D. L. Noorlander. Heaven's Wrath: The Protestant Reformation and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. 300 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8014-5363-2.
Reviewed by John K. Thornton (Boston University)
Published on H-Africa (January, 2020)
Commissioned by David D. Hurlbut (Center for Global Christianity and Mission, Boston University School of Theology)
The First Dutch West India Company has most recently been discussed primarily as a political and economic instrument, driven by Dutch commercial and military interests in the Atlantic. The religious dimension of the company’s motivations and actions, while not set aside entirely, have generally been considered as secondary to political and commercial interests. D. L. Noorlander makes a strong and generally successful attempt to reassert the religious component to the company’s mission, while carefully balancing this particular element with the more widely recognized material motivations.
It is easy to fall into a trap of superficial pieties, as some other scholars of the religious dimension have done, along with simple patriotism, another pitfall, but Noorlander studiously avoids either of these in this work, which is extensively documented with Dutch archival and printed sources. Indeed, the endnote apparatus of this work is a veritable guide to Dutch material in the archives that will enlighten even quite specialized scholars of the Dutch Atlantic.
Noorlander’s central thesis is that religious piety and principle were much more important than is usually considered by those who have focused on political or economic dimensions. While not claiming that religious zeal was foremost in the actions of the West India Company, and fully acknowledging political and economic leadership, he is successful in showing that religious matters were of concern to the company. But Noorlander does contend that at times its decisions were at least affected, and mistakes made, by religious ideals.
Noorlander is particularly strong in laying out the basic structure of the Dutch Reformation with its multiple dimensions, both in the religious and the organizational levels. Thus he skillfully outlines the general theology of the Reformation on the Low Countries, including its competing factions and interpretations. He is also assiduous in describing the organization of the Dutch church and its attitude toward the newer religious communities that grew up as the Dutch colonized or conquered in Africa and the New World.
He is equally clear and concise in describing the complex organization of the West India Company, with its multiple participants and municipal chambers, who were also influential in shaping policy and procedure overseas and were permeated by the religious establishment. In this respect, Noorlander makes a major contribution in providing such a clear description of the complex organization he describes. Indeed, general accessibility is one of the strongest features of this book.
From his description of the company and Dutch religion, Noorlander then explores the activity of the West India Company in its various Atlantic adventures, including the trading posts in West Africa, the conquered territory of Brazil and Angola, and the settlements in the Caribbean and New Netherland in North America.
His work on these overseas territories outlines clearly the various problems that arose among the Dutch participants in these territories, detailing extensively the personality conflicts, religious differences, and organizational variations of such a wide range of situations. In West Africa, the Dutch were a tiny community of merchants scattered along the coast engaging largely in the trade for gold and then for slaves, with virtually no territorial interests; in Brazil and Angola, the Dutch were in charge of conquests, in which the conquered people were Catholic and local allies were frequently not Christian; in North America, the local people were neither Christian nor always allies.
In his several sections dealing with the Dutch interactions with various indigenous people of Africa or the Americas, Noorlander, while not missing the significant components, often fails to provide sufficient context to render the full nature of the interaction. The section on New Netherland, for example, correctly identifies Krieft’s War as an important point of interaction between the Dutch and indigenous Americans that was affected by the war. But he does not adequately explain either the religious environment that inhibited Dutch attempts at conversion or the politics within the communities that would allow us to understand fully how this colony altered the politics of the region.
A similar problem upsets the Brazilian case. Noorlander, like others before him, could not resist the story of the exchange between two Tupi cousins, Pieter Poti and Antonio Camarão, one Catholic and the other Protestant. But the complexity of the politics of indigenous Brazilians does not figure in the account, and the apparently split in the Tupi-speaking community is never explained, nor the complex series of alliances with the Portuguese that preceded the arrival of Dutch forces that might have shed more light on the rivalry.
More significant, however, is the relatively brief section on Angola, which in some ways is treated in the same way that the West African cases are. The West African section is original and outlines the difficulties of evangelization outside of the Dutch community. But the case of Angola presents a missed opportunity, for it has its own special spin. The Dutch came to Angola largely because of an appeal to them in 1623 by Kongo’s King Pedro II, which ultimately was finalized by Pedro’s successor, Garcia II. Without this long-standing relationship with Kongo the Dutch would never have come to Angola, and without the Kongolese army they could not have won even their initial victories.
Noorlander notes Garcia’s Catholicism, but leaves most readers wondering about an independent African Catholic in Central Africa. Kongo had embraced Christianity in its pre-Reformation form in 1491, and had shaped their interpretation to suit Kongo’s religious traditions. The official see of Central Africa was at Kongo’s capital of São Salvador, not in Luanda. Hostility to Portuguese incursions into his lands made Garcia, like the pious Pedro II before him, prepared to accept an alliance with the Protestant Dutch in the interest of expelling the Portuguese from Angola. Garcia was careful to include a non-evangelization clause in the treaty he made with the Dutch leaders when the invasion of Angola was realized in 1641. When the Dutch sent the minister Ketel to evangelize Kongo in spite of the treaty-specific prohibitions, Garcia responded with a sharply worded message, which is noted by Noorlander, affirming his continued Catholicism.
Given the various ways that the Dutch interacted with Catholics elsewhere in the Atlantic world, the specifics of the interaction in Kongo certainly represented a different path. Both the agreement to exclude attempts to reform Kongo and the ultimate and somewhat underhanded attempt to introduce it later would make a very interesting additional turn on Noorlander’s analysis.
Noorlander also makes no mention of the Dutch alliance with Ndongo’s Queen Njinga in Angola. After Garcia II temporarily ceased assisting the Dutch following their betrayal of him in 1643, Njinga provided them with the bulk of the forces fighting on behalf of the Dutch occupation. Njinga was baptized but at the time a lapsed Catholic and there was no Dutch attempt at evangelization in her lands, unlike the situation with non-Christian or partially Christian indigenous allies in Brazil.
These criticisms aside, Noorlander has produced a very readable account, and his inclusion of well-chosen and telling anecdotes where the sources present them is well executed. The research underlying it is most thorough, though curiously, Noorlander pays very little attention to Spanish and Portuguese documentary sources, including, for example, their own intelligence reports. The Spanish and Portuguese point of view is represented by quotations and analysis from secondary sources, but not with the kind of detailed and independent verification that is supplied by the substantial use of original Dutch sources. Altogether I consider this a fine book and an important contribution to the religious dimension of the Dutch Atlantic expansion, marred, however, by the surprisingly light-handed treatment of the Angola section.
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Citation:
John K. Thornton. Review of Noorlander, D. L., Heaven's Wrath: The Protestant Reformation and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World.
H-Africa, H-Net Reviews.
January, 2020.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54453
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