Overview

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.

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9780226254784

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Capitalism and Cartography in the Dutch Golden Age offers an incisive, compelling analysis of two Dutch phenomena familiar to most historians and art historians the rise of early modern capitalism and the dissemination of printed maps. In a series of case studies focusing on Amsterdam, New Amsterdam, and the Dutch in Brazil, she explores the interdependency between Dutch mercantilism and mapping with critical aplomb. This timely, innovative account offers new ways of seeing how the structuring principles of mercantile development informed and were informed by Dutch practices of making maps and profile views. At home and abroad, printed maps, she argues, reinforced the rationalist logic of capitalism. While demonstrating a close connection between modes of picturing the Netherlands and the processes by which they were given political form, Sutton also brings her argument forward to the present day and to the continuing relationships between money, power, and visualization. --Claudia Swan, Northwestern University

Sutton offers a provocative and compelling examination of the ways Dutch capitalists in the seventeenth century deployed maps as tools for their dominance over the land and other people, as well as ways to express their power and wealth. A strong and stimulating work, Capitalism and Cartography in the Dutch Golden Age is an excellent addition to the fields of art history and the history of cartography. --Robert Karrow, Newberry Library

Author Information

Elizabeth A. Sutton is assistant professor of art history at the University of Northern Iowa.

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