In this volume, Sutton brings an art historical lens to examine how power and visual media combine to underscore the “rationalization and organization of a particular economic system” (14): capitalism. Her argument that maps are objects which can reflect, reproduce and reify power relations (albeit in a specific time and place, Amsterdam, 1600-1650) is not necessarily original. However, her inclusion of the Dutch Atlantic world—particularly Brazil and New Amsterdam—is original. Her choice to highlight the work of Claes Jansz Visscher, rather than his more-famous colleagues the Blaeus, and the West India Company (WIC), rather than its eastern counterpart, the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), adds an element of freshness to the work.
The book is laid out in six chapters, with the first serving as a theoretical foundation for Sutton’s analysis of maps as symbolic goods used by those in power to perpetuate their agendas. The idea of symbolic goods come from Bourdieu, while she draws on Weber, Marx, Giddens and others to flesh out her understanding of capitalism as an exploitative and alienating system cloaked in the rhetoric of rational efficiency that within its mantle hides inherent violence. A crucial part of this rhetoric is cartography, for early modern maps increasingly employed devices like direct observation and grid systems that made them seem as rational as the search for profit. Moreover, maps helped to combine economic power with state power by presenting the search for land and resources as a necessary activity for a united and prospering nation.
From theory, Sutton moves to a contextualization chapter that describes Amsterdam society and its map market. Intellectual foundations for the intertwining of civic virtue and order with capitalism and expansion include philosophers like Lipsius, military strategists like Simon Stevin and legal thinkers like Hugo Grotius. In early modern Amsterdam, capitalism thrived thanks to an overlap between state and company officials which created wealth for the merchants who controlled the reins of power. Whereas there was considerable tension behind closed doors, maps allowed officials to present a coherent message via maps—a message that the Dutch Republic was a unified, strong, expanding and rational state.
Chapters three to five use Visscher’s maps as case studies to see how they further the above outlined rhetoric. His prints of Amsterdam reinforced the “Holland merchants’ and regents’ legal, historical, and moral claims to accumulated private possessions and their corresponding power” (45). In particular, the Beemster planned community exemplified state-commercial cooperation to create a more ordered urban space. Participation in the project, or possessing a picture of it, could enhance one’s status. From Amsterdam, Sutton moves to Brazil, where Visscher’s maps not only served as news updates but also helped to smooth over possible problems that the WIC wished to keep quiet. Visscher had collaborated with WIC cartographer Hessel Gerritszoon in the past, leading Sutton to argue that it is most likely Visscher, and not Blaeu, to whom the WIC turned first to popularize views of their overseas holdings. His prints helped the WIC seem in control, even when it was not. A similar argument applies to the maps of New Amsterdam, the subject of chapter five. Like the Brazilian maps, Visscher’s depictions of New Amsterdam made it seem comparable with flourishing Amsterdam. This effect was achieved particularly via the inclusion of a city profile that allows the reader to compare government and economic institutions in the two places. Sutton argues that not only were Visscher’s New Amsterdam maps used to attract colonists but they were also pro-WIC at a time when it was actually quite weak.
Sutton’s analytical points are solid, if a bit repetitive, and could be pushed further. Maps, in her analysis, are passive reflections. Visscher’s works are reactions: there is little insight into how the mapmaker himself worked or how he might have altered or actively contributed to the discourse about civic capitalism in an Atlantic arena. In addition, the text would benefit from more direct analysis of the map objects themselves, which although present in the text are far from the dominant aspect of her analysis. For example, Sutton mentions in passing that there are indigenous Americans and slaves on the Brazil maps. How does the inclusion of such peoples alter the attempted equivalence of Brazilian cities with Dutch ones? How does the imperial experience tax, as well as complement, existing ideas about the morality of economic expansion? Reading against, as well as with the grain of the map elements would only add to the strong and eloquent critique of exploitative capitalism that Sutton offers in her introduction and conclusion.
While the volume usefully goes beyond the Dutch Republic, one wonders how the story would be altered if the comparisons were even broader. Although it would mean including more on the VOC, the first half of the seventeenth century is precisely the period when maps were censored with regard to the western Pacific. Sutton briefly mentions that the maps under analysis in her book were authorized knowledge and approved media—what of unauthorized knowledge? What happens when news slips from the closely monitored repositories of the WIC and the VOC? What happens when maps are made that the two companies’ do not approve? Both Blaeu and Visscher depended on their relationships with the companies to create maps with the latest information but they were also businessmen who sold to the general public. What are the implications for the form and function of maps when their makers are so tenuously situated between patron and customer? Addressing such questions could augment the nuance of Sutton’s engagement with the development of capitalism as part of Amsterdam’s global presence in the seventeenth century.
Overall, the book offers readers a kaleidoscopic view of Dutch cartographic representation of the Atlantic world, with a special focus on how maps served as vessels for a prevailing discourse about civic virtue and national pride, as exercised through commercial expansion. However, like a kaleidoscope, such views are often partial and require prior knowledge (especially of Dutch and European history). As such, this book is more suitable for experts looking to augment prior familiarity rather than as a text easily adapted to classroom use.
