 351.

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Hierarchy in Batavia In his study of Dutch colonial cities, Ron van Oers asserts that Stevin’s plan constituted the underlying organizational form for all these cities and that this is most clear for Batavia. There are certainly many formal connections, whether Stevin’s plan was the source, or whether the principles his plan shares with other Dutch seventeenth-century urban planning lie at the root of Batavia’s plan. Visual associations between these plans may have even contributed to the idea that Batavia manifested similar ideals. A consideration of the 1681 map (see figure 4.3) alongside Stevin’s plan (see figure 4.10) demonstrates how Batavia’s plan fostered still stronger divisions and a recognition of hierarchy in the citizenry of this city. Batavia resembles Stevin’s plan in its rectangular proportions, its central canal that redirected the Ciliwung River, and the water outside of the bastioned wall that functions as an additional protective barrier. The rectilinear divisions of the city blocks by streets and secondary canals additionally recall Stevin’s ideal city. Yet despite many formal similarities between its plan and that of Stevin’s ideal, Batavia was a far less egalitarian city. As the capital city of the VOC, Batavia represented the aspirations of the trading company and formed in many ways the face of the Dutch in the East. Founded two decades after the VOC began trading in the archipelago, Batavia was not built in haste, but rather carefully planned and plotted so that it could function as the eastern capital. Hierarchy was crucial to preserving the balance of power in the city, and the hierarchies present in Stevin’s ideal are even more apparent in Batavia. The differences between Batavia and Stevin’s plan suggest that Batavia’s form was not directly attributable to Stevin’s ideas. They also underscore the stronger hierarchies present in this colonial city. Batavia introduced a much more rigid hierarchy through the inequitable access that the population had to the city. Walls that in Stevin’s city are barriers to outside forces became in Batavia walls that formed barriers to the Chinese and enslaved populations who were resettled outside the walls. Canals that in Stevin’s city provide transportation both on water and on foot via regular bridges became barriers in Batavia because Batavia had fewer bridges. Stevin made some provision for his four quadrants to differ in religious affiliation, yet maintain equal access to the public buildings of the city. Batavia’s population and public spaces were distributed unevenly throughout the city, with varying levels of access and mobility. As in Stevin’s plan, a hierarchy of location is apparent upon further study of Batavia’s plan. But Batavia was further reshaped by the varying widths of its streets and canals, providing the potential for greater volumes of traffic, enhanced accessibility, and improved visibility—in some places more than others. The north-south canal in the top half of Batavia, the Tijgersgracht, was the most fashionable address

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for prosperous Batavians. It was flanked by rows of trees (seen in figure 4.9)—a feature not shared with every canal.62 The city’s public buildings were not distributed centrally or evenly: most important buildings, like the churches and city hall, were built near the Tijgersgracht in the southeast quarter of the city, while warehouses were in the northwest quarter, closest to the harbor. Skilled workers labored along the eastern wall, and residential architecture was built throughout the city. The bridges give further indication of the clear division of the city into isolated sections, in a hierarchy considerably starker than what Stevin’s plan merely suggests, with his bands of blocks at varying distance from the canals and public axis of the city. The canals in both his ideal plan and the plan for Batavia provided a means of transportation, but in many sections of Batavia they were unbridged and thus became an obstacle to land transportation. A key difference between the plans is that Stevin’s plan shows a bridge spanning the canals each time a street meets water, while Batavia’s had far fewer bridges. The main canal is only bridged at one point on the 1681 map, effectively isolating the east and west halves of the city from one another. A second bridge, a small drawbridge that is still extant, had been built in 1655 near the northernmost canal of the east half of the city. For obvious reasons this bridge did not appear on the 1650 map on which the 1681 map was based, but it also is not indicated on the 1681 map—a clear sign that the later map is a close copy of the earlier version. As the main canal was the widest, having to accommodate larger boats, this lack of bridges is somewhat understandable. Nevertheless, this rendered the canal a major barrier to movement on foot or horseback or in a carriage. The location of smaller bridges shows that the city was effectively divided further into quarters—the fort was isolated in the eastern half, and the western half of the city was divided roughly in two by the Maleidschegracht, which was only bridged at its eastern and western edges. Within these quarters, the canals were more regularly bridged, so land transportation was less impeded. Residential architecture was present in all quarters, but Batavia’s residents were not evenly distributed throughout the gridded city, so these disjunctures were barriers that separated populations within the city. The walls of the city constituted a further barrier to some segments of the Batavian population. Initially meant as protection from competing sea powers and indigenous armies, they evolved into protection from perceived internal threats. Two populations that were indispensable to the functioning of the city, the Chinese and the enslaved, were designated as potentially harmful and thus relocated outside of these walls. The population of Batavia was distributed throughout the city so that each ethnic group had its own district. The form of the city reinforced these 62 Bea Brommer has pointed out that this image from Nieuhof’s publication may have been mistitled by his publisher so this engraving may represent a different canal in Batavia. Personal communication, 2019.

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divisions and kept groups divided by canals and walls, a major contrast with Stevin’s city, which conferred equal access on all the citizens of the city, even if some had to travel farther to reach its important areas. Stevin’s plan introduces a social hierarchy based on proximity to desirable locations, while the city of Batavia as built incorporated barriers to movement that contributed to the organization and control of the population. These differences between Stevin’s ideal plan and Batavia as it was ultimately constituted show that Stevin’s plan was not the conclusive source for Batavia, but rather that both plans are consistent with Dutch seventeenth-century planning principles. As a newly built city, Batavia represented the ideals of Dutch seventeenthcentury planning, when not constrained by the existence of previous infrastructure. As such, it more clearly manifested the rectilinear grid, the canals, and the restricted number of bridges crossing these (a problem one encounters in any canalled city). Yet it is important to note that the Dutch hierarchy is distinguished by its concealed nature: the social structure within the city was subtly structured by barriers to movement. These barriers were porous; one could reach any desired quarter of the city. Nevertheless, these barriers made certain routes and destinations less convenient, thereby shaping the way residents used the city. What separates Dutch planning in the Republic from that in the colony is only the degree, not the presence, of hierarchy. In Batavia this hierarchy was exposed by the VOC administration’s frustration, ultimately expressed in legislation, with the overt performance of rank displayed by the Batavian citizens. This unDutch ostentation calls for a closer look at the social hierarchies of this city and their cause. Considered through the lens of the colonial situation, hierarchy is anticipated, but a closer look at Batavia in the context of seventeenth-century Dutch planning ultimately reveals that colonial Batavia enacted the same principles as did planning in the Dutch Republic.

Ordering Batavia’s Population Batavia’s built environment served on the one hand to promote a Dutch identity among the diverse Dutch residents of Batavia, allowing a more cohesive group to dominate over the non-Dutch residents. On the other hand, Batavia dispersed the remaining population into distinct quarters that were separated by unbridged canals and barrier-forming walls. Anthony King argues in his study of colonial Delhi that division between populations is inherent to a colonial city, between a dominant and subordinate culture, the colonizer and colonized.63 The example 63 King, Colonial Urban Development, 14, 25. Yeoh, Contesting Space, 2, expands on this binary population division.

Dutch Batavia: An Ideal Dutch City? 

of Batavia, where multiple cultures (Dutch, Eurasian, Chinese, enslaved, etc.) were in contact, is more complicated, and the city took this into account from its inception, hierarchically organizing the population through the arrangement of space. While Batavia shared with other colonial cities what King identifies as the feature of uneven contact, such hierarchies were also apparent in the Dutch metropole. What is particularly Dutch about these hierarchies is how they are hidden: an overt exercise of hierarchy and population control was rarely seen in Batavia or in the Dutch Republic, but a concealed hierarchy enforced by the built environment was intentional and very Dutch. As I have suggested, a major role of Batavia’s built environment was to strengthen the Dutch identity of this dominant group in the colonial city. The trade networks of the archipelago had functioned to establish a strikingly diverse population in the trading ports of the region.64 Before the arrival of European traders, indigenous residents had worked alongside Chinese and Middle Eastern merchants. In the ports they were joined by Portuguese, Dutch, and English merchants, to name but a few of the groups present in the area when Batavia was established. After the Dutch gained control of the area, defeating the local rulers and the English, the population remained diverse, though Javanese were for the most part excluded from trading. Javanese and other islanders, Chinese, Indian, and non-Dutch Europeans, made up the vast majority of the population of Batavia. A 1673 survey showed some 27,000 people living within the city walls, of which approximately 2,000 were Dutch, 700 were Eurasian, 2,800 were Chinese, 5,000 were of Indian descent, 3,000 were from Java and the rest of the archipelago, and 13,000 were enslaved people of unnamed origin.65 Among the 10 percent of the population that was considered Dutch in this survey there remained a great deal of diversity of origin and social status.66 This Dutch population was mostly made up of employees of the company and their dependents.67 The legal classification of “Dutch” included those who had been born in the Dutch Republic and relocated to the Indies, children born of Dutch parents in Batavia (creoles), wives of Dutchmen (but not concubines), and children of Dutchmen regardless of maternal lineage; the Dutch group expanded exponentially as offspring from all of these groups

64 See Castles, “The Ethnic Prof ile of Djakarta,” 153–162. This account also contains an interesting explanation about the shifting profile of the group designated “Indonesian.” 65 Abeyasekere, Jakarta, 19–20. 66 On the diversity of interests within this group, see Tagliacozzo, “Navigating Communities,” 108–109. 67 The status of this group as employees of the VOC makes their role in the imperial mission somewhat ambiguous—they are both working in the interest of the company and being shaped by the company’s wishes, not quite a colonizing or colonized group. See Bhabha on the ambivalence of this position: Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man.”

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continued to be considered Dutch.68 Ann Laura Stoler points out that this broad definition of Dutch, including what would amount to a substantial Indisch population, served to keep this group allied with European colonial interests.69 Jean Gelman Taylor shows that the Europeans in the Dutch group were insulated by the inclusion of Eurasians and creoles in their group from the other major ethnicities of Batavia.70 No non-Dutch Europeans are included as residents according to this survey, which does not reflect the actual situation—these were likely folded into the Dutch group, suggesting that Dutch in this case more accurately means white people and their descendants and dependents. Looking at the nationalities of a group of VOC soldiers gives us some insight into the ethnic make-up of this 10 percent Dutch population. In 1622, of 143 soldiers in Batavia, only 57 were Dutch, while the remaining 60 percent were German, Swiss, English, Scottish, Danish, Flemish, Walloon, and of unknown nationality.71 The Dutch group additionally included people considered undesirable or degenerate. Sailors and soldiers, who had a very low status in Dutch accounts of the period, made up a large portion of this group.72 Regarding the permanent citizens of Batavia, an early complaint came from the first governor-general of Batavia, Coen, who famously wrote to Amsterdam lamenting that only the “scum of the earth” were settling the city.73 The cross section of Dutch society that became the ruling elite of Batavia perhaps offers an additional clue as to why Dutch Batavians dressed and acted out of rank and ultimately required sumptuary laws: unaccustomed to wealth and power, many Batavian Dutch had no experience of the accepted Dutch expressions of rank.74 The attention to rank and debates over the trappings of prestige within the Dutch group eroded this group’s coherence. The apparent laxity in what constituted Dutch ethnicity—one did not need to speak Dutch, one need never have resided in or visited the Netherlands, one required no distinct ties to the Republic—contrasts with 68 When a Dutch man married an Asian woman legally, she and their children became Dutch citizens, though they were restricted from relocating to the Dutch Republic. Taylor, Social World of Batavia, 17. Also note that despite the divisions introduced in the Asian populations of the city, Dutchmen drew their wives from all different quarters. 69 Ann Laura Stoler, “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers,” 199–201. See also Stoler, “Making Empire Respectable.” 70 Taylor, Social World of Batavia, 45. See also Stoler, “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers.” 71 Boxer, Dutch Seaborne Empire, 89. 72 Abeyasekere, Jakarta, 20; For the social status of soldiers and sailors, see van Deursen, Plain Lives in a Golden Age, 21–31, 200–204. 73 Abeyesekere, Jakarta, 13. Taylor also provides a number of anecdotes about the undesirables in the Dutch population: Taylor, Social World of Batavia, chapter 2. 74 Indeed, many Dutch Batavians attained wealth only by violating the VOC monopoly, essentially smuggling, so the financial support for ostentatious behavior was also gained by violating established Dutch custom. On smuggling, see Taylor, Social World of Batavia, 33.

Dutch Batavia: An Ideal Dutch City? 

Figure 4.12: General Population Distribution of Batavia. Author’s alteration of Figure 4.3.

the divisions enforced upon the Asian and enslaved populations. An environment that could form this diverse Dutch population into a group with a collective Dutch identity served the VOC’s need to ensure that their capital appeared to be Dutch, and that the Dutch residents could dominate the other 90 percent of the population. The location of the various ethnic groups of Batavia in the city shows the role of the built environment in maintaining divisions between the non-Dutch residents of the city. Some of these populations’ locations are noted in figure 4.12. The key of the 1681 map indicates the location of two of the city’s groups, the Bandanese in the northeast corner of the city, and the Mallaccan slaves (here labeled Mallabaer) in the northernmost quarter of the workshop area (see figure 4.3).75 On the 1780 map, the Chinese neighborhood, outside the walls directly south of the west half of the city, is labeled clearly as “Chine Kwartier” (see figure 4.6). Further designations can be found through a close reading of Frederik de Haan’s two-volume Oud Batavia. De Haan describes historic Batavia in minute detail in this work published in celebration of the three-hundred-year anniversary of the founding of Batavia. His passing mention of certain zones as the location of different ethnic groups is both a reflection of his historical research and the accretion of years of place memory in 75 This designation appears to refer to the Malabar Coast of India, and this group had come to Batavia through Portuguese enslavement by way of Malacca. See Fox, “‘For Good and Sufficient Reasons,’” 249.

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Batavia—ethnic divisions unseen to present researchers in decolonized Jakarta. Within chapters describing the founding of the city, the streets and walls, the different ethnic groups, and even the furniture of Batavia, De Haan inadvertently also describes the separation of the people of the city into distinct quarters. The most wealthy residents, mainly European-derived merchants and officials and Chinese merchants, lived along the Tijgersgracht in the southeast quarter of the city, or in the second-most prestigious location, the Jonckersgracht (approximately translated as Squire’s Canal) in the southwest quarter.76 The Chinese of Jonckersgracht lived north of Utrechtstraat and the Europeans south of it.77 Free workers of all origins lived in the northwest corner of the city, near the warehouses.78 Slave craftsmen worked in the Ambachtskwartier ([Craft] Working Quarter), at the southeast corner adjacent to the wall.79 Incidentally, this is the same section that in Stevin’s ideal plan was the laborers’ area. Before the Chinese Massacre of 1740, the Chinese lived throughout the city, but they were concentrated in the center of the west half of the city, and they situated their own warehouses near those of the VOC.80 De Haan describes “Moors” (South Indian Muslims) living and working to the north of the Leeuwinnengracht after 1740.81 So-called “chained slaves” lived in the fort, while skilled and unskilled enslaved people lived either where they worked, or in a slave quarter outside the wall to the south of the Ambachtskwartier.82 Some of these groups, like the slaves and the Chinese post-1740, were compelled to live in specific neighborhoods by law, while other groups’ locations were determined by their occupation. Wealthy residents chose open tree-lined canals. A group’s relative access, controlled by bridges and the city wall, affected its mobility and separated it into a distinct entity. Yet, for residents within the walls, the barriers and divisions were porous. Any part of the city could be reached, but the relative difficulty of a route subtly shaped mobility, concealing the city’s hierarchy through the pretense of freedom of movement. Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, as the canals silted up and grew stinky and diseased, the wealthy Europeans moved north of the city environs, building villas rather than townhouses. The historic city core became a place for low-income residents who could not afford the healthier countryside. The result was a further separation within the social hierarchy of Batavia. 76 De Haan, Oud Batavia, 1:263. 77 De Haan, Oud Batavia, 1:264. 78 De Haan, Oud Batavia, 1:350–351. 79 De Haan, Oud Batavia, 1:221. 80 De Haan, Oud Batavia, 1: 351, 360. 81 De Haan, Oud Batavia, 1: 265, 361. “Moor” in Batavia referred to South Indian Muslims: Castles, “The Ethnic Profile of Djakarta,” 155. 82 De Haan, Oud Batavia, 1: 245, 351–352.

Dutch Batavia: An Ideal Dutch City? 

