Early-Modern Empire by Arthur Weststeijn
Renaissance Quarterly 74.2, 2021
This article shows how the rise of printed news media during the opening decades of the seventeen... more This article shows how the rise of printed news media during the opening decades of the seventeenth century fomented and fragmented authority in the polycentric Spanish Habsburg empire. Analyzing the making, dissemination, and reception of transatlantic news from Madrid to Mexico and from Lisbon to Lima, the article explores how the influx of fragments of unverifiable information from overseas undermined the possibility of complete knowledge. While the Spanish Crown exploited news media to create a sense of a unified imperial space, the dynamics of distance resulted in uncertainty and the spread of conflicting narratives that fractured central control.
Oxford University Press, 2020
The colonization policies of Ancient Rome followed a range of legal arrangements concerning prope... more The colonization policies of Ancient Rome followed a range of legal arrangements concerning property distribution and state formation, documented in fragmented textual and epigraphic sources. Once antiquarian scholars rediscovered and scrutinized these sources in the Renaissance, their analysis of the Roman colonial model formed the intellectual background for modern visions of empire. What does it mean to exercise power at and over distance?
This book foregrounds the pioneering contribution to this debate of the great Italian Renaissance scholar Carlo Sigonio (1522/3–84). His comprehensive legal interpretation of Roman society and Roman colonization, which for more than two centuries remained the leading account of Roman history, has been of immense (but long disregarded) significance for the modern understanding of Roman colonial practices and of the legal organization and implications of empire. Bringing together experts on Roman history, the history of classical scholarship, and the history of international law, this book analyses the context, making, and impact of Sigonio’s reconstruction of the Roman colonial model. It shows how his legal interpretation of Roman colonization originated and how it informed the development of legal colonial discourse, from visions of imperial reform and colonial independence in the nascent United States of America, to Enlightenment accounts of property distribution, culminating in a specific juridical strand in twentieth-century Roman historiography. Through a detailed analysis of scholarly and political visions of Roman colonization from the Renaissance until today, this book shows the enduring relevance of legal interpretations of the Roman colonial model for modern experiences of empire.
In: The Renaissance of Roman Colonization (eds. Pelgrom and Weststeijn), 2020
Access via: https://pure.rug.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/169019524/IntroductionSettler_Colonies_betw... more Access via: https://pure.rug.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/169019524/IntroductionSettler_Colonies_between_Roman_Colonial_Utopia_and_Modern_Colonial_Practice.pdf
This chapter shows the relevance of Carlo Sigionio’s reconstruction of Roman colonial practices for the history and theory of settler colonialism. It discusses how Sigonio’s analysis of Roman colonization as a vehicle of social emancipation implicitly criticized Venetian colonial strategies in the Eastern Mediterranean, and sketches its impact on European visions of overseas colonialism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, highlighting English and Dutch examples of settler colonialism between Batavia (Jakarta) and Savannah, Georgia. For Sigonio, the Roman colony could be characterized as a well-ordered agrarian landscape concerned with protecting the property claims and political rights of a clearly defined community of citizen–farmers. With his detailed study of Roman colonial law and practice, Sigonio showed that there was a historical foundation for settler colonialism to work effectively. His reconstruction of the Roman settler colony made it possible to conceive of a colonial utopia as a concrete colonial practice.
In: Joris Oddens and Alessandro Metlica (eds.), Contending Representations I: The Dutch Republic and the Lure of Monarchy, 2023
In: René Koekkoek, Anne-Isabelle Richard and Arthur Weststeijn (eds.), The Dutch Empire between Ideas and Practice, 1600-2000 (Palgrave, 2019), 37-65
This article uncovers the intellectual roots of the exceptionalist narrative of the Dutch empire ... more This article uncovers the intellectual roots of the exceptionalist narrative of the Dutch empire as a trading empire. It shows how this narrative originated in the humanist culture of the Dutch Republic around 1600 and became ingrained in elite and popular culture in the following decades. Analysing texts, imagery and urban architecture, Weststeijn argues that the idea of a non-territorial commercial empire gained weight because of its dominant manifestations in the Dutch public sphere around 1650 and in the visual culture of the European Enlightenment, which celebrated Dutch commercial imperialism as a Company-Republic. The dominance of this representation of empire in terms of a corporate instead of a national entity explains why the concept of a ‘Dutch empire’ never became an ideological construct.
