Following the revolutionary Atlantic, the red and black Atlantics, and the British, Dutch, Portuguese, French, and African ones, Michiel van Groesen’s Amsterdam’s Atlantic introduces yet another analytical category to the toolkit of historians of the Atlantic world as well as scholars of early modern print media: that of a “public Atlantic” (8). In the year that the Rijksmuseum’s exhibition of Frans Post’s Brazilian landscapes and animal drawings once more emphasized the extent to which modern-day understandings of Dutch Brazil are dominated by Count Johan Maurits of Naussau-Siegen’s cultural patronage, Van Groesen’s book makes an important intervention in arguing that the real significance of the Dutch colonial enterprise in northeastern Brazil lay in its importance as a media event stirring up popular participation in domestic politics through public debate.

As its title indicates, Amsterdam’s Atlantic is not a study of the Dutch presence in Brazil as such, but of its reception, representation, and production at home. Events taking place across the Atlantic—from the short-lived capture of Salvador in 1624 and the conquest of Pernambuco in 1630 to the final hand over of the colony in 1654—are approached from the perspective of Amsterdam’s media landscape, with the author utilizing drawings on maps, sermons, letters, diaries, and above all pamphlets and newspapers. It was these latter forms of “new media” (190)—cheaply produced, widely available, and largely free from government control—that ensured that Dutch Brazil captured the public’s attention and became a topic fomenting deep divisions in urban society that directly affected the colony’s future—an outcome made possible by an open discussion culture in which politicized public opinion flourished. Van Groesen makes a strong case for Amsterdam’s role as the Dutch Republic’s “epicenter of news and opinion” (4) and “the main information hub of early modern Europe” (2), and succeeds in demonstrating the pertinence of Dutch Brazil for understanding the functioning and impact of Atlantic news.

The book opens with a survey of the “second-hand” (22) knowledge about Brazil available in the United Provinces around 1600, which was limited, outdated, and of foreign origin. Only when Brazil gained political urgency with the founding of the West India Company (WIC) in 1621 did it become topical in print, feeding the public’s anticipation of an attack on this Habsburg powerhouse. Chapters 2 and 3 detail how news of military victories were eagerly publicized in Amsterdam’s two newspapers while reports of setbacks were passed over in silence; how the WIC successfully managed its public-relations strategy by commissioning a series of news maps; and how the company’s “corporate storyline of consolidation and appropriation” (100) began to be challenged during the 1630s as returning eyewitnesses produced a multiplicity of voices. Chapters 4 and 5 explain how, by the 1640s, increasingly acrimonious pamphlet wars were fought over issues related to religious toleration, morality, and monopoly politics or free trade, progressively pitting Amsterdam-based merchants against Zeeland-backed factions and effectively sealing the fate of a colony faced with a Luso-Brazilian planters’ revolt. Finally, chapter 6 makes the valuable contribution of tracing public legacies of Dutch Brazil down to the nineteenth century, addressing both the inflated importance attributed to Johan Maurits and the return to pre-1600 stereotypes of Brazil in Dutch geography as the political memory of the colony faded.

Van Groesen’s claims are elegantly presented and on the whole convincing, even if at times they raise questions that are not answered by the evidence the book provides. It remains unclear, for instance, why news about Dutch attacks on Iberian strongholds in Asia should not have carried “the implicit promise of imminent Spanish ruination” (10) in the way that Brazil did. More substantially, the assertion that “the volume and the sheer quality of publicity inspired by Dutch Brazil … are unrivalled in the early modern period” (10) could have been fortified by means of quantitative analysis, particularly in light of traditional arguments about the so-called blunted impact of the New World on Europe. Nonetheless, the book’s suggestion that colonizing ventures in the Americas shaped and were shaped by public debate in Europe should prove to be sufficiently compelling for fellow Atlantic historians to take up Van Groesen’s invitation of treating Dutch Brazil as a “template” (198).