Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570-1670 (review)

This study of representations of America in the early modern Netherlands opens with an unexpected but telling reference to Shakespeare. The Dutch Republic's response to the New World, argues Benjamin Schmidt, began with a certain skepticism to that world's apparent newness; Golden Age preachers and pamphleteers saw Europe's arrival in America less as a discovery of barbarism than as an encounter between civilizations. Such skepticism Schmidt finds distinctively, though not uniquely, Dutch. The book's first footnote recalls that in The Tempest Shakespeare balances Miranda's wonder at a "brave new world" with Prospero's canny rejoinder, "'Tis new to thee." Like Prospero, Schmidt cautions his readers against exaggerating America's novelty for Europe and observes how swiftly America was pressed into the service of European alliances and rivalries, how the New World was drafted into the battles of the Old. Audiences of The Tempest know that Miranda's encounter—even her amazement—is an intrinsic part of Prospero's master plan. Similarly, the sixteenth-century Netherlanders saw the coincidence of New World engagements with the founding of their own republic as no accident.

Yet the full irony of this moment in The Tempest, an irony Schmidt assumes or ignores, is that what dazzles Miranda is in fact the sight of Italian princes and courtiers; her brave new world is not America but Europe. As it happens, a similar effect lingers after reading Innocence Abroad. For this is a book not about America but about representations of America, and about the difference that those representations—variously termed "images" or "conceptions" or "notions" or, more grandly, a "construction" or "rhetoric" or "poetics"—made in Europe. In particular, Schmidt examines how the Netherlands saw in America the signs of a special kinship forged by the common suffering of Hapsburg imperial rule. His most robust and valuable claim is for the necessary triangulation of America, the Netherlands, and Spain in early modern studies: "The Dutch used Spain—Spanish tyranny, Spanish avarice, Spanish darkness—to define America, which, in turn, became a key component in the exercise of defining the Dutch" (xxiii). It is true that if the relation Schmidt plots out is a triangle, then Dutchness is the vertex of its right angle; in parts of his argument Spain and America seem minor vertices, of interest only when they are "usable" (a favorite word) to the Netherlands. But the aim of the book, which is to interpret Golden Age culture in its global context without either parochializing Dutchness or universalizing it, makes such a balancing attempt essential and worthwhile.

The key terms Schmidt uses to describe the Dutch relation to America and Spain are innocence and tyranny. For most of the period covered, the tyrants are the Hapsburgs, the innocents the Indians and the Dutch. This scheme will surely come as a surprise to the Anglocentric student of the New World encounter. For whereas the future James I openly disdained the Indians as slaves to Castile, William of Orange sympathized with them; the Dutch discourse on America was neither of conquest nor of empire but of alliance, of joining the Indians against the rapacious monarchy of the Spanish overlords. Constructing this polemic required, as Schmidt points out, a good deal of fancy footwork. The Hapsburg elite and army of Flanders had to be simplified into a colonial antagonist, its rule in Europe had to be conflated with the extension of imperial power abroad, and Dutch economic interests in America had to be obscured by a rhetoric of salvation. Dexterous as this strategy was, the imagined partnership would founder on real shores. From the 1620s on, the States General and the West India Company launched a series of expeditions aimed at forging a Dutch-American alliance against Spain, but the brotherhood never materialized, and the revolt of the Americas remained a fantasy. In Chile...