In: Rose Mary Allen et al. (eds.), Staat & Slavernij: Het Nederlandse koloniale slavernijverleden en zijn doorwerkingen, 2023
Rivista Storica Italiana CXXXI-3, 2019
This article explores Protestant prophecy between Spanish America and the Dutch Republic, focusin... more This article explores Protestant prophecy between Spanish America and the Dutch Republic, focusing on the life, ideas and publications of Joan Aventroot (1559-1633), a Dutch commercial entrepreneur who made a ca- reer in the Spanish Atlantic before becoming a prophet. Aventroot’s prophetism, inspired by Spanish mysticism and eschatological numerology, foresaw the demise of the papal Antichrist and the imminent downfall of the Spanish empire in America. He sought to convince the Spanish monarchs to convert to Protestantism, gave practical advice to the Dutch States General on how to strike the Spanish empire at its heart near the silver mines of Potosí, and proposed the inhabitants of the viceroyalty of Peru to form an alliance with the Dutch Republic to gain independence from Spain. Analysing the nature, context and implications of Aventroot’s prophecies, the article shows to what extent Spanish Catholic and Dutch Protestant cultures were entangled at the start of the 17th century.
In: Joke Spaans and Jetze Touber (eds.), Enlightened Religion. From Confessional Churches to Polite Piety in the Dutch Republic (Leiden: Brill, 2019)
The historiography of early modern Dutch colonial expansion in the East and the West shows a rath... more The historiography of early modern Dutch colonial expansion in the East and the West shows a rather stark division between studies on governance and trade on the one hand, and those on Christian mission on the other. This chapter explores a third field of research: the impact of cultural and religious entanglement in the context of the voyages of discovery, the creation of trade networks, and colonial enterprise. After an analysis of the legal justifications for rule and proselytizing overseas, either by conquest (Batavia, Brazil), first occupation (New Netherland, Cape Colony), or treaty (Ternate, Decima) the chapter presents three very different yet related projects for religious regimes in the Dutch overseas colonies of the second half of the seventeenth century: the first by the Leiden professor of theology Johannes Hoornbeeck, the second by the freethinkers Franciscus van den Enden and Pieter Plockhoy, and the third by the Labadists. Despite having very different inspirations, all three projects aimed to overcome the confessional strife afflicting Dutch society at the time. While Hoornbeeck's ideal was missionary, Van den Enden and Plockhoy's inclusive, and the Labadists' sectarian, they all looked to the overseas colonies not merely as a source of worldly riches (for which purpose they had been founded in the first place) but most of all for spiritual gain. All these projects, however, ended as brilliant failures because of the problematic relationship between the secular sovereign and the public Reformed Church. Successful mission had to await the Dutch missionary societies of the later eighteenth century. Early modern settlements overseas can be seen as shelters for escapism and laboratories for experimentation, and they functioned as a safety valve to release interconfessional pressure.
in: Wouter Bracke, Jan de Maeyer & Jan Nelis (eds.), Renovatio, inventio, absentia imperii. From the Roman Empire to contemporary imperialism (Leuven: Brepols, 2018), 93-116
In: Martti Koskenniemi, Walter Rech, and Manuel Jiménez Fonseca, eds., International Law and Empire: Historical Explorations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)
Recent reinterpretations of Hugo Grotius focusing on his treatise De jure praedae see him as inte... more Recent reinterpretations of Hugo Grotius focusing on his treatise De jure praedae see him as intellectually compromised by his efforts to provide legal support for the colonial ambitions of the Dutch Republic. This chapter attempts to ‘provincialize’ Grotius by viewing him in a contemporary non-European mirror, through a contextualized and comparative reading of the Malay treatise Taj al-Salatin [‘The Crown of All Kings’], composed in 1603 by Bukhari al-Jauhari in north Sumatra. It is argued that crucial aspects of Grotius’ theory were also dominant features of political thought in the Malay region, with mutually cherished notions of trust and contractual obligations. Conversely, the Southeast Asian perspective shows that Grotius’ proposition of the Dutch East India Company as a ‘corporate sovereign’ with international legal personality, and his distinction between the legal, religious, and political realms, must have been alien to his imagined Islamic readers in Southeast Asia.
