The Anglo-Dutch lake? Johannes de Laet and the ideological origins of the Dutch and English West Indies

Abstract

This article explores the intellectual origins of the Anglo-Dutch Caribbean by focusing on the Leiden humanist Johannes de Laet (1581–1649). De Laet, born in the Southern Netherlands, had strong religious and kinship ties to the London merchant community. In the early 1620s, when he became one of the founding directors of the Dutch West India Company, his extensive intelligence network enabled him to develop into the leading chronicler of Dutch ambitions and achievements in the Atlantic world. De Laet's two main publications are contemporary masterpieces, but they are surprisingly underrepresented in current scholarship in Atlantic history, even though they are at the roots of the sugar and slave societies that the English established on Barbados and across the Caribbean from the 1640s onwards. English diplomats and intellectuals recognized the significance of De Laet's ideas. In September 1641, on the eve of the Civil War, Parliament invited the Leiden humanist to Westminster to instruct them in matters of trade and colonisation in the Western hemisphere.