Michiel van Groesen. Amsterdam’s Atlantic: Print Culture and the Making of Dutch Brazil.

Abstract

Michiel van Groesen has large worlds in view. Through an exploration of reports about Dutch Brazil appearing from Amsterdam’s lively printing industry—the “public Atlantic” of the seventeenth century (10)—he can see how accounts of events had “the capacity to dominate public debate in Europe” (189). Newsprints were a relatively new innovation, and the public debate spurred by them in turn shaped public opinion, which “occasionally governed” the United Provinces of the Netherlands (190), or at least affected policies in its cities, its provinces, and the States General. He brings to his argument an experienced grasp of the history of early modern printing and its recent entanglement with knowledge economies and politics, allowing him to say that his case study exemplifies how “the communication circuits of metropolitan societies” (191) altered Europe. The evidence for van Groesen’s claims comes from thorough and lively exploration of the voluminous legacy of surviving newssheets, pamphlets, plays, poems, praatjes (“chats,” or printed representations of conversations), maps, scenic depictions of battles and peoples, and scholarly books, all of which spoke to Dutch interests in Brazil. Even if readers are not entirely convinced that his well-illustrated book has fully demonstrated its most ambitious goals, they will certainly appreciate the clear description of the shifting understanding of seventeenth-century “Brazil” that Amsterdam’s publishers conveyed to their readers.