Storia del Pensiero Politico 6.2 (2017), 177-196
What was the impact of Machiavelli's political thought on early-modern Dutch colonialism? This ar... more What was the impact of Machiavelli's political thought on early-modern Dutch colonialism? This article zooms in on Dutch Brazil between 1630 and 1654 to argue that the Dutch employed a distinctive notion of Machiavellian reason of state to theorize and legitimize their expansion overseas. Discussing the work of the prominent humanist scholar Caspar Barlaeus and his presentation of governor-general Johan Maurits of Nassau as a colonial prince, the article shows that the period of Dutch rule in Brazil provided the setting where Machiavelli was adapted to the concerns of a modern commercial empire.
In Wyger Velema and Arthur Weststeijn (eds.), Ancient Models in the Early Modern Republican Imagination (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 62-85
In Michiel Van Groesen (ed.), The Legacy of Dutch Brazil (Cambridge: CUP, 2014), 187-204, 2014
In Saliha Belmessous (ed.), Empire by Treaty. Negotiating European Expansion, 1600-1900 (Oxford: OUP, 2014), 19-44
BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review , 2017
What were the major developments in thinking about Dutch empire from the early modern period to t... more What were the major developments in thinking about Dutch empire from the early modern period to the twenty-first century? What moral, political, legal and economic arguments have been put forth to justify, criticize or reform empire? How and under what circumstances did these visions and arguments change or remain the same? This article outlines a research agenda that addresses these questions. It argues for an approach that includes a long-term perspective from the early modern period to the postcolonial situation, which sees ‘Dutch’ history broadly, moving beyond national borders, and instead explicitly informed by influences and actors from across the globe. This implies a transnational and transimperial approach that can highlight these global connections as well as tensions; and finally, an approach that understands intellectual history as going beyond the big names of systemic thinkers, and includes visions of empire as negotiated in (day-to-day) practice.
Itinerario. International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction, Apr 2014
What was seventeenth-century Dutch expansion in Southeast Asia all about? In the traditional hist... more What was seventeenth-century Dutch expansion in Southeast Asia all about? In the traditional historiography, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was predominantly presented as a multinational corporation and non-state colonial actor. Recent research, however, has significantly challenged this view, stressing instead the imperial aspects of VOC rule. This article aims to break new ground by analysing the vocabularies used in seventeenth-century reasoning about Dutch expansion overseas. Focusing on three critics of the VOC from the 1660s and 1670s, Pieter van Dam, Pieter de la Court, and Pieter van Hoorn, the article shows how voices within and outside of the ranks of the Company tried to make sense of the many-faced VOC as a commercial company that was also, in different ways, a state. In an on-going debate that centred on the issues of colonisation, conquest, free trade, and monopoly, the VOC was characterised as a distinctive political body that operated as an overseas extension of the state (Van Dam), as a competitor of the state (De la Court), or as a state as such (Van Hoorn). Following Philip J. Stern's recent analysis of the English East India Company, the VOC should therefore be considered to be a particular political institution in its own terms, which challenged its critics to think about it as a body politic that was neither corporation nor empire, but rather a Company-State.
