Joan Blaeu (1596-1673), Dutch, Pernambuco North, 1662 edition, engraving with hand coloring. Krannert Art Museum
Want to learn more about maps, politics, and Europe as a whole? Here are some resources available at UIUC that you can use to further explore the topics:
Maps That Made History by
Few people can resist the appeal of old maps and plans. Even in these days of disposable mapping - from satellite navigation to customized road directions at the click of a mouse - the historical map continues to present a unique perspective on our changing world. Here we explore 25 glorious examples. The emphasis is on the story behind the map: what it reveals about its creator and users, from the first explorers to the railway builders. This thought-provoking collection features maps that chart societies as well as land, sea, and skies; maps that have influenced and inspired; and perhaps most revealing of all, maps that misrepresent.
Capitalism and Cartography in the Dutch Golden Age by
In Capitalism and Cartography in the Dutch Golden Age, Elizabeth A. Sutton explores the fascinating but previously neglected history of corporate cartography during the Dutch Golden Age, from ca. 1600 to 1650. She examines how maps were used as propaganda tools for the Dutch West India Company in order to encourage the commodification of land and an overall capitalist agenda. Building her exploration around the central figure of Claes Jansz Vischer, an Amsterdam-based publisher closely tied to the Dutch West India Company, Sutton shows how printed maps of Dutch Atlantic territories helped rationalize the Dutch Republic's global expansion. Maps of land reclamation projects in the Netherlands, as well as the Dutch territories of New Netherland (now New York) and New Holland (Dutch Brazil), reveal how print media were used both to increase investment and to project a common narrative of national unity. Maps of this era showed those boundaries, commodities, and topographical details that publishers and the Dutch West India Company merchants and governing Dutch elite deemed significant to their agenda. In the process, Sutton argues, they perpetuated and promoted modern state capitalism.
Amsterdam's Atlantic by
In 1624 the Dutch West India Company established the colony of Brazil. Only thirty years later, the Dutch Republic handed over the colony to Portugal, never to return to the South Atlantic. Because Dutch Brazil was the first sustained Protestant colony in Iberian America, the events there became major news in early modern Europe and shaped a lively print culture. In Amsterdam's Atlantic, historian Michiel van Groesen shows how the rise and tumultuous fall of Dutch Brazil marked the emergence of a "public Atlantic" centered around Holland's capital city. Amsterdam served as Europe's main hub for news from the Atlantic world, and breaking reports out of Brazil generated great excitement in the city, which reverberated throughout the continent. Initially, the flow of information was successfully managed by the directors of the West India Company. However, when Portuguese sugar planters revolted against the Dutch regime, and tales of corruption among leading administrators in Brazil emerged, they lost their hold on the media landscape, and reports traveled more freely. Fueled by the powerful local print media, popular discussions about Brazil became so bitter that the Amsterdam authorities ultimately withdrew their support for the colony. The self-inflicted demise of Dutch Brazil has been regarded as an anomaly during an otherwise remarkably liberal period in Dutch history, and consequently generations of historians have neglected its significance. Amsterdam's Atlantic puts Dutch Brazil back on the front pages and argues that the way the Amsterdam media constructed Atlantic events was a key element in the transformation of public opinion in Europe.
