Establishing the Dutch West India Company in 1621 extended the Dutch Republic's clash with Habsburg Spain and Portugal—and their dynastic union (1580–1640)—to the Americas and to the printing houses. An avalanche of textual and visual depictions of the Dutch campaigns in South America and the Caribbean followed, attracting most of Europe's attention for decades. A growing audience, craving transatlantic storylines, increasingly consumed newspapers, news maps, bulletins, pamphlets, coffee-table books, and other printed materials that reported on the anti-Habsburg Dutch raids in the Caribbean, the battles for the sugar-rich colony of Brazil, and the retrieval of slave trade posts in West Africa. In eleven captivating chapters (some previously published in Dutch) Imagining the Americas in Print, by Michiel van Groesen, explores how seventeenth-century prints about Dutch interventions in the Caribbean and South America “contributed to the lasting inequality between Europe and parts of the Americas as well as Africa,” and why they helped shape and canonize this “persistent imbalance, adding to the disparity established by the actual encounters” between them (8).

Chapter 1 examines overlooked editorial modifications to the New World accounts published by the De Bry family. Van Groesen argues that far from being mere anti-Spanish or anti-Catholic militants (as frequently depicted), the De Brys were “prudent publishers who relied on the sales figures of their magnum opus for the prosperity of the family firm,” attempting to meet the disparate “demands of a highly differentiated European readership” (31), including Iberian Catholics as well as Dutch Protestants. Chapter 3 focuses on some Dutch West India Company maps, drawn by Dierick Ruiters, which complicate the standard narrative of cartographic openness during the Dutch Golden Age and highlight the importance of bureaucratic contingency. The West India Company's refusal to publish the manuscripts denied Ruiters canonical status—given later to his luckiest colleagues—as one of the cartographic founders of the Dutch Atlantic world.

In chapter 5, van Groesen analyzes how “good and bad news from the Western front” circulated in the Low Countries by comparing the editorial practices of two Coranto—the informational broadsheet antecedents of newspapers (99). Publishing these Coranto—one in Amsterdam, the other in (Spanish-ruled) Antwerp—involved differing strategies for obtaining and presenting stories, managing rumors, solving discrepancies between regular and irregular sources of information, choosing which topics to emphasize or suppress, etc. Chapter 6 focuses on editorial experiments by cartographer Claes Jansz. Visscher, who combined news, battle maps, and printed captions to spread awareness throughout the Netherlands and Europe about the West India Company's progress in Brazil. Visscher's news maps were printed as collages that could be separated into several parts, depending on the availability of the different illustrations that made up the original news map or the individual customer's wishes, spending power, or political preferences. The images were copied, translated, and reissued across the Old World, acquiring canonical status in European iconography.

The final chapters discuss the sense of exoticism that Dutch publications gradually developed as the political influence of the United Provinces in the Atlantic world started to diminish and disappear in the late seventeenth century. The figure of the cannibal, in particular (chapter 9), reappeared in Dutch descriptions of Brazil as the United Provinces came to terms with the painful loss of the colony. Also in the final quarter of the seventeenth century, as Dutch imperial aspirations declined in the Atlantic world, Amsterdam publishers lost interest in Atlantic news and images and shifted their resources to fictional stories (chapter 10) “of an unknown world beyond the horizon” (206), centered on the “brave enterprises and courageous expeditions of the most famous pirates” (210), and, during the eighteenth century, of West Indian Company admirals lionized in nationalistic narratives (chapter 11).

In sum, van Groesen's book is a sophisticated depiction of the editorial strategies, practices, and manipulations of texts and images on the Dutch fight for American territories during the middle of the Eighty Years’ War against Spain (1568–1648), and the Dutch-Portuguese War over spice, sugar, and slave trade posts (1602–63). It examines the complex politics, businesses, and circumstances through which early modern Dutch publishers accessed, narrated, illustrated, and marketed their printed accounts and illustrations of the Dutch Americas.