In: Sophus Reinert and Pernille Røge (eds.), The Political Economy of Empire in the Early Modern World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 11-31
Renaissance Studies , 2012
Surprisingly little research has been done on the ideological origins of seventeenth-century Dutc... more Surprisingly little research has been done on the ideological origins of seventeenth-century Dutch colonialism. This is especially remarkable since the Dutch case was the only early-modern example of a republic that successfully expanded overseas, combining a war for liberty at home with a project for empire abroad. This article analyses the intellectual background to this ‘republican empire’. Focusing in particular on the period of Dutch colonial rule in Brazil (1630-1654), it discusses how Dutch scholars, poets and political pamphleteers coped with the challenge of how to reconcile liberty and empire in a burgeoning commercial age. The central figure in the analysis is Caspar Barlaeus, a leading intellectual during the autumn of Northern humanism, who argued that the Dutch would be able tot resist the threat of imperial corruption by merging mercantile enterprise with republican statecraft. This claim was elaborated further by the prominent republican theorists Johan and Pieter De la Court, who strongly embraced an empire of trade as the means to combine liberty with greatness. Discussing the continuities and differences between Barlaeus and de De la Courts, the article sketches the development of a Dutch mercantile ideology of empire, which postulated commercial expansion as the modern antidote against ancient imperial decline.
Historia y Politica, 2008
This article deals with the process of decision making at the Spanish court concerning the Revolt... more This article deals with the process of decision making at the Spanish court concerning the Revolt in the Netherlands. Focusing on the ideas and deeds of one of the most influential advisors of Philip II in the years 1576-1579, Antonio Pérez, it argues for an analysis of this process which not only pays attention to the financial and geopolitical causes of Spain’s imperial policy, but which also takes into account the implications of the power struggle amongst the courtiers in Madrid, based on networks of patronage and ideological strife that had important consequences for the orders sent from Spain to the battlefield.
Modern Italy by Arthur Weststeijn
Inleiding van: Antonio Gramsci, Alle mensen zijn intellectuelen. Notities uit de gevangenis, 2019
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Early-Modern Empire by Arthur Weststeijn
This book foregrounds the pioneering contribution to this debate of the great Italian Renaissance scholar Carlo Sigonio (1522/3–84). His comprehensive legal interpretation of Roman society and Roman colonization, which for more than two centuries remained the leading account of Roman history, has been of immense (but long disregarded) significance for the modern understanding of Roman colonial practices and of the legal organization and implications of empire. Bringing together experts on Roman history, the history of classical scholarship, and the history of international law, this book analyses the context, making, and impact of Sigonio’s reconstruction of the Roman colonial model. It shows how his legal interpretation of Roman colonization originated and how it informed the development of legal colonial discourse, from visions of imperial reform and colonial independence in the nascent United States of America, to Enlightenment accounts of property distribution, culminating in a specific juridical strand in twentieth-century Roman historiography. Through a detailed analysis of scholarly and political visions of Roman colonization from the Renaissance until today, this book shows the enduring relevance of legal interpretations of the Roman colonial model for modern experiences of empire.
This chapter shows the relevance of Carlo Sigionio’s reconstruction of Roman colonial practices for the history and theory of settler colonialism. It discusses how Sigonio’s analysis of Roman colonization as a vehicle of social emancipation implicitly criticized Venetian colonial strategies in the Eastern Mediterranean, and sketches its impact on European visions of overseas colonialism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, highlighting English and Dutch examples of settler colonialism between Batavia (Jakarta) and Savannah, Georgia. For Sigonio, the Roman colony could be characterized as a well-ordered agrarian landscape concerned with protecting the property claims and political rights of a clearly defined community of citizen–farmers. With his detailed study of Roman colonial law and practice, Sigonio showed that there was a historical foundation for settler colonialism to work effectively. His reconstruction of the Roman settler colony made it possible to conceive of a colonial utopia as a concrete colonial practice.
