Mark Meuwese, who has published several important articles on Dutch–Amerindian relations in seventeenth-century Brazil and New Netherland, hit upon an excellent topic for his 2004 PhD dissertation. He has now successfully turned it into a significant, wide-ranging book that seeks to embrace nearly the whole of the late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Atlantic world.

During the early stages of Dutch colonial expansion in the 1590s, and subsequently to 1621, anti-Spanish pamphleteers in the Netherlands urged the Dutch public to wage war on the Spanish crown. In doing so, they made extensive use of the Reformation-era ‘Black Legend’ of Spanish cruelty, arguing that the Spanish people, with their admixture of Moorish blood, were innately cruel and despotic and that, in the New World and the East Indies, they were subjecting numerous indigenous peoples to their ‘tyranny’. Thus, so the pamphleteers claimed, these indigenous peoples should be the natural allies of the Dutch, both militarily and in trade. This logic continued to figure prominently in later years. In the intense and prolonged Dutch–Spanish negotiations of 1630, it was used as a tool to influence the Dutch public against agreeing to a new truce. Nevertheless, it was only a few zealous Calvinists, such as Willem Usselincx (1567–1647), who went further and also placed special stress on the religious factor; the duty to spread Reformed Christianity among indigenous peoples was, as they saw it, a reason for continuing and intensifying the war against Spain.

Meuwese points out that the importance of such arguments – strategic, economic, and religious – was far more pronounced in relation to Amerindian peoples, especially in the Guyanas, New Netherland, and Brazil, than it was with respect to African peoples. Even so, Dutch alliances with indigenous peoples were crucial to both the growth of their commerce and the establishment of their colonial presence on the ‘Gold Coast’ of West Africa (particularly in the early period between 1594, when a large number of Dutch ships began trading along the Guinea Coast, and the late 1630s, when the chief Portuguese base there, Fort Elmina, was captured by a Dutch force sent from Brazil). Take the example of the Dutch alliance with the Sabu kingdom, just to the east of Elmina. This was cemented by direct relations between the Dutch stadholder and the king of Sabu from 1613, greatly inconveniencing the Portuguese in a variety of ways and materially furthering Dutch economic and naval penetration of the area. Other examples include the Akan and other West African kingdoms, which mostly preferred trading with the Dutch to the Portuguese, French, or English because during the early and mid seventeenth century the former offered better prices and a wider range of goods. (It should also be noted that before 1633 the Dutch were much less involved in the African slave trade than they became from the mid 1630s, when they extended their grip over the sugar plantations of north-east Brazil.)

Turning to the other side of the Atlantic, it is true that, during the brief Dutch occupation of Bahia (1624–5), the local indigenous population, much of which had been converted to Catholicism, staunchly supported the Portuguese and fought the Dutch occupiers. Nevertheless, many of the converted Indians living around Recife and Itamaraca, in the areas of north-eastern Brazil overrun by the Dutch in the mid 1630s, later proved willing to change sides, enter into military and economic collaboration with the Dutch, and give token allegiance to Protestantism. Christianized and Dutch-trained and armed mission Indians, as well as some non-Christianized ‘Tupayas’, regularly provided a major supplement to the Dutch West India Company's army in Brazil throughout the period that the area remained under Dutch control (until 1654). This was the case despite the steadily deteriorating military position of the Company after 1645. The final surrender of the Dutch in Brazil to the Portuguese in January 1654, and the return of all the former Dutch strongholds in the country to the Portuguese crown, thus came as a great shock to a considerable number of both Christianized and non-Christianized Brazilian Amerindians, as well as to those mulattoes and free blacks who had fought with the Dutch.

Meuwese's book is a valuable and comprehensive survey of the topic of Dutch collaboration with indigenous peoples on both sides of the Atlantic. In this reviewer's opinion, its only substantial weakness is the author's surprisingly limited use of unpublished archival material, and even of published primary sources, with regard to topics other than those on which he has done specialized research (essentially Protestant conversion efforts among the Tupis of north-eastern Brazil). So hardly any use is made of the archival collections in Amsterdam or those of the States of Zeeland (in Middelburg). Similarly, the collections of the Archivo General de Indias in Seville and the Lisbon archives are largely ignored. The author tries to make up for this by relying on the secondary literature. But that reliance is not always justified, as for instance in his discussion of Usselincx's pamphlets, where he would have done better to quote what Usselincx actually said rather than merely repeat what modern scholars have said about his texts. Furthermore, a number of important secondary works are neglected. And then there is the regrettable omission of important salient matters such as Dutch South Africa (about which there is virtually no discussion) and the Dutch plans to subvert the unconquered Indians of southern Chile against Spain.