Changes in the city between its initial completion and the late eighteenth century are apparent by comparing the maps of 1681 and 1780, representing two thorough land surveys (see figures 4.3 and 4.6). The enslaved and Chinese populations were consolidated outside of the city walls, to the south, in sections isolated by canals and very few bridges, and separated from the city center by the wall. By 1780, the central canal of Batavia was bridged more regularly, perhaps because the most threatening populations had been moved outside the walls. This allowed mobility within the city to become slightly freer. An interesting change, relevant to the sumptuary laws, is the expansion of the parade ground between the city and the fort, and the plaza in front of the town hall (Stadhuis, built 1707–1710) in the southeast quarter. City ordinances of 1719 and 1754 regulating modes of transportation and procession underscore the importance of parading through space as a way for Batavians to express themselves, regardless of whether it was appropriate to their rank.83 As we have seen, the dominant group in Batavia seldom blatantly demonstrated their position above the other population groups, preferring to let the built environment more subtly shape the hierarchy. The Chinese Massacre of 1740 was a crucial exception. The Chinese were an important and integral part of the city’s functioning, serving as merchants with ties to China and the all-important porcelain trade, as well as shopkeepers, laborers, and sugar farmers and processors. Some Chinese merchants rose to high positions, living among the European wealthy on the fashionable canals. In 1733, select Chinese citizens were accorded the right to walk with a parasol-bearing servant, suggesting that class distinctions similar to those among the Dutch Batavians had developed.84 The Chinese Massacre collapsed this group into a homogenously feared entity and reoriented their relationship to the urban plan.85 The Chinese Massacre signified the hysterical reaction of the Dutch Batavians to their fear of revolt among Chinese workers located outside the city. More than a thousand Chinese living within the city walls were slaughtered; and a Chinese quarter was subsequently established outside the walls south of the city to protect the city’s population from any suggestion of rebellion or retaliation.86 Before the massacre the Chinese had lived in many parts of the city according to their respective economic status and occupation. But after 1740, they were forced 83 On the 1719 regulations, see van der Chijs, Nederlandsch-Indisch Plakaatboek, 4:136–137; for the 1754 regulations, 6:773–795. 84 Van der Chijs, Nederlandsch-Indisch Plakaatboek, 4:333–336. 85 In the legislation following the massacre, it is clear that the government of Batavia feared violence from the Chinese. The law of November 11, 1740, forbade Chinese from living within the city walls, imposed a curfew, and also forbade the selling of homes within the walls to Chinese, Muslims, or non-Christians, extending the scope of the anti-Chinese legislation. Van der Chijs, Nederlandsch-Indisch Plakaatboek, 4:510–514. 86 This is labeled as such on many maps, as can be seen in figure 4.6.

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into a homogenized ethnic neighborhood, separated from the rest of the city by a wall and canal. Enslaved people occupied the lowest level of Batavia’s hierarchy. This group, which made up nearly half the city’s population, was highly diverse in ethnicity, status, and occupation.87 Until 1664, the work they did determined their location in the city.88 Four main types of enslaved person lived in seventeenth-century Batavia: the household slave, the chained slave, the craftsman, and the kuli. The household slaves generally lived behind the house of the owner.89 The chained slaves (kettinggangers) were people from many ethnic groups and social levels, including Europeans, enslaved as a punitive measure. Housed in the fort, they were kept in chains and did heavy manual labor, much of it dangerous, like the digging and dredging of canals.90 The skilled laborers, who were a respected group enslaved by the VOC, initially lived in the section of the city where they worked, the Ambachtskwartier. Kulis (unskilled laborers owned by citizens of Batavia) lived in the slave quarter south of the city walls, where they were later joined by the skilled laborers. In 1664, the chained slaves were also moved to the slave quarter, when this became a quarter for all types of enslaved people, and the divisions among their laboring status became blurred.91 This led to a clearer division between the enslaved and free population, while still keeping the skilled workers near enough to the quarter where they worked. This also ensured that a fortified wall stood between the enslaved and the fashionable Tijgersgracht. In marked contrast to the imagined Dutch merchant mentioned earlier, whose sensation of the foreignness of the East Indies was mitigated by Batavia’s many references to his Dutch homeland, an enslaved craftsman heading to his workshop on the 1681 map had a very different experience of the city. After heading north from the slave quarter, he would have crossed a drawbridge and passed through the Nieuwe Poort (New Gate) (see figure 4.3). Crossing a bridge over a canal, he would then have headed east toward the workshops, staying off the sidewalks that 87 European slavery in Asia is rarely discussed, in large part because it is perceived to be a less extreme and encompassing enslavement than the Atlantic slave trade. Emmer, De Nederlandse slavenhandel; and Boxer, Dutch Seaborne Empire, briefly mention Dutch slavery in the East, but the best sources are Vink, “‘The World’s Oldest Trade’”; and Reid, Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency, especially the essays by Abeyasekere and Fox; and Oostindie and Passman, “Dutch Attitudes towards Colonial Empires,” which discusses the Dutch intellectual (non)response to slavery. See also Baay, Daar werd wat gruwelijks verricht. 88 For the locations of the enslaved, see De Haan, Oud Batavia, 1:221, 351–352. 89 For information on who enslaved large numbers of household servants, see Abeyasekere, “Slaves in Batavia,” 296. 90 James Fox, “‘For Good and Sufficient Reasons,’” 249. The dredging of silted canals claimed the lives of 16,000 of these chained workers, as they performed the labor of making the city Dutch with its ill-fated canals, doubly reinforcing their own low status. De Haan, Oud Batavia, 1:238. 91 Fox “‘For Good and Sufficient Reasons,’” 251.

Dutch Batavia: An Ideal Dutch City? 

were forbidden to him, which further shaped his experience of the city plan.92 His view as he walked was either of the fashionable Tijgersgracht on his left, by this time of day busy with the activity of household slaves, or on his right the parklike band just inside the walls, planted with trees and perfect for strolling, but not connected by footbridge to his workplace—so an impractical route. He would have retraced this path at the end of the workday, when the gate and drawbridge were closed behind him, protecting the city residents from any threat of slave revolt. Rather than evoking feelings of connections to the Dutch Republic, the canals for this person would have been a barrier to movement, directing his path to and from work and residence.93 These different relationships to the urban morphology of Batavia reinforced the divisions between the enslaved and free populations of Batavia, and among the types of enslaved, keeping them divided by canals, the city walls, the sidewalk, and even the house versus the rear yard, in the case of household slaves. Social divisions between ethnic groups contributed to the sense of separation of both free and enslaved groups. The VOC promoted ethnic divisions among the enslaved to secure the city against slave uprisings. Despite their shared living area after 1664, they remained divided by origin, religion, and status. Ethnic divisions were maintained among the enslaved in large part because of European perceptions of the specific skills of each group and the relative risks presented by a particular group.94 For example, by treaty, no Javanese were enslaved, as they were assumed to have the greatest motivation and means to escape their owners. Certain groups were prohibited because of a perception that they were dangerous: males from Bali were avoided because of their tendency to run amok. The VOC also issued ordinances about who might own a person and which religion that enslaved person might practice. Not surprisingly, those ordinances served to maintain a hierarchy among owners, with Dutch Christians at the top.95 Outside of the very inclusive Dutch group, similar social divisions could be found in the free population of the city, a group which operated under a kampung organization. This was a locally derived practice, in which each ethnic group controlled its own neighborhood, led by an officer chosen from among the population. While empowering a group to partially self-govern, in effect this kept people from interacting or transferring among groups, by maintaining linguistic and ethnic divisions between populations. 92 Enslaved people were also required to walk alongside horses that they were transporting, rather than riding them. Fox “‘For Good and Sufficient Reasons,’” 257. 93 For a thoughtful consideration of a similar differentiation in Virginia, see Upton, “White and Black Landscapes.” 94 Vink, “‘The World’s Oldest Trade,’” 162. For example, enslaved people from Malacca were perceived to be excellent craftsmen, and enslaved people from Africa were thought of as strong miners. 95 Fox “‘For Good and Sufficient Reasons,’” 252–255.

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Conclusion The market scene in Beeckman’s Castle of Batavia (see plate 7) shows a microcosm of the VOC’s trading network, as the city’s diverse population mingles, some buying and selling produce or fish, others playing or talking. The segregation of this population, fostered by the division of the city by unbridged canals and walls, is for the most part obscured by this lively gathering. The enslaved child leaning back under the weight of the parasol marks one couple as being of higher status, thereby exposing the essence of Batavia’s hierarchy. The Dutch Batavians’ attempted maintenance of a cohesive Dutch identity, enforced by Dutching Batavia’s built environment, was undermined by ostentatious displays of status by wealthier members of this society. The attempt by this group to demonstrate their dominance over others led to assertions of superiority within the allegedly cohesive Dutch group. Some manifestations of this hierarchy, such as the parasol, appear to have been adopted from the local population. However, only some specifics of this behavior can be attributed to local customs, for the preoccupation with hierarchy was utterly Dutch. At home, too, wealthy merchants expressed their higher social position by wearing costly dress, albeit in sober and unadorned black, ostensibly to demonstrate their lack of concern with that status. Indeed, Dutch urban planning practices of the seventeenth century, both overseas and in the Republic, demonstrate Dutch society’s concern with hierarchy. Batavia presents a vivid illustration of how a city’s very form served to expose the hierarchies inherent in all Dutch cities of the early modern period. In the next chapter, I examine how the buildings that fill the Dutch city plan of Willemstad, Curaçao, similarly work to enforce a Dutch identity, that is also more Dutch than the population of the city.

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Fox, James. “‘For Good and Sufficient Reasons’: An Examination of Early Dutch East India Company Ordinances on Slaves and Slavery.” In Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency in Southeast Asia, edited by Anthony Reid, 246–262. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1983. Fraser, Valerie. The Architecture of Conquest: Building in the Viceroyalty of Peru 1535–1635. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Greer, Margaret R., Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan, eds. Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. De Haan, F. Oud Batavia, 2 vols. and plate album. Batavia: G. Kolff & Co., 1922. van den Heuvel, Charles. ‘De Huysbou’: A Reconstruction of an Unfinished Treatise on Architecture, Town Planning and Civil Engineering by Simon Stevin. Translated by D. Gardner. Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2005. van den Heuvel, Charles. “Multilayered Grids and Dutch Town Planning. Flexibility and Temporality in the Design of Settlements in the Low Countries and Overseas.” In Early Modern Urbanism and the Grid: Town Planning in the Low Countries in International Context. Exchanges in Theory and Practice 1550–1800, edited by P. Lombaerde and C. van den Heuvel, 27–44. Turnhout: Brepolis Publishers, 2011. Higgins, Hannah B. The Grid Book. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009. Holtrap, Maria. “Surapati: From Enslaved Servant to Sovereign.” In Slavery: The Story of João, Wally, Oopjen, Van Bengalen, Surapati, Sapali, Tula, Dirk, Lohkay, edited by Eveline Sint Nicolaas et al., 176–193. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum/Atlas Contact, 2021. Israel, Jonathan. The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477–1806. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Jacobs, Els M. Koopman in Azië: De handel van de Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie tijdens de 18de eeuw. Zutphen: Walberg Pers, 2000. Keane, Webb. Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Kehoe, Marsely L. “Imaginary Gables: The Visual Culture of Dutch Architecture in the Indies.” Journal of Early Modern History 20 (2016): 462–493. King, Anthony D. Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power, and Environment. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976. Kniffen, Fred. “Folk Housing: Key to Diffusion.” In Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture, edited by Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach, 3–26. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986. Kostof, Spiro. The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History. London: Thames and Hudson, 1991. Leerssen, Joep. National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006.

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Nieuhof, Johannes. Gedenkwaerdige zee en lantreize door de voornaamste landschappen van West en Oostindien. Amsterdam: Widow of van Jacob van Meurs, 1682. Odell, Dawn. “Public Identity and Material Culture in Dutch Batavia.” In Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration, and Convergence; The Proceedings of the 32nd International Congress in the History of Art, The University of Melbourne, 13–18 January 2008, edited by Jaynie Anderson, 253–257. Carlton, Australia: Miegunyah Press, 2009. Oers, Ron van. Dutch Town Planning Overseas During VOC and WIC Rule (1600–1800). Zutphen, Walberg Pers, 2000. Oostindie, Gert and Bert Passman. “Dutch Attitudes towards Colonial Empires, Indigenous Cultures, and Slaves.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 31, nr. 3 (Spring, 1998): 349–355. Raben, Remco. “Klein Holland in Azie: Ideologie en pragmatisme in de Nederlandse koloniale stedebouw, 1600–1800.” Leidschrift 9, nr. 2 (1993): 44–63. Reid, Anthony ed., Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency in Southeast Asia. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1983. Rupert, Linda M. Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic World. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2012. Schama, Simon. The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. New York: Vintage, 1987. Schmidt, Benjamin. Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Stevin, Simon. Castrametatio. Dat is Legermeting. Rotterdam: J. van Waesberghe, 1617. Stevin, Simon. Materiae Politicae. Bvrgherlicke Stoffen: vervanghende ghedachtenissen der oeffeninghen des doorluchtichsten Prince Maurits van Orangie. Leiden: Justus Livius, 1650. Stevin, Simon. Principal Works. 5 vols. Edited by Ernst Crone, edited and translated by C. Dikshoorn. Amsterdam: C. V. Swets & Zeitlinger, 1955–1966. Stoler, Ann Laura. “Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th Century Colonial Cultures.” In Imperial Monkey Business: Racial Supremacy in Social Darwinist Theory and Colonial Practice, edited by Jan Breman, et al., 35–70. Amsterdam: CASA Monography #3, 1990. Stoler, Ann Laura. “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia.” In Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, edited by Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, 198–237. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Sutton, Elizabeth. “Possessing Brazil in Print, 1630–1654.” JHNA: Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 5, nr. 1 (2013). http://doi.org/10.5092/jhna.2013.5.1.3. Sutton, Elizabeth. Capitalism and Cartography in the Dutch Golden Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Tagliacozzo, Eric. “Navigating Communities: Race, Place, and Travel in the History of Maritime Southeast Asia.” Asian Ethnicity 10, nr. 2 (June 2009): 97–120.

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Taylor, Jean Gelman. The Social World of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. Temminck Groll, C.L., ed. The Dutch Overseas: Architectural Survey: Mutual Heritage of Four Centuries in Three Continents. Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 2002. Tucker, Rebecca. “Urban Planning and Politics in the City Center: Frederik Hendrik and The Hague Plein.” JHNA: Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 5, nr. 2 (2013). http:// doi.org/10.5092/jhna.2013.5.2.7. Upton, Dell. “White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia.” Places 2, nr. 2 (1984): 59–72. Upton, Dell. Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Valentijn, François. Oud en nieuw Oost-Indiën, 5 vols. Dordrecht and Amsterdam: Joannes van Braam, Gerard Onder de Linden, 1724–1726. Vink, Marcus. “‘The World’s Oldest Trade’: Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century.” Journal of World History 14, nr. 2 (June 2003): 131–177. Vries, Jan de and Ad van der Woude. The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Yeoh, Brenda S. A. Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial Singapore. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1996. 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. Zandvliet, Kees, ed. The Dutch Encounter with Asia: 1600–1950. Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, 2002.

5.

Simplifying the Past: Willemstad’s Historic and Historicizing Architecture Abstract: Willemstad, the Dutch western trading capital on Curaçao in the Caribbean, has always been a global city, with the influence of the city’s early mixed population of Dutch settlers, Iberian Jews, and enslaved Africans. The city’s resulting architectural heritage of Dutch-gabled townhouses, sprawling classicizing villas, and uniquely Curaçaoan color and curves, has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage City for precisely this multiculturalism. These global aspects, however, have been increasingly eroded as twentieth- and twenty-f irst-century architectural developments have emphasized the Dutch contributions. This chapter questions the selective preservation and promotion that seem to revise the global past of the city in favor of an overwhelmingly Dutch past and proposes the townhouse as Dutch vernacular architecture’s enduring form. Keywords: historic preservation, creole, vernacular architecture, Dutch architecture, hybrid

The city of Willemstad, Curaçao, splashes its primary view, the row of colorful houses on the Handelskade (trading quay), across tourist advertisements and postcards, t-shirts and tote bags. (plate 8) This view has come to embody what the island offers: a unique Caribbean experience, celebrating urban architecture over beaches and palm trees. The focus on this view is not new or unique to modern tourist promotion—in fact the city’s buildings have been celebrated from the very first images circulating of the city, in drawings and watercolors showing the city and shoreline as marginalia on maps dating to the early eighteenth century. Photography studio Soublette et Fils captured city views, including the Handelskade, from the end of the nineteenth century, selling directly to consumers as postcards or collectable prints, and also to publishers of travel guides, demonstrating an

Kehoe, M.L., Trade, Globalization, and Dutch Art and Architecture: Interrogating Dutchness and the Golden Age. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463723633_ch05

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Figure 5.1: Handelskade 1 (left) and Handelskade unnumbered (right), details. From left: 1885, photograph Soublette et Fils (Collection Nationaal Museum van Wereldkulturen, Netherlands. Coll.nr. TM-60028720); 1915, photograph Soublette et Fils (Collection Nationaal Museum van Wereldkulturen, Netherlands. Coll.nr. TM-60019999); 2014 (photograph author).

enduring local interest in promoting the cityscape.1 The architecture of Willemstad is unique—a combination of European styles, accumulated over time, adapting to changing tastes and needs and the local environment, that reflects the history of this island through its colonization and settlement by Europeans. Taken as a whole, Willemstad’s architecture tells a story of dynamic and multicultural city. Through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, however, there is a palpable shift towards a singular narrative expressed in this cityscape, a narrative that reflects the Dutch “Golden Age.” The Dutch seventeenth-century architectural style is referenced, both in historic architecture (original buildings dating from the seventeenth-century founding of the city) and in modern historical-looking buildings meant to blend in with the old city. Dutchness is to be expected in Curaçao—the island has been under various forms of Dutch rule since 1634. Over the years, Willemstad, and particularly this Handelskade view, has been described as a tropical Netherlands: “An artist might revel for weeks in the strange streets, the quaint houses of the seventeenth century, the old costumes and the wealth of color. It is a veritable bit from the Zuyder Zee. I have seen just such streets in Rotterdam…”2 Europeans who traveled here, just like those who brought their impressions of Batavia home to the Dutch Republic in the previous chapter, noted the relationship with the water, the Dutch buildings, the narrow 1 The photography studio of Felix Roberto Caspar Soublette (1846–1921) and son Robert “Tito” Joseph Soublette (1870–1938) is the subject of Schiltkamp, Soublette et Fils. 2 Hutchinson, A Trip to Venezuela and Curaçao, 20.