Modern Italy by Arthur Weststeijn
This book foregrounds the pioneering contribution to this debate of the great Italian Renaissance scholar Carlo Sigonio (1522/3–84). His comprehensive legal interpretation of Roman society and Roman colonization, which for more than two centuries remained the leading account of Roman history, has been of immense (but long disregarded) significance for the modern understanding of Roman colonial practices and of the legal organization and implications of empire. Bringing together experts on Roman history, the history of classical scholarship, and the history of international law, this book analyses the context, making, and impact of Sigonio’s reconstruction of the Roman colonial model. It shows how his legal interpretation of Roman colonization originated and how it informed the development of legal colonial discourse, from visions of imperial reform and colonial independence in the nascent United States of America, to Enlightenment accounts of property distribution, culminating in a specific juridical strand in twentieth-century Roman historiography. Through a detailed analysis of scholarly and political visions of Roman colonization from the Renaissance until today, this book shows the enduring relevance of legal interpretations of the Roman colonial model for modern experiences of empire.
This chapter shows the relevance of Carlo Sigionio’s reconstruction of Roman colonial practices for the history and theory of settler colonialism. It discusses how Sigonio’s analysis of Roman colonization as a vehicle of social emancipation implicitly criticized Venetian colonial strategies in the Eastern Mediterranean, and sketches its impact on European visions of overseas colonialism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, highlighting English and Dutch examples of settler colonialism between Batavia (Jakarta) and Savannah, Georgia. For Sigonio, the Roman colony could be characterized as a well-ordered agrarian landscape concerned with protecting the property claims and political rights of a clearly defined community of citizen–farmers. With his detailed study of Roman colonial law and practice, Sigonio showed that there was a historical foundation for settler colonialism to work effectively. His reconstruction of the Roman settler colony made it possible to conceive of a colonial utopia as a concrete colonial practice.
dynasty, nationalist imperialism, fascist martyrdom and vindication, subaltern resistance and, ultimately, postcolonial oblivion. The resulting story reveals the continuous tension in the uses and meanings of the two monuments as both Roman and non-Roman objects, a tension that arguably defines aegyptiaca Romana throughout history.
In The Italian Experiment, historians and Italy experts Pepijn Corduwener and Arthur Weststeijn lay out the history of the country, from Giuseppe Garibaldi to Beppe Grillo. Referencing key political figures, but also novels, films and music, they explain how the most beautiful country in Europe has grown into a testing ground for the modern world.
De radicale Republiek laat, na driehonderdvijftig jaar, de broers opnieuw aan het woord. Het vertelt hoe twee immigrantenzonen uit Leiden rijk werden in de handel, en met hun provocatieve geschriften het hele land tegen zich in het harnas joegen. Het verhaalt over hun successen en mislukkingen, hun idealisme en recalcitrantie. En het plaatst tijdloze thema’s als burgerschap, markt en moraliteit tegen de achtergrond van het roerige tijdvak waarin de broers leefden: een tijdvak van libertijnse vrijdenkers en religieuze scherpslijpers, van gesjeesde Oranjes en oproerige democraten, van langdurige voorspoed, smeulende onrust en plotseling ontvlammende chaos. "
Helen Roche & Kyriakos N. Demetriou (eds.), Brill’s Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (Leiden-Boston, Brill, 2018)
power in the 17th-century Dutch Republic.
The question how power is represented sparks
the interest of scholars working in a wide range
of disciplines. This workshop brings together
political, cultural, and intellectual historians,
literary scholars and art historians. It aims to
stimulate a cross-disciplinary dialogue about
representations in art, literature, ritual and
other media. The participants have been
invited to reflect on the challenge of
representing power in a republican state, in an
age when monarchy was the dominant state
model. The third day will be devoted to the
presentation and discussion of the ongoing
ERC-project Republics on the Stage of Kings
economic crisis that followed or to how Genoese republican state power was represented during the long seventeenth century, especially in relation to neighbouring polities. To address this gap, the conference explores how the Genoese Republic shaped its political image between 1559 – the year of the publication of Oberto Foglietta’s Delle cose della
repubblica di Genova – and 1684, when Genoa was bombed by the French.
The conference, aimed at art historians, literary scholars, and political and cultural historians, strongly encourages a comparative approach, with a focus on the originality of the Genoese system of political representation in the European early modern context.