Amsterdam's America

Benjamin Schmidt. Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570-1670. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xxviii + 450 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $65.00.

Try this experiment: put a group of American historians in a room and ask them what they know about Dutch history. Most, if they remember the history of New York or recall the early portions of textbooks, will know that the Dutch colonized New Netherland. Some, presumably the early Americanists, will also remember that the Dutch established plantations in Brazil. A few who have an interest in early modern history might know about the West India Company (WIC), or about the Dutch golden age, a marvelous epoch depicted by the historian Simon Schama and others. ¹ But that is about it. With the exception of a small group of specialists who have studied New Netherland, American historians have not examined Dutch history in much depth. ² The publication of Benjamin Schmidt's Innocence Abroad should change this scenario. The argument he has made is too compelling to ignore. Though some readers will disagree with parts of the book, and though the presentation of some of the visual evidence is problematic, we must all reckon with Schmidt's work.

Innocence Abroad focuses on how the Dutch understood America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Schmidt, who examined printed books and pamphlets as well as various kinds of pictures, is less concerned with what happened on the ground in the Western Hemisphere than with the ways that the Dutch manipulated images of America to suit their political goals. While they suffered under the rule of the Spanish Hapsburg empire, the Dutch discussed Spanish cruelties in the Americas in great depth. They cast Native Americans as "the ultimate ally to the Dutch geopolitical imagination" because they were untainted by Europe yet became fellow sufferers in the Dutch "gallery of Hapsburgian victims" (p. 106). Since, by this logic, the indigenous peoples of the Americas were also innocent victims of Spanish tyrants, the Dutch became obsessed with what the Spanish were doing to the Indians because they believed that the Spanish could do the same things to them. In essence, the Dutch needed the Indians to understand their own plight. They molded their perceptions of America's native peoples to fit the proper role in the Dutch interpretation of their own history. Printed images of the Spanish desecrating the bodies of both Indians and the Dutch reinforced the imaginative links between them, at least in the minds of Dutch publishers. The fact that the Americas contained wonders that the Dutch had never seen before—and which would have amazed anyone who saw a Native American woman riding side-saddle on an enormous armadillo in Adriaen Collaert's engraving America (printed in 1589)—made the bonds even more durable. What could be better than finding a political ally who happened to inhabit a previously unknown world filled with nature's marvels?

When the Dutch revolt allowed the republic to flourish and its merchants to enrich themselves with long-distance trade, America took on a series of new meanings, not all of them positive. The hoped-for alliance between Indians and the Dutch never materialized in the Western Hemisphere. Rather than find common ground with indigenous peoples, the Dutch instead sought to profit from what they could haul back from the Americas, whether pelts from New Netherland or sugar from Brazil. That strategy made sense at first, and Dutch economic horizons widened when colonists settled in the Americas.

That sense of optimism, however, could not be sustained. If America produced valuable goods, it also produced problems. Schmidt describes Dutch ambivalence toward tobacco, a product whose medicinal value was eclipsed in the Netherlands by fears of vice. To "a growing number of moralists," Schmidt comments, America "represented a breeding ground of sin" (p. 275). By the 1630s many Dutch observers saw only vanity and excessive luxury in the Americas, symptoms of a polity grown corrupt...