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streets arranged on a grid. One such Dutch building is visible on the Handelskade, the second building in from the right with a tall, brown façade. (figure 5.1) This building would indeed be at home in the Dutch Republic. It is more modest than the finest seventeenth-century homes of Amsterdam’s Herengracht, but outside of Amsterdam’s city center, or in smaller Dutch cities like Leiden, it is a familiar form. The two-and-a-half story building is narrow and tall, topped with a tall triangular gable capped with a square (a spout gable). The building stretches deep into its lot, the steep roof ridge perpendicular to the street and the water along the quay—not a canal, in this case, but a shaped waterway that acts as a channel into a larger inland bay. Unlike its colorful neighbors, the façade is plain, composed of sandy brown bricks, pierced by large windows, topped by alternating grey stones, recalling the brickwork of northern Europe. This building reflects the Dutch architectural values of the seventeenth century that are also apparent in Batavia’s plan: plain, pragmatic, unostentatious. It makes good use of its street frontage to maximize and also share street and water access with the other buildings. And yet, this building is not in fact the oldest building in the view, but only the most historical-looking. With the documentation provided by the Soublette et Fils photography studio, we can see the 1885 state of this building is very different from its present state. In the late nineteenth century, this building had three stories with a low hipped roof—in form it is a Dutch townhouse connected to its neighbors but without the vertical emphasis of a tall front-facing gable. The street level appears to have full-height warehouse doors, and the upper floors have three squat window openings each. The unadorned wall space between stories slightly emphasizes the horizontal aspect, especially in relationship with the seemingly continuous building to the left, further supported by what may be a projecting cornice at the top of the façade. By 1915, again documented by Soublette et Fils, the arrangement of windows is new, perhaps suggesting a reorganization of the first and second floors as there are no longer any openings at the middle level. Instead, a series of light-colored horizontal bands fills the space, echoed by one band above the third story’s three windows and now, clearly, an outward thrusting cornice. The three windows now have a more vertical shape, with six panes separated by mullions. Because the earlier photos are greyscale, the color of the façade is not known, but it appears light and smooth, suggesting that like many other buildings in Willemstad’s downtown, the surface was stucco plaster over coral stone. In both of these photos, despite the changes, this building is essentially a townhouse form, but with openings, a roof type, and decoration that undermine a typically Dutch emphasis on the vertical and instead emphasize the horizontal, lending the building a squat appearance. The effect of horizontality through decoration and arrangement of openings, as well as the architectural elements of a hipped roof and heavy cornice, are elements associated more generally with European classicism that began in ancient Greece and which has been subject to recurrent revivals and revisions.

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From the middle of the twentieth century, the building has had the form it carries into the present.3 Perhaps the entire building has been replaced, although the three window openings in the middle floor seem unchanged, suggesting this may just be an extensive renovation. The roof structure is entirely different, now a simple gable roof, the extended peaked ridge running perpendicular to the street and the gable facing front, continuous with the lower façade. Instead of the light-colored façade we saw in 1885, or the banded façade of 1915, the façade is now of brown brick and stone. The lower-level openings have again been reworked, as two tall window openings and a false window that extends downward to form a doorway. The three windows at mid-level are each divided into four tall panes, and a matching single window aligns with what was formerly the edge of the roof. The spout gable then flies far above this. As mentioned above, this building now conforms to the northern European form and style which are particularly associated with the Dutch: a narrow townhouse, plainly decorated, with tall windows, together giving the effect of verticality and of pragmatically making the best use of space by building upwards in a narrow lot. This single building has clearly been Dutched, becoming more Dutch “Golden Age” in appearance over the twentieth century, through renovations that appear not to be a restoration to an earlier state, but rather to an imagined historicizing form. This is the story this chapter examines, of an increasing Dutch architectural appearance in the historic district of Willemstad, both when historic buildings are renovated and when new buildings are added, celebrating a specifically and identifiably Dutch historical past. In fact, the architecture of downtown Willemstad has never looked as Dutch as it does now. As they aren’t visually documented, Willemstad’s original seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings may have been entirely Dutch in form and style, but more likely they may have already shown a tendency toward a hybrid colonial form. Over time, these buildings have all accumulated features that are distinctly classicizing in style, as well as Curaçaoan adaptations to make these buildings more comfortable in this tropical setting. The need for alterations to the Dutch form is a reminder that pragmatic Dutch architecture and urban planning was not pragmatic for the tropics, and was naively or ideologically applied to these different environments. Why reimagine a historical, Dutched “Golden Age” Willemstad that is more Dutch in character than the historical evidence suggests? What complicated and messy histories are being revised out of the story in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? How does this monocultural representation of what was very much a multicultural past serve Dutch or Dutch colonial identity? Some of that complicated 3 A photo by J. van Essen of the Handelskade in 1958 shows this building was then already in its present state. Reproduced in: M. D. Ozinga, De Monumenten van Curaçao, plate 135.

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history includes Spain taking the island by force from the indigenous inhabitants, the Dutch West India Company taking the island from Spain, Dutch and Portuguese Sephardic merchants settling Willemstad. Many certainly have an interest in forgetting that Curaçao was an essential hub for the transatlantic slave trade. In the twentieth century, Curaçao’s economy was reinvigorated by the establishment of an oil refinery, and the influx of new workers from the Netherlands and across the Caribbean changed the island’s demographics. More recently, tourism and a UNESCO world heritage designation for downtown Willemstad continue to impact the appearance of the city. Today, a visitor may be forgiven for not seeing this complicated history, and instead only remembering Dutchness, because this is the story the cityscape tells.

The Founding of Willemstad and the WIC Willemstad, at its founding in 1634, was intended to be the central Dutch city in the Caribbean and Americas, serving as administrative capital for the Dutch West India Company (WIC) and warehouse for goods and enslaved people carried by Dutch ships into and around the region. The island of Curaçao was a pragmatic choice for a base—close to the coast of South America, among the Lesser Antilles, and between Dutch Aruba and Dutch Bonaire, these Dutch islands are out of the path of Caribbean hurricanes, a key factor in preserving the architecture discussed in this chapter. The Spanish first visited in 1499, and then conquered the island from its indigenous population, the Caquetíos, a branch of the Arawak. 4 The Spanish called this chain of islands useless (islas inútiles), and Curaçao’s arid climate indeed gave little hope for large-scale agriculture, so Spain put up little resistance to the Dutch conquest in 1634. Curaçao instead provided the Dutch a secure harbor, space for warehousing goods and enslaved people, productive salt pans, and access to the illicit coastal trade of South America.5 This contrasts with what we tend to think of as the typical wealth-generating colonial projects in the Caribbean, namely plantation agriculture worked by enslaved people. Instead, Curaçao was a trading hub and was, and remains, one of the wealthier economies of the Caribbean. The port city of Willemstad was founded as the Dutch trading capital for the WIC territories, straddling the mouth of the St. Anna Bay, on the southeast coast of Curaçao. (figure 5.2) This bay would, in the twentieth century, become the location 4 The oft-cited number is that only 75 indigenous people remained when the Dutch took over, and that this population quickly disappeared, but Rupert notes that there are still indigenous residents mentioned into the eighteenth century: Rupert, Creolization and Contraband, 142 5 On the smuggling business which was key to Dutch successes in the Caribbean, see Klooster, Illicit Riches; and Rupert, Creolization and Contraband.

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Figure 5.2: Gerard van Keulen, Map of Curaçao, 1716. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA.

for the island’s profitable oil refineries, and the entrance through the city provides access. The urban planning and architecture of Willemstad parallel developments in Batavia and the Dutch Republic, expressing Dutchness through the use of a grid plan, Dutch buildings, and water control. At top center on the 1716 map, the earliest growth of the city can be seen, a fort at the east entrance of the bay, and a small gridded city stretching inland. Across the bay, there are a few scattered buildings, and another fort would be built in 1828, securing the entrance and protecting the growing settlement. In the lower right of the 1716 map, little spout-gabled townhouses peek out of the fort. While in the 1716 map, Willemstad’s shore is quite irregular in shape, over time the Dutch would regularize the coastline, as is visible in the twentieth-century map of the city.6 (figure 5.3) The architectural photographs of 6 Rupert, Creolization and Contraband, 124–133 details the development of the city.

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Figure 5.3: J. Stanton Robbins & Co. / Blair Associates, The Distinctive Architecture of Willemstad, April 1961. From The Distinctive Architecture of Willemstad: Its Conservation and Enhancement. A Report prepared by J. Stanton Robbins and Lachlan F. Blair.

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Soublette et Fils, which will be discussed at length in this chapter, provide further evidence of the role of buildings as cultural markers in Willemstad. This 1961 map was prepared as part of a report about the potential for the city’s historic architecture to attract tourists (the authors marked the best historical areas with shading). Here we can see the shape of the city as it existed in the eighteenth through twenty-first centuries. The fort has changed somewhat as the city developed, now serving more as a retaining wall and site for government buildings, restaurants, and a twentieth-century hotel thrusting upwards. North of the fort is the oldest section of the city, gridded rows of tightly packed warehouse residences of the city’s early Dutch and Jewish merchants.7 Because of this dense layout, it is difficult to view or photograph many of the inward-facing buildings, hence the focus on the vista of the Handelskade across the water. This primary historic area, known as Punda (creole for “point” or Dutch “punt”) was completely built up by the early eighteenth century. Throughout Punda and surrounding neighborhoods, the architectural ensemble is relatively consistent, similar forms decorated in the variety of styles discussed below. A moveable pontoon bridge connects Punda to Otrobanda (creole for “other side,” Dutch “Overzijde”), traditionally a working class neighborhood, which also hosts historical warehouse residences, but on a looser grid, and of more modest scale.8 Currently, this neighborhood is home to the Kura Hulanda luxury hotel, incorporating the site of a former slave market—the owner founded an on-site museum of African history and the slave trade, which sits uneasily among luxury hotel rooms and restaurants, gated off from the neighborhood. North of Punda, separated by a small bay (the Waaigat, “Windy Hole”) is the historic neighborhood of Scharloo, with residences built primarily in the nineteenth century, in many cases by the city’s prominent Jewish population. Willemstad also boasts two of the most historic Jewish sites of the Western Hemisphere: the cemetery, Beit Chaim Bleinheim, and the oldest active synagogue in the Western hemisphere, Mikvé Israel-Emanuel, for a community founded in 1650.

The Vernacular Architecture of Downtown Willemstad In downtown Willemstad, private merchants built townhouses that combined warehouses below and residences above, which have been protected by a favorable climate and the continual efforts of residents to update and preserve. These are 7 On how a densely built city was part of Dutch efforts to successfully colonize in North America, see Romney, “‘With & Alongside His Housewife,’” 212. 8 Rupert, Creolization and Contraband, 130 and 133, notes that Otrobanda has been minimized on maps of the city, suggesting a disregard for this mixed and lower-income population is encoded into the city’s documentation.

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examples of Dutch colonial vernacular architecture, unique because of their survival, their residential rather than imperial function, and the hybridity of their style as they are not fully Dutch. I’ll take in turn these three factors that make Willemstad’s buildings special in architectural and cultural history. In the many places worldwide where the Dutch marked their dominance with architecture, few buildings survive, and sometimes the primary remains are the shape of the streets, as in Batavia’s plan in chapter 4. In these cases, secondary sources like prints of the cities and their buildings in travel literature and on the margins of maps provide evidence for what once stood. This evidence, however, is not straightforward—drawn sometimes by eyewitnesses but more often by artists who had never seen these places, these views are imaginary.9 The photographic documentation of Willemstad’s late nineteenth-century buildings is thus invaluable. The buildings that once filled many colonial cities have been destroyed after years of neglect or climate-related decay, replaced by new architecture, often the effort of subsequent occupiers or post-colonial governments. Across the Caribbean, in particular, hurricanes and earthquakes have battered early modern colonial cities, the most famous example being Jamaica’s sunken Port Royal. Willemstad’s historic buildings are also unique among the remaining colonial structures of the Dutch world because they represent the everyday architecture of the residents of the city, rather than only the colonial or company buildings, erected to represent the lofty ambitions of the Dutch West India Company and the Dutch Republic abroad. Those official buildings, including palaces, government structures, and even churches, were generally built to last of more durable materials, which also is a factor in their disproportional survival. We might make a fruitful comparison of the town halls of Amsterdam (now the Dam Royal Palace), Batavia (Jakarta), and Willemstad, to see one type of consistent architectural language of empire. The common buildings of the city’s residents, on the other hand, are a more democratic and subtle expression of broadly held cultural values, representing the collective effort of the people who make up a culture, rather than the overt expression of empire. These vernacular structures may seem to be less imperial or less ideological, because they are built by regular people, who rely on the forms and techniques of their training, experience, and simply what makes sense to them. However, as I argue throughout this chapter, imperial values are also a factor in everyday architecture, perhaps even more persistently as they weren’t the target of anti-imperialist actions. In the case of Willemstad’s townhouses, these still represent an elite merchant culture, and thus do not democratically represent all of the city’s or island’s residents, but they are the production of individuals rather than the West India Company or the State. There are isolated examples of Dutch 9

Kehoe, “Imaginary Gables.”

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everyday architecture across the world, like Jakarta’s National Archives Building, the Schenck House in the Brooklyn Museum, and in Paramaribo, Suriname, but Willemstad preserves much of its eighteenth-century downtown, a full cityscape of historical buildings.10 Finally, Willemstad’s vernacular architecture represents an in-betweenness in style—between Dutch and colonial, between Dutch and Iberian and classical and neo-Palladian and Curaçaoan, which is specific to the history and people of this place. Settlers in Willemstad imported their home cultures’ forms and styles, and adapted them with local building materials, reflecting this new setting, and then continually amended them.11 This makes for a messy story, which is avoided by art history’s traditional preference for studying cultures in isolation, holding up a canon of examples which straightforwardly represent a culture’s output and ideals. These methods make the study of cultural hybridity challenging, as discussed in chapter 1, and indeed one of the complications of cultural hybridity is the impossible suggestion that a single, consistent style can even be identified; these methods also enable a continued spotlight on elite European cultures. The buildings considered here were built in the eighteenth century, but have been adapted and changed over the intervening centuries, so what remains today represents a series of time periods, different owners, and changing trends. In traditional architectural studies, it is the original, architect-planned structure that is considered, but vernacular architectural methods enable a consideration of change over time, particularly apt for these examples. Rather than carefully reconstructing the original plan of a single building, I’ll consider the accumulated alterations of the city’s professional, amateur, and anonymous builders. It is not possible to pinpoint each change, but rather I’ll look at the cityscape as a whole, with the evidence of photography from the late nineteenth century to the present. Willemstad’s architectural ensemble is made special all over again when we consider the attention paid to this architecture over time. There has been a consistent interest in Dutch visual culture to represent Dutch buildings across the world, producing the secondary evidence of maps and illustrated travel accounts like those considered in chapter 4. Our knowledge of Willemstad’s architectural history 10 On Dutch architecture worldwide, see Temminck Groll, The Dutch Overseas; on New Netherland, see Zink, “Dutch Framed Houses”; and on Surinam, see van der Klooster and Bakker, Architectuur en Bouwcultuur in Suriname; and Fatah-Black, White Lies and Black Markets. 11 The shift in building practices across time and space, when vernacular practices encounter new places and materials through settlement, has been theorized as “diffusion” by Fred Kniffen. This model could be extended to consider hybrid practices and what happens when cultures meet by force or imperial expansion, although this is not part of Kniffen’s conception. Kniffen, “Folk Housing: Key to Diffusion.” Preeti Chopra’s consideration of colonial Bombay (now Mumbai) considers the hybridity of the British colonial encounter with Indian architecture: Chopra, Joint Enterprise, especially chapter 2.

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Figure 5.4: Entrance to the St. Anna Bay. Photograph Soublette et Fils, 1890–1895. Thomas Frederick Davis papers, Descriptive account of Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles, 1902, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA. mm 80003197.

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is further enabled by photographic evidence from the late nineteenth century, thanks to the work of photography firm Soublette et Fils (Felix Roberto Caspar Soublette, and son Robert “Tito” Joseph Soublette), which shows a sustained and unique local interest in this architecture.12 While many early photography studios focused on studio portraits, and colonial photographers pursued phrenology and salvage ethnography, this creole studio documented the city’s buildings, selling their work as tourist postcards and licensing illustrations for travel guides.13 (figure 5.4) This Soublette photograph looking south towards the entrance to the Saint-Anna Bay, with Punda and the Handelskade at center, captures a bird’s-eye view of the city from a rise north of Otrobanda. This glossy photographic print is among a number of other city views, several stamped with the Soublette et Fils logo, that Thomas Davis included with his unpublished manuscript, “Descriptive Account of Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles,” now in the Library of Congress.14 Davis, who was stationed in Curaçao from 1901–1902, likely acquired these prints directly from the Soublette studio, and perhaps had them printed to order. Today, Willemstad’s buildings remain a key factor in tourism marketing, appearing in brochures and on souvenirs, showing this sustained interest and sense of the importance of this cityscape to residents and visitors alike.

