The Dutch West India Company and the Peace of Münster, Revisited

Few institutions more clearly reflect the entanglement between Iberia and the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century than the Dutch West India Company (WIC). Nominally a commercial enterprise, the WIC was in fact a military instrument to strengthen the Republic’s hand against Habsburg Spain. The chapter explores the company’s relationship to the war and the consequences of peace in 1648. In contrast to scholarship that links the company’s decline to the loss of its colony in northeastern Brazil, the chapter demonstrates the importance of political factors, especially the Peace of Münster and the declining influence of the “war party” that had sustained the WIC since its inception. While for the Dutch the war against Spain was existential, the contest over Brazil was not. By contrast, Portugal deemed holding onto Brazil essential to sustaining its own struggle for independence from Spain. For both states, strategic considerations in Europe proved to be paramount. It was peace—not war—that sealed the WIC’s fate.