Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>In September 1645, as news of a revolt in Dutch Brazil reached Europe, the directors of the West India Company gathered for a meeting that would determine the fate of their burgeoning imperial project in the New World. Minutes of Empire tells the story of this meeting. Drawing readers into the boardroom of one of history’s most enigmatic trading companies, it exposes a hidden world of early modern corporate politics and challenges conventional accounts of how the Dutch Republic rose to commercial preeminence in the heart of the Golden Age. Chartered by the States General in 1621, the West India Company’s principal aim was to open a new front in the struggle against Habsburg Spain by attacking its colonial revenues at their source. This required deep and enduring cooperation between the company and the central organs of the Dutch state. Rather than the merchant-dominated venture of popular imagination, the company emerges as an instrument of war in which noblemen and courtiers played a decisive role. Through portraits of figures such as Hendrick van der Capellen and Johannes de Laet, the book reveals how the company and its leaders wrestled with fundamental questions of political authority, colonial governance, and the relationship between private enterprise and public power. Minutes of Empire shows how conquest abroad helped to unify and strengthen a fragmented polity at home—and why the West India Company’s failure to hold Brazil ultimately mattered less than its contribution to securing the Dutch Republic’s independence from Spain in 1648.</jats:p>