The Townhouse as Dutch Colonial Architecture The most celebrated example of the Willemstad cityscape is the Penha Building at the south end of the Handelskade (Heerenstraat 1). The date of 1708 proudly decorates the gable, and this building has been carefully preserved over the past three centuries, so that almost no change can be seen between its representation in a ca. 1822 print to the present. (figure 5.5) The building’s bold yellow color is striking, and all architectural elements are in contrasting white, so that the arcades of the first two stories and the fantastical curving gables of the third story stand out. The earlier images suggest that a similar light color with noticeable architectural detailing reaches back at least two centuries. Willemstad’s architecture is known for its bright coloring and curves, other examples of which can be seen in plate 8 and throughout the historic district. These stylistic aspects mark Willemstad’s townhouses as different from the more subdued architecture of the Dutch Republic’s cities, yet paint and applied ornament are superficial adornments over a remarkably Dutch form: the townhouse. 12 Schiltkamp, Soublette et Fils. 13 On salvage ethnography, see Hochman, Savage Preservation, introduction. 14 Davis, “Descriptive Account of Curaçao.”

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Figure 5.5: Penha Building (Heerenstraat 1), details. From left: 1800 (‘t Eÿland Curacao, manuscript. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, Washington, DC, USA. G5181.A35 1800 .E9.); ca. 1822 (R. F. Raders, De haven van Curaçao, acquatint, New York Public Library, USA, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection); 1885, photograph Soublette et Fils (Collection Nationaal Museum van Wereldkulturen, Netherlands. Coll.nr. TM-60028720); 2014 (photograph author).

Viewing the building from the water, its primary façade on the Handelskade, we see a typical three-story townhouse with triangular, street-facing gable, tightly packed next to its neighbor. The bay at right with its two stories of arches and dormer windows facing Breedestraat are an addition to the basic townhouse form, which might be original here, given the corner placement, or a later renovation. The detail from the 1800 watercolor in figure 5.5 (which should, considering its medium, not be considered objective evidence) may exclude this bay, and as we will see momentarily, open balcony or gallery features were later additions to many of Willemstad’s townhouses. Excluding this bay, the basic form of the Penha Building is a typical Dutch townhouse, similar to what has been regularly erected from the sixteenth century onwards in the Low Countries and, where extant, in the Dutch colonies abroad. (figure 5.6) The Dutch townhouse has not been extensively discussed in scholarship, perhaps as it seems unremarkable.15 It is a vernacular form that is ubiquitous across centuries, and that is not exclusive to the Netherlands, but seen more widely in northern Europe. The townhouse is also not consistent, as variations in form and style show that hybridity and mixing have always been present. However, rows of closely packed townhouses have become a symbol of the Dutch “Golden Age,” celebrated in Dutch historic districts and deliberately quoted in places like the American Dutch cities of Holland, Michigan and Pella, Iowa. Like the Dutch city planning discussed in the previous chapter, this Dutch urban vernacular architecture is an unadorned and pragmatic form that reflects the culture that built it. While it may be tempting to perceive the plainness to be a lack of style or cultural marker, this plainness is, in fact, the ultimate Dutch colonial style. This is a form that has 15 The townhouse is discussed in van den Hurk, “New Amsterdam and Old New York.”

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Figure 5.6: Warmoesstraat, Damrak, Amsterdam. ca. 1880–1890. Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed, Netherlands. OF-05129.

persisted, that lingers and continues to assert Dutchness long after it is practical: under the radar, through physical discomfort and post-colonial movements, only to be reasserted in cultural revivals. The townhouse is the logical outgrowth of Dutch city planning that favors a gridded division of space and deep, narrow lots with access to a canal or street, which appears at first glance to be fairly divided but can also hide hierarchies of access, as discussed in the previous chapter. With such small lots, living space is gained by building upwards, emphasizing verticality, and many of the seventeenth-century townhouses of wealthy Amsterdammers stretched to a fifth or sixth floor (the wealthiest might build on adjoining lots for a double-wide townhouse). To maximize space and accommodate drainage, these townhouses generally have a gable roof, gable facing to the front, which allows a half-story attic space. The top of the façade is extended into a triangular gable, either flush with the roof or extending above to decoratively disguise the roof shape. Even the finest of these townhouses in the wealthiest Dutch neighborhoods at the height of the Baroque period have very little embellishment—decorative stone or brickwork around the window and door openings, and gables with scrolls or bell-shapes (never approaching the whimsy of Willemstad’s gables). The typical modest townhouse generally has one of three gable shapes: steps that amplify the rectilinearity of brickwork, equilateral or taller triangles, and triangles topped with a square spout.

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The Dutch built these modest, plain townhouses in their cities across the world. Where these buildings still stand, like in Willemstad, they are generally more modest in size than their counterparts in the Republic, reflecting the lesser wealth of the colonies’ settlers, and many were built of less persistent materials like wood and thus are no longer standing. As noted above, there are few extant houses, so we can turn for less-reliable evidence to visual representations of Dutch seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cities abroad for additional context, like printed images on maps and in travel literature, drawings and watercolors, and textual descriptions, many of which note similarities between the Dutch Republic and her colonies. While the townhouse form seems pragmatic, it, like the canaled city, also did not work as well across the world as it did in the Dutch Republic’s cool, damp climate. In a warm, damp or dry climate, as most of the Dutch colonies were, these townhouses proved impractical and uncomfortable. In Batavia, the rooflines were shifted ninety degrees to accommodate monsoon rains.16 In Willemstad, the stuffy interiors were relieved by adding open balconies that hang off any exposed façade, to provide spaces with circulating air. Prior to germ theory, the stagnant air and spaces that trapped the miasma, both inside houses and in narrow lanes and streets between Dutch structures, were blamed for rampant illness in Dutch tropical cities.17 In Batavia, for instance, the dense downtown was abandoned by those who could afford it in the eighteenth century, leaving the city to fall into disrepair, and many of the historic buildings had to be pulled down as a result. Returning to the Penha Building, while the primary form is the Dutch townhouse, the exterior is embellished in a way that feels decidedly unDutch, with bold coloring and the attention drawn to the allover architectural features painted in contrasting white. There are two stylistic trends here: the classicizing features of the arcades and horizontal thrust of the building (contrasting the vertical rise of the basic Dutch townhouse); and the Curaçaoan elements, namely the bold color, curvy gables, and open galleries. These unDutch qualities, I argue, reflect the local context of Willemstad: first I’ll examine the vernacular forms and style brought by non-Dutch settlers in Willemstad, namely Iberian Jewish merchants, and next, the role of the tropical setting. Curaçao’s Sephardic Jewish population was a cultural force in Willemstad, a significant portion of the merchant and middle classes of the city. These settlers, like the Dutch, brought their own pragmatic vernacular architecture to the island, building forms that made sense to them, and embellishing their homes with familiar European style. These forms reflect the warmer climes of Southern Europe, perhaps 16 See chapter 4, figure 4.8. 17 On malaria in Batavia, see chapter 4, note 23.

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Figure 5.7: Late nineteenth-century Scharloo houses. Left: Villa Maria, 2–6 N. van den Brandhofstraat, built 1885, photograph ca. 1888–1900, Soublette et Fils, detail. (Collection Nationaal Museum van Wereldkulturen, Netherlands. Coll.nr.: TM-60060208). Right: facade of Schaarlooweg 106, built 1881. (Photograph, 1994/1995. Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed, Netherlands. 900.260)

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diffused via Brazil in some cases, which was a closer fit to Curaçao than what the Dutch settlers brought. Stylistically, Willemstad’s Jews turned to classicizing features. This can best be seen in Willemstad’s predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Scharloo, where scattered houses were standing by the eighteenth century, and which was filled in during the nineteenth century. I am grateful for Pauline Pruneti Winkel’s extensive study of this neighborhood, and I draw on her arguments and examples below.18 This neighborhood has an entirely different footprint and structure from Punda. These different forms and stylistic embellishments can also be identified in Punda, and if not directly attributed to Jewish builders and residents, contribute to the multicultural architectural elements in Punda which reflect the population beyond the Dutch. In f igure 5.7, we see two nineteenth-century homes along the Waaigaat in Scharloo, which embody this contrasting form and style: the classicizing villa. Their lots, like the downtown Dutch grid, are deep and rectangular, but the lots are broader and the homes don’t fill the lot, but rather sit within a fenced yard. The buildings aren’t as tall as their Dutch counterparts, instead sprawling back through the lot. The form of the villa—seen best at left in Villa Maria (2–6 N. van den Brandhofstraat)—is more suited to the warm climate, allowing air circulation from four sides and sometimes also from an internal courtyard. The hot stagnant air which accumulates in a tall Dutch townhouse with its high-pitched roof has fewer opportunities to collect in the villa and can dissipate through open windows and spaces. This vernacular form has diffused to Curaçao, built by and for a population for which this was the pragmatic form, coming from warmer Iberia and Brazil, and indeed it works better in the Caribbean. Furthermore, both of the examples of figure 5.7 feature classical styling that contrasts with the plain Dutch style, like the hipped roof that is at a lower angle, forfeiting attic space but echoing the classical pediment. This same roof structure was seen in the earlier photographs from figure 5.1 before they were renovated into Dutch gables. In the Scharloo villas, heavy cornices, highlighted in white (more starkly in the modern photograph at right), frame the walls at top and corners, emphasizing the horizontality of the structures. Villa Maria features a miniature Doric temple as front entrance, while Scharlooweg 106 has a more modest semicircular columned entrance, its roof topped with a balustrade. Other features, like the window and door openings, are also emphasized with white, which recall the white marble of ancient Greece (though in reality this is painted trim). Pruneti Winkel notes that many of these villas were continually renovated, often do-it-yourself home renovations by owners.19 18 Pruneti Winkel, Scharloo. 19 Pruneti Winkel, Scharloo, 113.

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Figure 5.8: Plantation house Groot Santa Martha with kunuku huts, detail, ca. 1900, photograph Soublette et Fils. Collection Nationaal Museum van Wereldkulturen, Netherlands. Coll.nr. TM-60019497.

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While the homes of this neighborhood were built a century after the townhouses in the Punda, their classicizing stylization suggest a source for the classical features we see on the downtown townhouses: the Sephardic settlers’ importation of a different European form and style to Curaçao. Classical elements that may very well have been original, like hipped roofs, may reflect the preferences of the Jewish merchants who were also initial inhabitants of Punda. Both the Scharloo villas and the Punda townhouses have been renovated continually, accumulating new stylistic features and sometimes subtle transformations to the building’s core form. There are two additional architectural forms in Curaçao, both present in the small-scale plantations in the countryside outside of Willemstad: the Dutch country house (landhuis) and the African-derived hut (Papiamentu: kas di kunuku, “plantation hut,” or kas di yerba, “straw hut”; Dutch “kunuku huisje”). (figure 5.8) The landhuis is a Dutch vernacular structure, unconstrained by dense city lots.20 In this example of Groot Santa Martha, the landhuis stands out in a light color from the landscape, and has a sprawling footprint, with the main living space all on the ground floor. Two parallel gabled roofs create attic space, their spout gables marking the structure as Dutch in style even from a distance. The roof has two distinct slopes, known as a double-pitched roof, and this is reflected in the shape of the gable.21 Smaller versions of the landhuis can be seen in the city of Willemstad, marked most notably as different from the townhouse because their gables face to the side rather than the front. The kunuku houses in the middle- and foreground of figure 5.8 are small, one or two room dwellings with steep thatched roofs; and a yard fenced by cactus can be seen at the bottom of the detail. This building type, named for their connection to plantations, formerly housed enslaved people, which is clear from their relationship to the landhuis in this photo. They are associated in oral history with Curaçao’s African population and their descendants, and celebrated as an African vernacular form, diffused to the Caribbean.22 Today, few of these original structures remain, and their relationship to Curaçao’s history, much less a direct connection to African building traditions, remains understudied. These connections may not be traceable considering the breaks in history caused by the Middle Passage and exclusionary 20 Huijgers and Ezechiëls, Landhuizen van Curaçao and Bonaire. 21 A double-pitched roof is sometimes known as a Dutch roof, especially in North American vernacular architecture, where it most often appears in the “Dutch colonial revival” type, itself a misnomer as the form is a mix of Flemish and other influences. Stump, “The Dutch Colonial House.” 22 Jamila Moore Pewu notes, regarding an African-diasporic site in the US, that “the biggest threat to this endangered site was time itself,” referring to the changing and conflicting oral histories and related changes in community and political engagement. She calls for recovery of this semi-forgotten history via digital reconnaissance. Pewu, “Digital Reconnaissance,” 109.

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Figure 5.9: View of Willemstad, the Harbor of Curaçao, 1780, drawing and watercolor. Collection het Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Inv. nr. S.0163.

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methods of scholarship.23 While these structures don’t have a counterpart in downtown Willemstad, it should be presumed that much of Willemstad’s architecture was built with the labor of Africans and their descendants, both enslaved and free. Further study of the building techniques of the remaining kas di kunuku may perhaps enable comparison with Willemstad’s European-derived forms, showing the contribution of African vernacular building techniques to the city, but at the moment, this remains only a suggestion. Beyond the cultural influences that brought European and possibly African architecture to the Caribbean, there are aspects unique to Curaçao, two of which are reactions to the local environment: the bold colors and open galleries, and Curaçao’s whimsical curved gables, whose reason for being is unclear. Curaçao, unlike the Netherlands, is a warm, sunny, dry location, with an average temperature of 80F/27C year-round. Residents presumably found an architecture designed for a humid, cool, cloudy climate to be uncomfortable. Local lore says that the bold exterior colors seen throughout the city derive from a governor-general, who complained that the whitewashed exteriors in the bright sunshine hurt his eyes and imposed a rule in the early nineteenth century that the houses should be painted in colors.24 Apocryphal or not, an early watercolor of Willemstad shows white houses with red detailing (figure 5.9), while visitors have remarked on the colors from the early nineteenth-century, grayscale photographs suggest more variety, and twentieth-century color photographs confirm the practice. Colored paint is the most superficial and simple of stylistic changes, and has a big impact on impressions of the cityscape as a whole. Willemstad isn’t entirely unique in this feature, as many port cities share this colorfulness. An adaptation that affected the basic form of the city’s townhouses was the addition of open galleries, which allow air circulation.25 Early images of the city, prior to photographic evidence and therefore difficult to confirm, show covered arcaded balconies protruding from the upper floors of the Punda’s homes, supported by diagonal beams. (figure 5.9) These balconies appear to be hasty additions, made once residents recognized the discomfort of their tightly packed town houses. These upper-floor galleries persist in the arcaded spaces that front many of the homes of Punda, sometimes even stacked three open galleries high. I can imagine that an initial hanging balcony was later made more stable by building out a lower level, which was then integrated into the footprint of the building. The Penha building, taking advantage of its corner lot, has a full additional bay of these arcades. 23 The scholarship on oral traditions, especially the example of Sapali, in Sint Nicolaas, Slavery, demonstrates a potential way forward on this question. 24 An ordinance of 1817 codified the color requirement, discussed in Temminck Groll, Curaçao, 24–27. 25 Temminck Groll, Curaçao, 27–28, and 31 describes the galleries as a second generation of Willemstaders solving the problem of stifling interiors.

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Figure 5.10: Whimsical Curved Gables of Willemstad, 2014, photographs author. Clockwise from top left: Breedestraat 37, Heerenstraat 29–31, Handelskade 3, and Pietermaaiweg 16.

(figure 5.5) While some of these structures may have been planned from the initial building, in some examples throughout the city, awkward juxtapositions suggest these were afterthoughts, like the building on the left in figure 5.1, with its set-back gable in earlier photographs. If we take that early watercolor as evidence, these balconies featured rows of arches from the beginning, a classicizing feature prior to the nineteenth-century architecture of Scharloo and the neo-Palladian features discussed by Pruneti Winkel, underscoring that this style was present earlier. Finally, Curaçao’s curvy gables are a special local feature, present also in Dutch South Africa. (figure 5.10) These gables relate to the triangular gables of the Dutch townhouse, disguising the roof join but echoing it. They are a stylistic feature and can be updated without affecting the form of the building, similar to the classicizing features added and removed from buildings throughout the city. Tracing the source of these curvy gables is difficult: they are a more whimsical version of European eighteenth-century Rococo, and they also show affinity with Afro-Brazilian architecture, especially with their spirals.26 Since most builders in eighteenth-century Curaçao were free and enslaved Africans and their descendants, it is very tempting to posit that some of these builders contributed to this unique stylization, and that some may be African builders who came by way of Brazil (as indeed some of the Jewish merchants of Willemstad did), but this is unfortunately impossible to prove. The example of Breedestraat 3–5 is illustrative of the combination of forms and styles found in Punda. (figure 5.11) Today this light blue building is clearly horizontal 26 Hallen and de Benedetti, “Afro-Brazilian Mosques in West Africa”; and Soulillou, Rives Coloniales, see examples on 255, 258, 259.

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Figure 5.11: Details of Breedestraat 3–5, Willemstad. From left: ca. 1890, photograph Soublette et Fils (Collection Nationaal Museum van Wereldkulturen, Netherlands. Coll.nr. TM-60028736); ca. 1890–1895, photograph Soublette et Fils (Thomas Frederick Davis papers, Descriptive account of Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles, 1902, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA. mm 80003197); 1954, photograph H. van der Wal (Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed, Netherlands. TGGR-412); 2014 (photograph author).

