Seventeenth-Century Dutch Merchant-Regents: Cultures of Knowledge and Attitudes toward the World

At the inauguration of the Amsterdam “Athenaeum Illustre” (1632), the philosopher Caspar Barlaeus gave an address in which he painted the image of the wise merchant (“mercator sapiens”). According to Barlaeus, philosophy and commerce were complimentary rather than mutually exclusive. Scholars should use merchants’ experiences to increase their knowledge, whereas merchants should profit from the wisdom of philosophers to pursue their trade. Furthermore, merchants should not limit their studies to moral philosophy, but they should also command “speculative philosophy” and acquire a broad theoretical and empirical knowledge of the world.

The image Barlaeus invoked appealed to a new generation of Dutch merchant-regents who preferred to settle down and raise their prestige and power as governors and political dignitaries. Most probably, it was these Dutch merchant-regents, too, for whom the Amsterdam/Leiden publishing house Elzevir published its “Republics” between 1625 and 1649. The volumes, which had similar titles, similar frontispieces and a similar small format, consisted of descriptions of all seventeenth-century European states, several non-European countries, and Israel, Greece and Rome as the three most important cultures of antiquity. Reading them, the merchant-regents could “experience” everything they needed for their political and economical duties while at the same time staying at home and avoiding the dangers and incommodities of early modern traveling.

Until now, the Elzevirian Republics have only been analyzed in the context of early modern political philosophy. In my paper, I will use the series to discuss early modern Dutch merchant-regents’ cultures of knowledge and attitudes toward the world. In doing so, I not only hope to contribute to a better understanding of one of the most important early modern European elites, but also to recent publications in the history of knowledge and commerce.