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A trading company that was really an instrument of war, read out of its own boardroom minutes.
TalkHistoryBooks & writers
The Dutch West India Company was chartered in 1621 to attack Spain where it was richest - at its colonies - and Alexander Bick has reconstructed how it was actually run from the record of the arguments inside it. What emerges is not the merchant venture of popular imagination but something closer to a department of state, decided by noblemen, courtiers and magistrates, with the same questions recurring: who governs a colony, and where private enterprise stops and public power begins.
It turns on the autumn of 1645 and the debate over whether to hold the sugar colony in north-eastern Brazil. They lost it, and Bick argues the company's part in securing the peace with Spain in 1648 mattered more.
He is a historian of early modern Europe at the University of Virginia and a former United States national security official.
Put on by the Centre for Statecraft and National Security, which sits inside the Department of War Studies at King's College London and was formed in 2025 out of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and the Centre for Grand Strategy. Ticketed, and open to anybody who books.
Tuesday 27 October, 17:00
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