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in emphasis, with a double-gable of low pediments over two rows of open arcades. Painted in contrasting white, these classical details are more striking than the Dutch aspects of the building. In the 1954 image, where the roof is visible, we see that this is a Dutch landhuis form, with spout gables facing the sides, and little dormer windows provide light and air to the attic. Going back in time, comparing the ca. 1890 photo to the ca. 1890–1895 photo, even at the sharp angle, we can see that the pedimented gables were an addition right around this time, though the arcades are present in all the photos. While this evidence doesn’t confirm the original appearance of Breedestraat 3–5, we can see that a Dutch landhuis form had open galleries on the façade, perhaps descendants of the hanging balconies of figure 5.9, providing air circulation as was needed in the heat. Classical features accumulated over time. This building, at the moment carefully preserved, reflects the multicultural past of Willemstad, including local adaptations, and change and accumulation over time. The historical buildings of Willemstad trace the island’s colonial demographics: the wealthy Dutch and Iberian Jewish merchants commissioned homes in the forms and styles that made sense to them, Dutch townhouses and classical villas, respectively. These were built, most likely, by enslaved and free laborers of African descent, who would have contributed their own practical techniques. And here we have the three main population groups of Curaçao, whose descendants built new structures and added onto existing structures, who updated their homes’ exteriors according to changing trends and shifting needs. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, historic preservation efforts further changed these structures. If the original buildings demonstrate the tastes of the wealthiest residents, the changes to the buildings over time help to show shifting demographics and power in Willemstad. The whole of Punda might look like figure 5.11, but instead, as we’ll see below, the trend is towards simplifying this complicated cultural history in favor of a single story, the Dutch.

The Curaçaoan People As has been noted several times already, Curaçao is home to a mixed population, primarily of European and African descent. While the indigenous population was decimated with European encounter, beginning here with Spanish arrival in 1499, the settlers and forced migrants to the island came from many backgrounds. Since 1634, when the Dutch took the island from Spain, until today, the island has been governed by the Dutch; with varying levels of semi-independence since 1954. When Willemstad was founded, it attracted wealthy merchant settlers from Europe, moreso than the city’s counterpart in Asia, Batavia, which drew middle- and

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lower-class European settlers. This divergence can be partially explained by the more permissive approach to private trade of the Dutch West India Company than the Dutch East India Company (VOC), as there were fortunes to be made in Willemstad in both private as well as large-scale illicit trade. These wealthy and soon-to-be wealthy merchants of Willemstad built fine townhouses with their ground floor warehouses along the quay and throughout the city. As expected, the dominant European population that settled in Willemstad was Dutch, and there has also long been a sizeable and influential Sephardic population, Iberian Jews, some of whom arrived via Brazil. Many Portuguese Jews, some of whom were Christian conversos, had settled in Portuguese Brazil in the sixteenth century, perhaps seeking distance from the Inquisition. As the Inquisition’s influence spread, and also with Dutch occupation of Brazil from 1630–1654, some relocated to Dutch locations like Curaçao, attracted by the Dutch official policy of religious tolerance. Willemstad’s Jewish population, however, was not afforded full citizenship until 1825.27 As in Batavia, the European population of Willemstad was not limited to these dominant populations, and there was a continual stream of migrants from nearby English, French, and Spanish colonies.28 The African-derived population outnumbered the Europeans in Willemstad and on Curaçao, although it was a smaller ratio than the plantation-driven economies elsewhere in the Caribbean. In a survey of 1789, Willemstad’s population of 11,543 was 17.3% white Protestants (many of Dutch derivation), 8.9% Sephardic Jews, 4.2% free white servants, 22.7% free Black and mixed-race people; and 47% enslaved Blacks—the conflation of religion, legal status, and race/ethnicity in these categories is telling of Curaçao’s demographics.29 Curaçao’s enslaved labored in households, on the island’s small-scale plantations, in the saltworks, or contracted out as sailors. Curaçao’s sizeable population of free Black citizens is sometimes noted retroactively as a sign of Dutch generosity and tolerance, yet many in this group were destitute, manumitted by their owners not out of generosity, but in times of economic downturn, to save the owners the cost of feeding and clothing them.30 Curaçao’s Black population was overwhelmingly Catholic, many converted by Spanish and Portuguese slavers. Throughout the company period, these three main populations: Dutch Protestants, Iberian Jews, and Black Catholics, both free and enslaved, remained relatively 27 Benjamin, Jews of the Dutch Caribbean, 54; Jews were also excluded from participating in the slave trade until 1674: Anderson and Dynes, Social Movements, 28. 28 Oostindie, Paradise Overseas, 19–20. 29 Population data from Rupert, Creolization and Contraband, 134. On the island overall, the Black and “colored” population was significantly higher in the same survey, with 21% white, 18% free Black and mixed race, and 61% enslaved: Oostindie, “Slave Resistance,” 5. 30 Oostindie, “Slave Resistance,” 3–4; Anderson and Dynes, Social Movements, 30.

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distinct communities, divided by racial and ethnic identity and prejudice, religious practice, and socioeconomic status. Mixing did occur, more between Curaçao’s white and Black populations than between the Dutch and Sephardic populations, and people who fell between these groups were identified on a hierarchy of perceived skin color.31 Reading the literature on Curaçao’s history and monuments, one finds a disturbing tendency to not only downplay the racial and cultural tensions, but even to note that despite a diverse population, the history is remarkably free of racism. In the early twentieth-century, Thomas Davis wrote “…it speaks well for Curaçao and favorably distinguishes it from the other West Indian Islands, that there is almost an entire absence of race prejudice.”32 This quote is followed by offensive language about which types of Curaçaoan Blacks were welcomed into white society, immediately contradicting the quoted statement. Following the anti-colonial movements and civil rights discourses of the mid-twentieth century, one might expect some improvement in this rhetoric, but unfortunately it continued, for instance in the popular history account of Hans Hannau, who wrote in 1975 that none of the Netherlands Antilles have spawned racial discrimination.33 A few aspects of Curaçaoan history across the centuries clearly contradict this “nothing to see here” rhetoric, including the island’s key role in the transatlantic slave trade, the celebrated 1795 uprising of enslaved people, and the 1969 May Revolution. As the capital of the West India Company, Willemstad was central to the Dutch slave economy.34 Slaving ships arrived in Willemstad’s harbor with their human cargo, and while most of these enslaved people would be sold and transferred to elsewhere in the Caribbean and the South American mainland, they were held on Curaçao to recover their health after the harrowing Middle Passage before being sold. Because the island didn’t have large-scale plantation slavery like elsewhere in the Americas, some suggest that Curaçao’s slavery was less cruel, but this does not excuse or lighten the reality of the approximately 100,000–150,000 Africans the Dutch shipped through Curaçao, and the enslavement of generations of their creole children through 1863 when slavery was abolished here. Further, as Linda Rupert notes, one’s race, rather than legal status of enslaved or free, precluded one’s legal treatment, so enslaved or free, the Black population of Willemstad and Curaçao has long suffered under a racist system.35 31 Rupert discusses how the three-group model is oversimplified in Creolization and Contraband, 136. 32 Davis, “Descriptive Account of Curaçao,” 28. The quote continues: “The Jews and Dutch constitute two distinct social elements; in the first case the negro is strictly debarred, and in the latter only those of the highest education and intelligence are admitted.” 33 Hannau, The Netherlands Antilles in Full Color, 7. 34 Page, The Dutch Triangle, 119–135 35 Rupert, Creolization and Contraband, 145–147.

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A central moment in the racial history of the island, which is celebrated today as a national holiday on August 17, was the 1795 slave rebellion, led by Tula Rigaud of the Knip Plantation.36 It is natural to presume that the upraising was against slavery, and this movement should be considered in the context of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) and the French Revolution (1789–1799).37 However, scholars often note that working conditions were at root, and this is where improvements occurred after the Revolt was crushed: better food and clothing, Sundays off, and more humane punishments. This intersection of a racist economic system and labor rights is mirrored in accounts of the 1969 May Revolution. On May 30, 1969, striking oil refinery workers and sympathy strikers convened for a rally in front of the Shell refinery on Sint Anna Bai, and marched on Fort Amsterdam, aiming to replace the government, passing through Punda on their way.38 Rebuffed at the fort by police, who shot the protest’s leader, Papa Godett, the crowd spread through Punda and then Otrobanda, looting and setting fires; two people were killed and sixty buildings were destroyed. Punda’s density made it difficult for firefighters to stop the blazes, another unanticipated failure of Dutch urban planning. William Anderson and Russell Dynes’s discussion of the context of the riots blames social stratification (by class, race/ethnicity, religion, and island-born versus new immigrants), the strained relationship between the Antilles and the Netherlands (after the 1954 semi-independence), and labor issues. The movement lead to changes in the governing coalition and shattered the idea that race and class were non-issues in Curaçao. Scholars of social movements and identity, thankfully, have built a nuanced discourse around race, religion, and social standing in Curaçao.39 It is certainly a complicated situation, with multiple groups clashing and melding against a backdrop of colonialism across four centuries. Sociologist René Römer describes a culture which despite the divisions along racial and religious lines found common ground in creole culture and especially the creole language, Papiamentu, which combines elements of African languages, Portuguese and Spanish, and English and Dutch. 40 When the Dutch Royal Shell refinery was opened in 1915, creole identity 36 Dalhuizen, Geschiedenis van de Antillen, 62–65. For the 1795 revolt and those preceding, see Oostindie, “Slave Resistance,” especially p. 6–10. For more context on the relationship of this revolt to emancipation movements across the Caribbean, see Klooster, “The Rising Expectations of Free and Enslaved Blacks,” especially p. 66–69 (on Curaçao). Tula is one of the featured stores of the Rijksmuseum’s slavery exhibition: Sint Nicolaas, Slavery, 220–239. 37 Oostindie, “Slave Resistance.” 38 Anderson and Dynes, Social Movements, 4–6 is a quick synthesis, and then the rest of the book considers context. 39 For a good overview of this scholarship, see Allen, “Toward Reconstituting Caribbean Identity Discourse.” 40 Römer, “Ethnicity and Social Change.”

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was further strengthened as the island-born confronted their differences from the new migrants from the Netherlands (Dutch Protestants in management positions) and from around the Caribbean (primarily Black Protestant laborers). 41 Divisions continue to exist along racial, religious, and class lines, but Römer also notes an increasing secularization of all groups which has broken down some barriers. Curaçao has a complicated and diverse demographics, reflected in its historical architecture, the language Papiamentu, and the local musical form, Tambú. 42 The latter are currently celebrated in popular culture, as a growing movement of creole Curaçaoan identity. Papiamentu is spoken by the majority of households on the island, and in the last few decades has been elevated after years of suppression in schools and public culture. In sum, Curaçao has had, since European conquest, a diverse, multicultural population, in flux as new populations arrive and old populations form new alliances. Racial and ethnic identity have been contested and in tension. Throughout this time, the buildings of Willemstad have most visibly reflected the presence of those two economically dominant white populations: the Dutch and the Iberian Jews, though the Africans and their descendants provided much of the labor to build these structures. The dominant populations have had the resources to build and remodel, and their houses reflect social changes through architectural style. Willemstad’s buildings reflect change over time, and as we shall see in the next section, that change doesn’t always reflect the demographics, but instead reflects the shifting of power and redefinition of Dutchness.

Tracing Change over Time Willemstad’s buildings, the Dutch townhouse form embellished with Dutch or classicizing features alongside Curaçaoan flair, reflect the contributions of the island’s diverse demographics, particularly that of the dominant Dutch and Sephardic populations. The cityscape as a whole, and individual structures, show these multiple influences. Examining change over time in Willemstad, however, shows a story of multiculturalism falling away in favor of homogenization, as the cityscape is Dutched. The wealth of representations of this cityscape over the city’s four centuries, and especially photography since the late nineteenth century, enables this closer look. The historical Dutch appearance of the example discussed at the opening of this chapter was a mid-twentieth-century adaptation of a building which earlier had been quite different in appearance. (figure 5.1) In this 41 Römer, “Ethnicity and Social Change,” 161. 42 On Papiamentu, Benjamin, Jews of the Dutch Caribbean, 82–85; Rupert, “Trading Globally, Speaking Locally”; and Fouse, The Story of Papiamentu. On Tambú, de Jong, Tambú.

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section, I’ll examine this question of change over time more closely, to show how the appearance of the city’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century buildings diverge from Willemstad’s diverse and changing demographics. Willemstad’s architecture today reflects history, but this is increasingly a manufactured Dutch “Golden Age” which evokes only partially the island’s history. Dutch identity is a shrinking factor in heterogeneous and creole Curaçaoan culture and the relationship between the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the semi-decolonized Dutch Antilles is shifting. Considering the full cityscape over centuries is a distant, rather than close, approach, which reflects the experience of a visitor, who strolls along the street taking in a general impression. While each building in the downtown has its singular story of adaptation and renovation, these stories are difficult to access, with uncertain records and on the scale of 200+ buildings. Each building has a history of different owners, and the vast majority of buildings currently have private owners, who have made various choices for a number of reasons. Furthermore, many of these buildings have been repurposed from residential to commercial use. 43 What is important to see, however, is that over time, there is an accumulating trend, which is reflected both in the alterations made to historic buildings, and also in new architecture. What is the evidence of this change over time? The cityscapes that have been continually captured since the city’s founding, first in drawings and watercolors, and from the nineteenth century, in photographs, and finally, the buildings themselves can be examined as they stand today. In early depictions of Willemstad, such as the 1780 watercolor, we see a densely packed urban fabric, adjacent to the fort. (figure 5.9) White houses with red roofs and regularly repeating features of triangular gables and arcaded balconies crowd together, almost certainly a shorthand for the types of structures rather than a detailed record. These buildings are similar to the Dutch townhouse form examined above, but are less dramatically vertical. However, those triangular gables seem to mark these as Dutch-styled buildings. I’ve argued elsewhere that images like this, which circulated in Europe as eye-witness accounts of exotic locales, cannot be understood as straightforward representations of the colonial city’s architecture. 44 Dutch travel accounts regularly placed Dutch buildings around the world as an act of colonization within the European imaginary, regardless of the actual appearance of a city. Relatedly, draftsmen at home in the Dutch Republic, having never seen the places they depicted, filled in their imagery with Dutch architecture, like the little spout gables that peek out of the bastion in the lower right in figure 5.2 and that surround the Penha Building in the 1800 43 Changing use of the space, whether temporary or permanent, introduces changes outside of the scope of this project, primarily to the interior arrangements and to the experience of the interior space. On comparable examples in Chicago, see Sen, “Transcultural Placemaking.” 44 Kehoe, “Imaginary Gables.”

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drawing in figure 5.5. These earliest images of the city suggest the Dutch appearance dominated, with some local elements like the curvy gable and hanging balcony, however we cannot trust these images to reflect the actual appearance, and it is to be expected that they will be heavily Dutch in appearance simply because of Dutch colonization of Curaçao. From approximately 1885 to the present, we have a more secure method of tracing the appearance of these buildings, with photography. Photography is, of course, still a representation, but it has an indexical quality not present in freehand renderings. The photography studio of Soublette et Fils exercised artistic license in their choices of views and focus, and provided a collection of photographic documents of Willemstad. They show us the value they placed on the architecture of the island, by recording it, and the interest they anticipated for the postcards they printed and the images they sold to publishers. They also produced documentation of the real appearance of Willemstad’s cityscape around the turn of the twentieth century, which can be fruitfully compared with later photographic documentation. Many of the Soublette photographs show buildings with mixed styles that reflect the city’s demographics, like this image that author Thomas Davis acquired in 1901–1902. 45 (figure 5.12) This shows a street scene along Breedestraat in Otrobanda, a road that passes across the pontoon bridge into Punda. On this side of the bay, houses are more modest in size and not so tightly packed, and there’s a mix of tall Dutch gables like the fourth house from the left, column-supported upper-level balconies, and classicizing features like heavy cornices, low hipped roofs, and fanlights over windows and doors. Between the views captured by Soublette et Fils and photographs I made during fieldwork in Willemstad in 2014, there’s a steady loss of this mix. We’ve already seen the alterations made to the brown Handelskade townhouse, where a two- or three-story townhouse with classical decorations had its façade reworked into a very Dutch “Golden Age”-looking brick spout-gabled townhouse, in the first half of the twentieth century. (figure 5.1) This building, in fact, stands out on the Handelskade for appearing to be the oldest and most conservatively Dutch building, which is strange considering the twentieth-century renovation. Its neighbor, Handelskade 1, currently an orange spout-gabled townhouse hosting a restaurant, went through a similar transformation, which is also visible in figure 5.1. In the earlier images, there are four square windows above arched openings on the ground floor, and a shed roof angled against a spout gable. The building shows a few classicizing features in the early photos: arches at ground level and the contrasting horizontal cornice, but otherwise is less adorned than its neighbor. The set-back gable suggests that the current façade may have begun as a hanging balcony, later 45 This same view also exists in a hand-colored postcard version, see Leiden University Library, Digital Collections, KITLV 7609, http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:784688, accessed December 13, 2022.

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Figure 5.12: Breedestraat in Otrobanda, 1895–1900, photograph Soublette et Fils. Thomas Frederick Davis papers, Descriptive account of Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles, 1902, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA. mm 80003197.

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Figure 5.13: Breedestraat 24. Left: unknown photographer, detail, 1945–1960 (Collection Nationaal Museum van Wereldkulturen, Netherlands. Coll.nr. TM-60060876). Right: 2014 (photograph author).

incorporated into an extension of the building outward. Along with its brown neighbor, before the middle of the century, the façade was reworked to bring forward the spout gable, giving the building a historical Dutch look. This building is more Curaçaoan in flavor, with a slimmer spout gable, and the bright orange paint, yet its ultimate form is unmistakably a Dutch townhouse. Elsewhere in Punda, similar transformations take place, as with Breedestraat 24, which was rebuilt in 1954. (figure 5.13) The earlier building on the site, like its neighbor at right (Breedestraat 20–22, now blue), included Dutch features (a tall narrow form with a spout gable facing the side), two levels of gallery extensions on the front with classicizing open arcades, topped with an imaginatively gabled dormer window, featuring spirals and undulating curves. The building that replaced it has a prominent spout gable at the corner, and the galleries are plain and rectilinear, a Dutch aesthetic version of the previously classicizing features. While this building has a modern appearance, its references are to the historical Dutch townhouse, with a nod towards Curaçaoan color— yellow with white details, like the Penha Building (figure 5.5)—and no classicizing features. This shift towards historical Dutch form and style is also seen in more recent architecture built in Willemstad, infill that replaces buildings either fallen into disrepair, in need of upgrade, or damaged in the 1969 fires. Towards the center of the Handelskade, two such buildings have been replaced by a single residential building in the present day, Handelskade 6. (figure 5.14) In 1888, the site included two Curaçaoan Dutch buildings: at right, a typical Dutch townhouse, and at left, a Dutch landhuis. By 1958, the landhuis has been transformed with the expansion of the second story, now barely recognizable. The townhouse too has been subtly

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Figure 5.14: Handelskade 6, details. From left: 1888, photograph Soublette et Fils (Leiden University Library, Netherlands, Digital Collections. KITLV 5325); 1954, photograph H. van der Wal (Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed, Netherlands, Collectie Temminck Groll. TGGR-367); 2014 (photograph author).

altered, with taller window openings and a taller gable, perhaps an extension of the roof at the rear. It has a more vertical, Dutch townhouse-like emphasis. While the stylistic trend of the landhuis’s renovation is unclear, and the townhouse’s trend is towards more Dutch, fire damage during the 1969 riots ultimately led to both structures being replaced with this cream-colored, much larger building. Certainly an entirely different building form, with its bigger footprint and low-sloped roofs, nonetheless it is striking that the designer broke up the façade with a nod to the Dutch townhouse. Open balconies frame a five-story, flat-façaded bay with triangular gable, with another one facing to the side, and a similar, hipped-roof bay at left. It doesn’t precisely reflect the townhouse: the angle of the roof precludes a taller Dutch-styled gable, yet it still seems a deliberate quotation, meant to fit in with the form and style of surrounding buildings and lend a historical and local air to this late twentieth-century building. Across the water, in Otrobanda, there are a number of redevelopment projects which make an effort to evoke the local history, also, like the renovations in Punda, raising the Dutch history above the rest. The Renaissance Hotel and Casino, a Marriott property, adjoins the Rif Fort and the cruise port, and was built in 2008–2009. (figure 5.15) The shopping corridor recreates the narrow streets of Punda, with what appears to be a row of tall townhouses but is in fact a single building. The bays are differentiated with vertical splashes of color—yellow, blue, red, and green, with triangular gables poking up. The bold colors reference Willemstad, but we don’t see the classicizing features that helped to reference Willemstad’s diverse history through architecture—instead the primary style referenced is the Dutch plain, tall façades. A further Dutch reference, not seen elsewhere in Willemstad, but familiar in the urban centers of the Netherlands, are the single-window-wide segments (here in green and blue), which in Amsterdam squeeze extra building space out of what were once narrow alleys. Likewise, another recent construction cleverly mimics the historic Dutch style, while standing apart as contemporary. (figure 5.16) This area was also heavily

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Figure 5.15: Renaissance Hotel, Willemstad. 2014. Photograph author.

Figure 5.16: Brionplein, Willemstad. 2014. Photograph author.

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damaged in the 1969 fires. As in all three examples of modern historicizing structures, these are larger, wider buildings, with interiors that are presumably more comfortable and accessible than the Dutch townhouse, including elevators and HVAC systems, and horizontally rather than vertically arranged spaces. The stylization of this façade again gives the impression of separate narrow structures, a nod to those townhouses of Willemstad’s Handelskade and Dutch urban spaces. These façades appear to float in front of the real structure, with the tops of aqua and yellow segments forming postmodern broken pediments that are a far cry from Willemstad’s classicizing features but maybe approach the whimsy of the Curaçaoan curves. The shorter pink and blue segments curve out slightly from the building at top and bottom, further underscoring their separation from the building’s structure. I’m tempted to see this as a reference to the characteristic outward lean of the Netherland’s historic townhouses, which accommodated the hoisting of large objects to upper floors via their windows. As with the previous example, the references to Curaçao’s historic architecture is limited to the local features of bold colors and creative gables, and Dutch features seen elsewhere in Curaçao or even only in the Netherlands (like the window-wide bays and outward lean). The classicizing features which elsewhere signaled the contributions of other European groups are absent or barely visible in set-back hipped roofs. In sum, new construction, aiming to fit in and reference Willemstad’s distinctive architecture, follows the same trajectory as the renovations of historical buildings: an over-reliance on Dutch features, with just a few Curaçaoan references, erasing the multiculturalism that was present throughout the centuries in the city’s buildings and population.

Conclusion Into the twentieth century, the vernacular architecture of Willemstad reflected the history of this city—a population which was from the beginning a mixture of various Europeans and the African diasporic peoples who built the structures, and a population which sometimes remained separate, sometimes mixed, and often clashed. These fluctuations can be seen as the buildings have changed over time—as new features accumulated, buildings were adjusted to be more comfortable in the hot dry climate, and spaces are renovated for new owners and new uses. Over the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, however, the trajectory of the buildings has diverged from the trajectory of the population, so that the buildings increasingly appear more Dutch in style, excluding the classicizing elements, and with nods to the local through color. This shift appears to simplify the history of the island, which is increasingly hidden from residents and visitors. A clear story emerges, of the connection of the

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island to the Netherlands, and specifically to the Dutch “Golden Age” of the early modern period. The more complicated story, of multiple influences and accretion of change over time, falls away. The Dutch “Golden Age” appears to be a time of simple, practical buildings, quaint and charming, perhaps a little naive—as the discomfort of closely spaced narrow townhouses in the heat becomes apparent. The story that Willemstad currently tells erases the colorfulness of the island’s past—its Jewish past, the relationships among the island’s cultural groups, Curaçao’s role in the slave trade. This is a story that does not seem to reflect the current population of the island, where Dutchness is but one of many cultural influences. Like the clashing and intermingling population of Willemstad, explanations for this shift in focus are myriad and conflicting. Individual property owners make choices about renovations that are personal but also reflect a larger conversation. A simplified Dutch story serves the cultural interests of Dutch-identifying residents, but also, surprisingly, Curaçaoan national interests. The tourist industry promotes the Dutch architectural angle, while UNESCO designation and historic preservation standards also have a role to play in these trends. For Dutch residents of Willemstad, whether more recent transplants or generations-long islanders, connecting to the Dutch past has clear appeal. If the Netherlands is home for these residents, the visual and architectural connection to the Dutch “Golden Age” is comforting and nostalgic, as was the case in Dutch Batavia. More insidiously, renovating this past of the island may also appeal to some as a reminder of the former, and in some ways continuing, Dutch domination. A growing sensitivity to the diversity of the population, and the long-term oversize influence of the Dutch suggests this trend may be reversing: recent planning efforts are seeking a broader range of stakeholders. 46 However, many Curaçaoans who don’t identify as Dutch have also been invested in maintaining ties to the Netherlands. Gert Oostindie notes that as early as the 1910s, in opposition to suggestions that the Netherlands consider selling off their Caribbean possessions, Curaçaoan elites, specifically the white population (both Protestant and Jewish), “expressed the idea of shared belonging, of centuries-long and, hence mutually obliging, ties.”47 From the 1954 Statute that semi-decolonized the Antilles and Surinam, which was planned as a step towards independence, there has been a reluctance among Antilleans to fully decolonize. Observing the challenges that nearby Suriname has experienced since independence (economic troubles, large-scale migration to the Netherlands), the Dutch Caribbean islands have sought instead to strengthen the ties to the Netherlands. 48 The cityscape may have 46 Tromp, Transforming Urban Curaçao. 47 Gert Oostindie, “Curaçao: Insular Nationalism,” 256. 48 Gert Oostindie, Paradise Overseas, 111–135, especially 114–117.

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a role to play in these efforts: a celebration of uncontested and positive Dutchness signals the continuing relationship, and may indeed serve the non-Dutch-identifying Curaçaoans who benefit from continued relations, complicated as this may be. Like many former colonies, especially in the Caribbean, Curaçao relies heavily on tourism for revenue, alongside the banking and oil refinery industries. Willemstad’s reference to a charming version of the Dutch “Golden Age,” and its reliance on architecture to tell that story, makes Curaçao a unique destination in the Caribbean, appealing to tourists and cruise ship traffic. While most Caribbean islands sell visions of tropical paradise to tourists, Curaçao has that and a historic urban core. 49 Views of the Handelskade adorn brochures and trinkets, both the things that entice visitors to come and those they take away as souvenirs. Curaçao has long celebrated its architecture, from the earliest travel publications and postcards that featured Soublette et Fils images, to the present. A simple story of the island’s Dutchness is easier to communicate in shorthand or on walking tours than the more complicated story. Tourists with a special interest in Jewish history can visit the synagogue and Jewish cemetery, so this history is not erased, but its intermingling is lost with the nichification of the historical tourism industry. Historic preservation is another factor in the renovation of Willemstad’s story. Generally, historic preservation aims to restore a structure to a single, specific moment, which is a complicated decision requiring research and difficult choices. There are counter-examples, of course, that evoke change over time, but generally projects aim to preserve the original state of a building or freeze in time a significant historical moment or historical figure’s experience of the space. This attention to a single moment helps to create a clear and uncomplicated story, though even restoring to a Dutch story requires involvement with the colonial past. The twentieth century witnessed growing efforts at historic preservation in Willemstad, which have done much to preserve this cityscape and contribute to the awareness of architectural history here, and this is almost always a selective history.50 Finally, historic Willemstad’s designation on the UNESCO World Heritage List is intertwined with both the tourist industry and historic preservation. Willemstad was listed in 1997, and UNESCO describes the city as unique, historical, and multicultural. The report describes the several cultures that have influenced the growth and changing appearance of the city, and the various organizations and regulations responsible for ensuring continuing adherence to the UNESCO plan.51 Willemstad’s trend towards Dutchness appears to contradict the UNESCO designation, which 49 For the Caribbean celebration of the tropics as a tourist’s and colonist’s paradise, specifically Jamaica, see Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics. 50 Van Ditzhuijzen, Geschiedenis in steen; and Temminck Groll, Curaçao, 68–70. 51 “The Historic Area of Willemstad is a colonial ensemble in the Caribbean, which illustrates the organic growth of a multicultural community over three centuries. It also represents a remarkable historic port

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specifically called out the multiculturalism of this place as a crossroads, and it seems to me that the trend away from multiculturalism threatens this status. Also, similar to the prizing of Dutchness, UNESCO’s prizing of an uncomplicated, tension-free multiculturalism is itself a simplification. With so much ink spilled on celebrating the racism-free past of the island, despite so much evidence to the contrary, a simple salute to multiculturalism is also a celebratory cleaning up of the past. Yes, Willemstad has a multicultural history, but it is one of tension and change, which has repercussions to the present day, and cleaning up the past does not allow honest and open reflection on that. Further, many have critiqued UNESCO for not serving local needs, so while it may have brought prestige and attention to Willemstad, it may also have introduced further problems.52 I have not definitively answered the question of why Willemstad’s cityscape is trending towards a stronger sense of Dutchness, because there are a number of motivations, internal and external, for the many private owners of buildings in the city. These owners have made decisions, not collectively, but individually. Yet the trend is unmistakably towards a simpler, charming, and more innocent past, where the hierarchies and atrocities of colonialism and its aftermath can be overlooked. In the final chapter of this book, I’ll turn briefly to a contemporary celebration of Dutchness, which likewise succeeds in excluding the present realities of race in America.

Works Cited Allen, Rose Mary. “Toward Reconstituting Caribbean Identity Discourse from within the Dutch Caribbean Island of Curaçao.” In Freedom, Power and Sovereignty – The Thought of Gordon K. Lewis. Caribbean Reasonings, 94–110. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2015. Anderson, William A., and Russell R. Dynes. Social Movements. Violence and Change. The May Movement in Curaçao. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1975. Barron, Laignee. “‘Unesco-cide’: Does World Heritage Status Do More Harm Than Good?” The Guardian, August 30, 2017. Benjamin, Alan F. Jews of the Dutch Caribbean: Exploring Ethnic Identity on Curaçao. London: Routledge, 2002. Chopra, Preeti. Joint Enterprise: Indian Elites and the Making of British Bombay. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Dalhuizen, Leo, et al., eds. Geschiedenis van de Antillen: Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao, Saba, Sint Eustatius, Sint Maarten. Zutphen: Walberg Pers, 1997. town in the Caribbean in the period of Dutch expansion with significant town planning and architectural qualities.” UNESCO, “Historic Area of Willemstad.” 52 Barron, “‘Unesco-cide.’”

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Davis, Thomas Frederick. “Descriptive Account of Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles.” Unpublished manuscript, 1902. Library of Congress, Miscellaneous Manuscripts collection, mm 80003197. van Ditzhuijzen, Jeannette. Geschiedenis in steen: De ontwikkeling van de monumentenzorg op Curaçao. Amsterdam: KIT Publishers, 2012. Fatah-Black, Karwan. White Lies and Black Markets: Evading Metropolitan Authority in Colonial Suriname, 1650–1800. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Fouse, Gary C. The Story of Papiamentu: A Study in Slavery and Language. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002. Hallen, Barry and Carla de Benedetti. “Afro-Brazilian Mosques in West Africa.” MIMAR 29 (September 1988): 16–23. Hannau, Hans W. The Netherlands Antilles in Full Color. New York: Hastings House Publishers, 1975. Hochman, Brian. Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2014. Huijgers, Dolf and Lucky Ezechiëls. Landhuizen van Curaçao and Bonaire. Amsterdam: Persimmons Management B.V., 1992. van den Hurk, Jeroen. “New Amsterdam and Old New York: Remnants of Netherlandic Architecture in Late-17th Century New York City.” The Gotham Center for New York City History, January 12, 2021. https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/new-amsterdam-and-oldnew-york-remnants-of-netherlandic-architecture-in-late-17th-century-new-york-city, accessed February 14, 2021. Hutchinson, William Francis. A Trip to Venezuela and Curaçao by the Red Line. Providence: Providence Press Company, 1887. de Jong, Nanette. Tambú: Curaçao’s African-Caribbean Ritual and the Politics of Memory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. Kehoe, Marsely L. “Imaginary Gables: The Visual Culture of Dutch Architecture in the Indies.” Journal of Early Modern History 20 (2016): 462–493. van der Klooster, Olga and Michel Bakker. Architectuur en Bouwcultuur in Suriname. Amsterdam: KIT Publishers, 2009. Klooster, Wim. Illicit Riches: Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648–1795. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1998. Klooster, Wim. “The Rising Expectations of Free and Enslaved Blacks in the Greater Caribbean.” In Curaçao in the Age of Revolutions, 1795–1800, edited by Wim Klooster and Gert Oostindie, 57–74. Leiden: KITLV, 2011. Kniffen, Fred. “Folk Housing: Key to Diffusion.” In Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture, edited by Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach, 3–26. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986. Oostindie, Gert. Paradise Overseas: The Dutch Caribbean: Colonialism and its Transatlantic Legacies. Oxford: Macmillan, 2005.

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Temminck Groll, C.L. et al. Curaçao: Willemstad, City of Monuments. The Hague: Gary Schwarz/SDU Publishers, 1990. Temminck Groll, C.L., ed. The Dutch Overseas: Architectural Survey: Mutual Heritage of Four Centuries in Three Continents. Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 2002. Thompson, Krista A. An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Tromp, Caspar et al. Transforming Urban Curaçao. Community and Expert-Based Visioning for Localizing the New Urban Agenda (Copenhagen, United Nations Office for Project Services, 2019). https://isocarp.org/app/uploads/2019/04/UNOPS_ TransformingUrbanCuracao.pdf, accessed January 28, 2021. UNESCO. “Historic Area of Willemstad, Inner City and Harbour, Curaçao.” https://whc. unesco.org/en/list/819/, accessed September 2, 2015. Zink, Clifford W. “Dutch Framed Houses in New York and New Jersey.” Winterthur Portfolio 22, nr. 4 (Winter, 1987): 265–294.

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6. Conclusion: The “Golden Age” Today Abstract: The conclusion considers non-imperial efforts to revise the Dutch “Golden Age” into something wholly Dutch. This chapter includes a brief consideration of the current celebration of a bucolic, quaint, and imagined Dutch culture in Holland, MI, in the annual Tulip Time festival, by a conservative religious community that migrated to the United States in the nineteenth century in a rejection of Dutchness. In an age of growing multiculturalism and cultural nationalism, and escalating clashes over what “Dutch” means, the question of how and why the past is revised to serve the present remains imperative. Keywords: Tulip Time, nostalgia, community, Dutch diaspora

In this book, I’ve explored how the seventeenth-century Dutch “Golden Age” has been revised by subsequent generations to deliberately forget negative aspects of the period, so that reminders of this period are positive and innocent. Through four case studies, we’ve seen that just as the Dutch Republic was established in the late sixteenth century, the Dutch showed their desire to control world trade, through legal argument and piracy. After immense successes in the first half of the seventeenth century, Dutch trade domination began to slip away, and instead the Dutch redefined their success as the owners, rather than importers, of rich goods. In the eighteenth-century colonial city, Dutch behavior threatened to expose the stratification of Dutch domestic and colonial society, and so this behavior was redefined as unDutch. And as the twentieth century progressed, a multicultural city has downplayed its dynamism in favor of a less-diverse, Dutch-dominated view of the past. Instead of domination we see freedom, instead of trade we see wealth, instead of hierarchy we see egalitarianism, and instead of racial conflict we see tolerance. The material and visual culture and the built environment that were created in the early modern Dutch Republic, and later examples that evoke this “Golden Age,” are symbols, in Maurice Halbwachs’s formulation, around which many Dutch people tell and retell their stories. But these examples also lay bare how these stories have changed over time, which means that both the positive and negative aspects of the “Golden Age” can be revisited and reconsidered, in all their messy complications.

Kehoe, M.L., Trade, Globalization, and Dutch Art and Architecture: Interrogating Dutchness and the Golden Age. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463723633_ch06

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Rather than shoring up an innocent version of the past, this careful examination of these objects and landscapes, alongside an engagement with the history of Dutch involvement in the world, requires grappling with the challenges of the past. The Dutch Republic explored and innovated, but also failed and enslaved. This has repercussions to the present, when race and belonging are still hotly debated in the Netherlands. Only if named can these problems be addressed, and if ignored, they will only compound as those who lay claim to the golden parts of this past reject those who see and experience the tarnish. In this conclusion, I want to turn away from the history of Dutch imperialism to consider a manifestation of the Dutch “Golden Age” that is not entangled in the colonial past, but likewise leans on the supposed innocence of this culture. In western Michigan, in the upper Midwest United States, a Dutch diaspora community thrives, centered around the cities of Grand Rapids and Holland.1 This community was founded by a group of conservative religious Dutch, many from the province of Friesland, who settled at the shore of Lake Michigan by the mouth of Lake Macatawa in 1847, a landscape reminiscent of the Atlantic coast of the Dutch Republic and its tropical versions at Batavia (Jakarta, Indonesia) and Willemstad, Curaçao. This community’s motivation was religious freedom, as their conservative faith hearkened back to the Calvinism of the early Dutch Republic, for which they faced persecution in the Netherlands. In Holland, Michigan, they founded the Christian Reformed Church in 1857, in opposition to the more liberal Reformed Church of America (a branch of the Dutch Reformed Church). There were, of course, also economic interests, as American land was considered cheap and freely available, despite the continued Indigenous presence. While the Dutch-American community looked to the past in their religious conservatism, they also looked to the present and future, and later generations retained a conservative bent but also embraced American culture. This shift is expressed in the architecture of Holland’s Hope College, where the earliest campus buildings were built in the distinctly American historicist styles representing the many European origins of America’s settlers: Italianist Revival (Van Vleck Hall, 1857), Victorian (President’s Home, 1892), and Richardsonian Romanesque (Graves Hall, 1894). (figure 6.1) As in Willemstad, the campus buildings that look the oldest and most Dutch (Voorhees Hall, 1907; Lubbers Hall, 1942) are more recent, and reach back to sixteenth-century Flanders with patterned brickwork, contrasting stone, and stepped gables. (figure 6.2) The turn towards the display of Dutchness in material culture and the built environment is nostalgic, a return to a historical and somewhat imaginary Dutchness, seemingly in contrast to the values of a community that rejected the Netherlands to come to America. 1

The definitive history of Holland is Swierenga, Holland, Michigan.

Conclusion: The “Golden Age” Today 

Figure 6.1: Van Vleck Hall, Hope College, Holland Michigan, built 1857. Photograph, ca. 1859. Holland, MI, USA, Joint Archives of Holland, Photograph Collection. H88-PH5470.

Figure 6.2: Lubbers Hall, Hope College, Holland Michigan, built 1942. Undated photograph. Holland, MI, USA, Joint Archives of Holland, Photograph Collection. H88-PH5260-008.

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Annette Stott, in her study of American “Holland Mania,” notes that circa 1900 there was a general American affinity with an ideal of a Dutch nation that felt familiar, including a parallel origin story and “Protestantism, republicanism, and perceived ideals of democracy and personal freedoms.”2 This manifested in an explosion of Dutchness in visual culture (ranging from fine art to advertising), vernacular architecture (like the “Dutch colonial” house), and overall in calls to detach from the notion of English origin for American culture. Stott notes, however, that all manifestations of Dutchness were historical in nature, reaching into the “Golden Age,” becoming a touristy stereotype. She even notes that as early as 1910, travel books lamented that “Americans view the Netherlands through an out-of-date and childish lens.”3 Howard Wiarda brings this observation to the present, arguing in his 2007 book that the Dutch-American community of West Michigan and the Netherlands are “so far apart culturally and ideologically as to represent two very different societies with almost no connection except maybe nostalgia between them.”4 We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that when Holland (MI) began its annual tradition of the Tulip Time festival in 1929, it was founded by residents without Dutch ancestry. It celebrates a historical and nostalgic view of Dutch culture which has hardly any relationship to the contemporary Netherlands. Local school children perform Dutch dances in stereotypical Dutch costumes and wooden shoes, marching bands play, and local politicians parade among carnival food stands selling hot dogs and funnel cake. The festival happens in early May as hundreds of thousands of tulip bulbs bloom across the city. The monochrome tulip beds in downtown parks and at Windmill Island are a miniature version of the picturesque tulip fields of the homeland, the only true connection to the Netherlands of today. Holland (MI) makes a familiar and expensive attempt to control the blooms by replanting annually so that no bulb appears out of place, rather than allowing these perennials to regenerate. This effort at control in the face of nature recalls Dutch control of free trade, discussed in chapter 2. The tradition of Tulip Time and the culture of this region of Michigan, like the case studies of this book, and Holland Mania, hearken back to a cleaned-up past, with some authentic references and some invented traditions. What’s the harm in this? The residents of Holland come together around the city’s shared history to raise revenue, support local businesses, and learn about quaint and innocent traditions (no matter how invented). They aren’t celebrating nor denying the dark history of colonialism, as occurred in the other case studies of this book. There is no revival of Zwarte Piet, thankfully. 2 Stott, Holland Mania, 10. 3 Stott, Holland Mania, 264. 4 Wiarda, The Dutch Diaspora, 24.

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However, Holland, like the rest of the United States, like the Netherlands, does have a history and present where hierarchies, racism, and exclusion are fundamental to daily life. West Michigan has long celebrated its Dutch heritage, to the exclusion of the other cultures present. The history of the Dutch migrants settling on Indigenous land is not referenced in these celebrations, nor does the significant Latinx population (according to the US Census Bureau, Holland presently has a population that is about 22% Hispanic) find a place in Tulip Time. Nearby Grand Rapids census data shows its population is 19% Black. These are not new populations, but people who have been a significant presence in these cities for generations, yet they have struggled to find purchase in these communities in the face of overwhelming Dutch-American culture. In his exploration of Grand Rapids, Wiarda implies that the non-Dutch residents are new communities, not present when he grew up in Grand Rapids in the 1940s and 1950s.5 In reality, these are only newly visible communities to the majority white population which continues to ignore the region’s diversity. In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Holland launched a #oneholland campaign on social media, and a perusal of the Instagram posts with that hashtag shows cute white children among the tulips, products for sale on Holland’s main street (8th Street), and Dutch buildings.6 While the campaign includes text in both English and Spanish, the #oneholland logo features a lighthouse, a Dutch townhouse, and a windmill, which, as in Willemstad, celebrates the Dutch heritage with a nod to the local, but without reference to the non-Dutch heritage.7 There are important ongoing efforts to support and celebrate Holland’s Latinx community, notably the work of Latin Americans United for Progress (LAUP, founded 1964) and Tulipanes Latino Art & Film Festival. In 2021, the Holland Museum featured an exhibit in collaboration with Hope College on the history of LAUP, and another organization, Alliance for Cultural and Ethnic Harmony (ACEH, founded 1999), seeks to build relationships among Holland’s diverse population. However, there is also backlash in the community towards efforts to represent the local population more equitably, and I hope the city continues to do better. When we look to history to understand our present, we have a choice: we can either celebrate an untarnished view of the past, sometimes unknowingly and sometimes explicitly smoothing over past wrongdoings and replicating these problems into the present, or we can look to the past to understand the inequities 5 Wiarda, The Dutch Diaspora, 28. 6 The campaign is sponsored by the City of Holland, Downtown Holland, the Holland Area Visitors Bureau, and Tulip Time: https://www.holland.org/oneholland, accessed June 26, 2021. 7 More specifically this logo represents “Big Red” (the twentieth-century lighthouse at the entrance to the Holland Channel), a small Dutch building whose curvy gable is reminiscent of those in Willemstad (see chapter 5, figure 5.10), and DeZwaan Windmill at Windmill Island, Holland, which was imported from the Netherlands in 1964.

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that persist today, and will continue if they are not faced head on. Rather than simply celebrating the “Golden Age,” it must be understood in all its messiness and serve as a means for redressing the failures and cruelties that continue to subject so many to exclusion.

Works Cited Stott, Annette. Holland Mania: The Unknown Dutch Period in American Art & Culture. Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1998. Swierenga, Robert P. Holland, Michigan: From Dutch Colony to Dynamic City. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmand Publishing Company, 2013. Wiarda, Howard J. The Dutch Diaspora: The Netherlands and Its Settlements in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007.

Works Cited Archives and Databases Delft City Archive (Gemeente Archief). Archief van het Gilde van Goud- en Zilversmeden, 1502, 1536–1807, archive nr. 234. Inv. nr. 2: Ingekomen en minuten van uitgaande stukken van de dekens 1576–1727, 18th document Inv. nr. 10: Plakkaten en ordonnaties van de Staten van Holland en West-Friesland, de stad Delft en andere steden betreffende de goud- en zilversmeden, 1662–1733, various documents Dutch National Archives (Nationaal Archief), The Hague. Aanwinsten van de voormalige Eerste Afdeling van het Algemeen Rijksarchief, 14th century–1933, archive nr. 1.11.01.01, inv. nr. 541. Prijslijsten van goederen van de VOC. Archive of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), 1602–1795 (1811), archive nr. 1.04.02, inv. nos. 5003 and 5004, Ladinglijsten. Archive of Jacob van Ghesel, 1757–1773, archive nr. 1.10.31, inv. nr. 195, Lijsten van de kantoren van de VOC in Indië en de daar verhandelde producten. (1701). Archive of J. Hudde, 1602–1703, archive nr. 1.10.48, inv. nr. 17, Gagelijsten van retourschepen. International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. Collectie prijscouranten, commerciële couranten, veiling- en ladinglijsten, 1580–1870, ARCH03972 KB (Nationale Bibliotheek). Delpher newspaper database, delpher.nl. Koninklijk Nederlands Historisch Genootschap. The Dutch East India Company’s shipping between the Netherlands and Asia 1595–1795. http://www.historici.nl/Onderzoek/ Projecten/DAS/EnglishIntro. Slave Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, https://www.slavevoyages.org/, accessed May 19, 2020.

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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. Zandvliet, Kees, ed. The Dutch Encounter with Asia: 1600–1950. Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, 2002. Zink, Clifford W. “Dutch Framed Houses in New York and New Jersey.” Winterthur Portfolio 22, nr. 4 (Winter, 1987): 265–294.

Acknowledgements Long before I completed the research for this book, I started reading acknowledgements carefully, looking for pathways to success: who got support from which grants, what communities were authors part of, what power structures were they navigating. It was overwhelming to see just how much support some authors had as they built their careers and wrote their first and subsequent books: multiple major grants, sabbatical leaves, research assistants—I wasn’t sure I would be able to secure that kind of support. And I didn’t. This book happened despite failing to win a Fulbright fellowship (twice), not being nominated by my department for a university-sponsored fellowship, not getting the CASVA or ACLS I applied for. I have written this book entirely off the tenure track, with very little access to the small pots of funds that enable research travel, image permissions and subventions, and time to write in the humanities. These failures have very often made me feel that I’m a failure, but they have also energized me, motivated me to make my voice heard, filled me with frustration that pushed me to find time to write on the weekends, take on extra projects for pay to support infrequent research trips and conference presentations. And there have been moments of opportunity: I was quite lucky to have two years as a Mellon fellow at Columbia University, which gave me a much-needed boost in confidence, but I was only able to find contingent teaching positions before and afterwards. I was so grateful to have two months of support as a Baird Society Resident Scholar at the Smithsonian Libraries in 2013, and another two months from the Omohundro Institute National Endowment for the Humanities American Rescue Plan fellowship in 2022. It was, ironically, my falling out of academia after a decade on the job market that allowed me to finally finish the book—first, because I currently have the kindest supervisor (thank you, Ron Fleischmann!) who protects my time off even though it makes his job harder, and second, because I was able to write not for an imaginary search committee or tenure file, but rather for myself and my community. Building a community is what made this book happen, a community of kind, real people, friends and colleagues who became friends, people who remind you that even though much of academia is unkind, it doesn’t have to be. People who face down insecurity, failure, pettiness and instead bring a well-timed laugh, who will listen (or at least pretend to) as you explain your nautilus murder board, who remind you why you want be part of an academic community. People who affirm that, yes, that was terrible, your instincts are right on. People who take you out of your head and remind you to take a walk, grab a beer, and who recommend good tv shows. I’m not sure anymore what success in academia looks like, but I’m grateful for where I am.

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To my writing friends, who I spend less time writing with and more time talking with, thank you for being there alongside me: Jojo Karlin, Melissa Mednicov, Natalie Dykstra, Tato Gyulamiryan, Theresa Handwerk, Jesse Sadler, Jeff Byrnes. Jacob Esselstrom: thank you for always caring the most about the images and the data. My fellow Netherlandish art historians, working to change the field, Maureen Warren, Jun Nakamura, Isabella Lores-Chavez, and the members of IDEA. To my favorite art historian friends who steer clear of the Dutch: Beth Zinsli, Ünver Rüstem, Joe Ackley, Linde Lehtinen, Anne Heath, Jessica Santone, Laura Whatley. Most of all, thank you to my research partner, Carrie Anderson—our collaboration is such a joy, and our work together is so much better than this book! To my academic advisors: Sarah Blick has been there for me since I first declared my art history major, navigating graduate school and the job market. Anna Andrzejewski hooked me on buildings; and she and Jill Casid, Jane Hutchison, Jolanda Vanderwal Taylor, Preeti Chopra, and Arijit Sen shepherded the earliest pieces of this book. Dawn Odell has given the best advice at the most important times, and has supported my academic ambitions for over a decade. To my parents, who encouraged me even though they didn’t know what they were getting me into. To my aunt Kathy, who invited me to her defense and introduced me around as an art historian before I even started graduate studies. To my nonacademic friends (you know who you are), who find academia so weird, thank you for reminding me not to take this too seriously. And finally, thank you to Mike Lorr, who showed me what was possible.



Index

Note: page numbers in italics refer to figures. Abjuration, Act of 46 accuracy of visual evidence 133–34, 141, 151, 173, 177, 193–94 Africa 44, 172, 183–86 West Africa 67 South Africa 186 Afro-Brazilian style 186 Age of Discovery 43–45 Alva, Duke of 45–46 Ambonese Massacre 70 American comparisons 21, 24–25, 28, 35, 210 Americas 111–12; see also specific locations Amsterdam 94, 111–112, 148–49, 167, 173, 178, 197–99 Amsterdam Town Hall 109–111 Amsterdam Stock Exchange 48, 67 Anglo-Dutch Wars 75–77, 106–07 anonymous makers 50–51, 53, 56 Antwerp 57 anxiety 106–12 architecture 129, 137, 139, 165–202, 211 archives 28, 42, 102 Asia 47–48, 53, 111–12; see also specific locations aspiration 41, 49–50 Augsburg 57 Bali 159 Banda Islands 69–70, 155 Batavia 74, 125–60, 173–74, 179, 188–89, 208 Dutchness of 137–4 founding of 130–33 naming of 131 maps 132, 135, 136 plan of 133–37, 170 views of 127, 140 Beeckman, Andries 125–26, 160, pl. 7 beer 88, 98 van Beijeren, Abraham 88, 89, 91, 92, 112 Bellekin, Cornelis 53, pl. 2 Bonaparte, Napoleon 76 Brazil 67, 181, 186 bridges 133–37, 141–52, 156–59 Britain 21–22, 73, 75–77, 189, 210 building materials 139–41 buildings 129, 137, 139, 165–202, 211 butter 93

carpets 85–86, 91, 93, 112 cartography as evidence 133–34, 151, 173 change over time 167–68, 174, 185–86, 192–99 Chinese Batavians 151–53, 155–58 Chinese Massacre 156–58 Christianity 34, 45–46, 108, 208 Cirebon (Java) 69 city planning 125–60 colonial 150–52 Dutch 126, 141–53, 169–72, 178 failures of 138, 168, 185, 191 ideal 142–46, 150–52 Roman 143–45 Spanish 142 cityscapes 127, 141, 165–66, 172, 174, 192–93, 200–01, pl. 7–8 civil rights 190 Claesz, Pieter 39, 40, 99, 100 class hierarchy 125–30, 146, 149, 191 climate 138, 168, 172–73, 185–86 Coeman, Jacob 127, 128 Coen, Jan Pieterszoon 69–70, 131, 154 collecting 49, 56, 62 collective identity 23–28, 33–35, 66, 131, 137–38, 155 collective memory 23–29, 155–56, 207 colonial cities 130, 150–52; see also city planning colonial identity 141, 168–69, 200–01 colonialism 16, 27, 76–77, 192 vs. trade 69, 129 Columbus, Christopher 44 Compagnie van Verre 47 competition 46–47, 116 consumers 94–96, 107–09 contact zone 152–53, 188–92 continents 110–11 control 35, 62–66, 79, 116, 131, 142–43, 152–56, 210 corruption 68, 76, 169, 189 costume 125–30, 128, 130, 142, 160 creole identity 154, 191–93 cultural appropriation 129, 160 cultural identity 23–28, 33–35, 154, 191–92, 208 cultural values 33–35, 43 Curaçao 165–202 curiosities 49, 56 Cuyp, Aelbert 127, 128, 141

cabinets of curiosity 49, 56 Calvinism 34, 45–46, 108, 208 Camerarius, Joachim 51 van Campen, Jacob 109–111 canals 130, 133–38, 141–52, 156–59, 179 Caribbean 67, 76, 107, 169; see also specific locations

Danish metalwork 57 Davis, Thomas 176, 194 decolonization 21–23, 76 decorative arts 49–62, 90 Delft 56–57, 68–69, 77–79, 94 delftware 77, 93

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demographics 126, 131, 141–42, 166, 188–92, 199–202, 211 hierarchy of 147, 152–59 diffusion of architecture 139, 179 diplomacy 44–45, 47–48, 65, 69–70, 73–75, 131 Discovery, Age of 43–45 disease 133, 138, 156, 179 domestic (household) 42–43, 85, 113–17, 158, 172–73, 189 domestic (national) 17, 34–35, 42–43, 68–69, 93, 113–17, 142, 176 dress 125–30, 128, 130, 142, 160 Dutch, defined 19 Dutch Antilles 67, 76, 107, 169; see also specific locations Dutch East India Company (VOC) 46–48, 62–63, 66–70, 74, 93, 96–109, 125–33, 143, 153, 155, 159–60, 189 Dutch East Indies 74, 131; see also Indonesia Dutch language 19, 154–55 Dutch Republic 45–46, 75–77 Dutch townhouse 167–68, 170, 172, 176–89, 196–97, 211 Dutch West India Company (WIC) 66–68, 74, 93, 96, 169–73, 189–90 Dutching 19–23, 49–56, 86, 109–17, 137–41, 167–68, 192–201 Dutchness 33–35, 126, 130, 137–41, 153–54, 168–69, 177–78, 192, 208 earthquakes 138, 173 East India Company, Dutch (VOC) 46–48, 62–63, 66–70, 74, 93, 96–109, 125–33, 143, 153, 155, 159–60, 189 East India Company, English (EIC) 70, 107 egalitarianism 126, 130, 142–43, 145–47, 150, 207 Eighty Years’ War 45–46, 48, 72–75, 106–07 England 21–22, 73, 75–77, 189, 210 engraving, of nautilus shell 50, 53, 55, pl. 1–3 erasure 109–17, 192–99, 207–12 ethnicity; see population Eurasian Batavians 153–54 exclusion 18, 35, 211 exotica 49–50, 62, 90; see also specific items exoticism 112 exploitation 95; see also slavery exploration, global 43–48 failures in city planning 138, 168, 185, 191 fascism 25 Flanders 19, 89 foodstuffs 85–93, 98–99, 101, pl. 4–6; see also specific items foreign products 49, 86–93, 111–12 foreign trade 46–48, 91–93, 97–109, 115–17 forgetting 23–28, 95, 116–17 forts 134, 137, 142, 170, pl. 7 France 73, 75–77, 93, 189 free trade 35, 65–73

freedom 34–35, 62–66 freedom of religion 74, 189 Freedom of the Seas 48, 62–71, 77 Friesland 208 gables 139–41, 170, 178, 185–86, 188, 196, 208 gaze 96–97, 115 genocide 48, 69–70, 156–58 Geoctroyeerde Westindische Compagnie (WIC) 66–68, 74, 93, 96, 169–73, 189–90 German metalwork 57–58 Germany 93; see also specific locations glassware 85–86, 91, 93, 113–16, pl. 4, pl. 6 tipped or broken 40, 88, 91, 98, 108, pl. 5 global trade 46–48, 91–93, 97–109, 115–17 global vs. local 17, 27–28, 31–35, 42–43, 68–69, 93, 113–17, 142, 176 “going native” 129, 160 gold 56–62, 111–12 “Golden Age”: celebrated 17, 41 debated 15–18, 27–28, 41 defined 16–18, 87, 106–07 and identity 25–28 revised 77–79, 95, 109–17, 129–30, 166–69, 177, 188, 192–93, 199–201, 207–12 goldsmiths 41, 49, 56–62, 68–69, 77, 112 Grand Rapids (Michigan) 208–11 de Grebber, Nicolaas 39–41, pl. 1 grid plans 130, 137, 139, 141–49, 166–67, 170–72 Groot Santa Martha (Curaçao) 182, 183 Grotius, Hugo 26, 48, 62–71, 77–79 guilds for metalsmiths 68–69, 77 guilt 35, 43, 189 Halbwachs, Maurice 24, 29, 207 Handelskade (Willemstad) 165–68, 172, 176–77, 196–97, pl. 8 Heda, Willem Claesz 88, 89, 98, 100, 108 de Heem, Jan Davidsz 91, 100, 101, pl. 5 Hein, Piet 71 heritage 15–18, 21–22, 192–99, 201–02, 208–11 hierarchy 34–35, 94, 125–60, 178, 211 of access 145, 150–52, 156–59 hidden 143, 152–53 of population 147, 152–59 social 125–30, 146, 149, 191 Hiller, Joachim 59 historic preservation 167–68, 188, 192–96, 199–201 historicism 30, 165–69, 194, 208 historiography 41–43, 93–97 Holland (Michigan) 29, 177, 208–211 Holland Mania 210 Hollandse Mercurius 102–05 Hope College 208, 209, 211 de Houtman, Cornelis 47 humility 34–35, 154; see also ostentation; pride hybridity 19–23, 50, 168

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Iberian Jewish culture 172, 174, 179–83, 188–89, 192 Iberian rule and trade 26, 45–48, 64, 68, 73–75, 93; see also Spain; Portugal Iconoclastic Fury 45–46 ideal city planning 142–46, 150–52 identity 23–28, 33–35, 154, 191–92, 208 illusionism, in painting 93–97, 108, 113–17 immigration 18, 111, 154, 169, 192; see also population imperialism 27, 30–31, 67, 69, 173 Independence, Dutch War of 45–46, 72–75 India 44, 52, 100 Indian Batavians 153 Indies, Spanish Laws of the 142 indigenous knowledge 52, 139 indigenous peoples 64–65, 69–70, 106, 169, 188, 208 indigenous practices, adoptions of 129, 160 Indisch Batavians 153–54 Indonesia 44–46, 63, 76, 100, 131; see also specific locations industry 169–70, 191–92, 201 inequality see hierarchy innocence 15, 23–28, 43, 65, 189, 210 international vs. national 17, 27–28, 31–35, 42–43, 68–69, 93, 113–17, 142, 176 inventories 87–89, 94–95, 102–05 Ireland 93 Islam 155, 156 Italianist Revival style 208, 209 Jakarta see Batavia Jamaica 173 Japan 16, 68, 70, 76, 107, 112 Java 69, 131, 159; see also Batavia; Indonesia Jewish people 68–69, 172, 174, 188–89, 192, 201 merchants 169, 179–83 joint-stock company 17, 47–48, 67, 71 de Jonghe, Clement 134 Kalf, Willem 85–86, 90–91, 92, 112–17, pl. 4, pl. 6 kampung 159 van Keulen, Gerard 170 kota (Jakarta) 134 kunuku houses 182, 183–85 Kura Hulanda (Willemstad) 172 laborers 56, 96, 146, 151, 156–58, 185, 188, 191–92; see also slavery land use 139, 145, 178, 181; see also city planning landhuis 182, 183, 188, 196 language 19, 154–55, 191–92 Latinx population 211 Laws of the Indies, Spanish 142 light reflections 85–86, 96–97, 109, 112–17 linen 89, 100 van Linschoten, Jan Huygen 46–47 local vs. global 17, 27–28, 31–35, 42–43, 68–69, 93, 113–17, 142, 176 Long-Distance Company 47

Mackensen, Andreas I.: pl. 3 Mallaccans 155 Maluku Islands 44, 47–48, 51, 62–66, 69–70, 109 van Mander, Karel 94, 116 manners 125–30 manumission 189 maps as evidence 133–34, 151, 173 Mare Liberum 48, 62–71, 77 massacres 48, 69–70, 156–58 material culture 28–30, 49–62, 87–94 Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, Johan 67 May Revolution (1969) 190–91 memory 23–29, 155–56 metalwork 41, 49, 56–62, 68–69, 77, 112 Michigan 208–211 migration 18, 111, 154, 169, 192; see also population military 147, 154 mixed-race populations 153–54, 190 modernism 196–99 monopoly 43, 47–48, 62–70, 93, 107, 116 monster, nautilus as 57, 91 mother-of-pearl 52–53 multiculturalism 32, 199–202, 211; see also population Muslims 155, 156 Napoleon Bonaparte 76 national vs. international 17, 27–28, 31–35, 42–43, 68–69, 93, 113–17, 142, 176 nationalism 15–18, 23–28, 77–79 American 21, 24–25, 28, 35, 210 naturalism, in painting 93–97, 108, 113–17 nautilus cups 39–43, 49–62, 78, 90–93, pl. 1–3 as metaphor 41, 49–50, 56, 58, 60, 62–63, 66 in still life painting 88, 91–93, 98–99, 100, 114, pl. 5 nautilus shells 49–56, 113 artistic treatment of 52–53 in mount 39–43, 49–62, 78, pl. 1–3 in still life painting 88, 91–93, 98–99, 100, 114, pl. 5 Netherlands, Kingdom of 75–77 Netherlands Antilles 67, 76, 107, 169; see also specific locations newspapers 102–05 Nieuhof, Johannes 138–39, 140, 151 nostalgia 15–18, 23–28, 79, 116, 137–38, 141, 200, 208–210 Nuremburg 57 oceans 46–48, 62–66 oil refinery 169–70, 191–92, 201 Oldenbarnevelt, Johan van 63, 74 oral history 28, 183–85 order 35, 62–66, 79, 116, 131, 142–43, 152–56, 210 ostentation 34–35, 89–90, 108–09, 125–30, 142, 152, 154, 160, 167–68 Otrobanda (Willemstad) 172, 191, 194, 195, 197

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Palladian style 174 papacy 44–45, 64 Papiamentu 191–92 parasols 125–29, 157, 160 Pella (Iowa) 29, 177 Penha Building (Willemstad) 176–77, 179 pepper 86–87, 97–109, 115, 118–19, 133 photography 167–68, 176, 194 as evidence 173 piracy 43, 64–65, 70–73; see also privateering plainness 49, 167–68, 177–79 plantations 100–02, 107, 131, 169, 182, 183–85, 190 polders 146 population 126, 131, 141–42, 166, 188–92, 199–202, 211 hierarchy of 147, 152–59 porcelain 77, 85–86, 88, 91, 92, 98–99, 112–16, pl. 4, pl. 6 Portugal 44–46, 48, 50, 62–64, 74, 174, 189 post-modernism 199 pragmatism 34–35, 130, 142–43, 147–49, 167–69, 177–79, 181, 200 pride 34–35, 87, 90, 109–112, 117, 154 privateering 48, 71–75; see also piracy pronk 89–90, 108–09, 129 pronk still life 85–87, 90, 113–117 propaganda 23–25 Punda (Willemstad) 172, 183, 191, 196 public space 145–46 Quellinus I, Artus 110 race 27; see also population racism 190–91, 202, 208, 211 reflection of light 85–86, 96–97, 109, 112–17 religion 45–46, 74, 145, 159, 189, 208–210 residential lots 139, 145, 178, 181 restoration of buildings 167–68, 188, 192–96, 199–201 revisionist history 30, 208, 211; see also “Golden Age” Richardsonian Romanesque style 208 Rigaud, Tula 191 Rijksmuseum 15–17, 28–29 Ritter, Jeremias 52 Roman city planning 143–45 Rotterdam 56–57, 166 van Royesteyn, Jan Jacobsz. 39, 40 Ruel, Jörg 59 Rumphius, Georg Eberhard 51–52 sailors 154 salt 75, 88, 89, 100, 169 Scharloo (Willemstad) 180, 181–83 Sea Beggars 72 self-portraits 91 Sephardim 169, 172, 174, 179–83, 188–89, 192, 201 shareholders 17, 47–48, 67, 71 Shell oil refinery 169–70, 191–92, 201

shells see nautilus shells silver 85–86, 89, 91, 111–13, 115 silversmiths 41, 49, 56–62, 68–69, 77, 112 Sinterklaas 30 slavery 48, 70, 102, 107, 183–85, 189–90 enslaved people 126–28, 133–37, 151–52, 155–59 slave revolts 159, 191 slave trade 27–28, 169, 172, 190–91, 200 social class hierarchy 125–30, 146, 149, 191 soldiers 147, 154 Soublette et Fils 165–68, 175, 176, 194, 195 Spain 44–46, 50, 57, 61, 67, 73–75, 106–07, 142, 169, 174, 188 Spanish Laws of the Indies 142 Spice Islands 44; see also Maluku Islands spices 43–47, 51, 74, 86, 97–109, 115, 133 Stevin, Simon 141–49, 150–52 still life painting 39, 42, 61, 85–117 defined 87–93, 112 interpretation of 86–87, 95, 109–117 and pepper 100 style and 93–97 types 89 storytelling 23–30 Stracké, Franciscus Leonardus 78 stratification see hierarchy style, architectural 166–68, 174, 186, 196–99, 208, 209 classicism 139, 167–68, 174, 179–83, 194–96 Curaçaoan 174, 179, 186 Dutch 166–68, 174, 176–88, 194–99, 208, 209 hybrid 174, 186–88 style, in visual art 53, 93–97, 108, 113–17 sugar 91, 92, 107 Sumatra 100 sumptuary laws 34, 125–30, 157 Surakarta 69 Suriname 76, 174, 200 surveillance 146 Sweden 111 symbols 24–26, 28–30 Tambú 192 textiles 74, 104, 107–08, 115; see also linen; carpet Tijgersgracht (Batavia) 138, 150–51, 156, 158–59 tolerance 16, 189 Tordesillas, Treaty of 44–45 tourism 165–66, 169, 172, 176, 201, 210 townhouse 167–68, 170, 172, 176–89, 196–97, 211 trade 46–48, 91–93, 97–109, 115–17 vs. colonialism 69, 129 illicit 68, 76, 169, 189 private 47, 51, 67–68, 76, 189 products 49, 86–93, 111–12 treaties 44–45, 65 tropics 137–41, 165–66, 185–86 Tula Rigaud 191 tulips 20, 210–11 Twelve Years’ Truce 46, 73–75

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UNESCO 169, 201–02 Union of Utrecht 46 United Kingdom 21–22, 73, 75–77, 189, 210 United States comparisons 21, 24–25, 28, 35, 210 urban planning see city planning Utrecht 46, 56–57 Valentijn, François 138 vanitas 89, 95 Vatican 44–45, 64 Venice 85, 93 Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie see VOC Vergrooting van Amsterdam 111–12 Vermeer, Jan 77 vernacular architecture 129, 137, 139, 140, 165–202, change over time 167–68, 174, 185–86, 192–99 defined 173–74 Victorian style 208 visual material as evidence 133–34, 141, 151, 173, 177, 193–94 VOC (Dutch East India Company) 46–48, 62–63, 66–70, 74, 93, 96–109, 125–33, 143, 153, 155, 159–60, 189

Vos, Jan 111–12 walled city 133–37, 141–52, 156–59 warehouses 48, 69, 131, 134, 151, 172–73 water: control of 137–38, 143–46, 166–67, 170 Dutch battle against 41, 60–66 trade routes 62–66, 111–12 see also canals; oceans West India Company, Dutch (WIC) 66–68, 74, 93, 96, 169–73, 189–90 whiteness 18, 22, 211; see also population Willem (William) the Silent 45–46, 77 Willemstad (Curaçao) 165–202, 208 wine 85–86, 88, 91, 92, 98–99, 101, 113–15, pl. 4, pl. 6 workers 56, 96, 146, 151, 156–58, 185, 188, 191–92; see also slavery workshop practices 50–53, 58–60 world trade 46–48, 91–93, 97–109, 115–17 Zaragosa, Treaty of 45 Zwarte Piet (Black Peter) 18, 30, 210