Wim De Winter
Early-modern Asian, world-, and maritime historian on the Indian Ocean & the Pacific at KU Leuven. As post-doctoral researcher, i'm currently part of the ERC Advanced Grant project TRANSPACIFIC team (P.I. prof. Angela Schottenhammer), investigating 'unseen exchanges', contraband cargoes, and navigational strategies across the Pacific Ocean from the 16th to the 18th century.
https://crossroads-research.net/projects/erc-adg-transpacific/
I hold a Ph.D. and an M.A. (greatest distinction) in History from Ghent University, where I focused exchange relations as performative elements of "intercultural connections" in a seventeenth century maritime environment (as world-historical anthropology). The result was an award-winning thesis and resulting research articles.
For my doctoral dissertation, I studied a comparative historical anthropology of cross-cultural interaction and performative exchange as building blocks for the GIC (Ostend Company)'s historical connections in the intercultural environments of late 18th c. China (Canton) and India (Bengal), against the background of Qing Chinese and Mughal Indian foreign policy.
Cross-cultural interaction consisted of improvised encounters and practical exchanges, as performative elements of connected histories. It investigated the cultural dimension and re-contextualisation of exchanges involving European maritime traders (mainly from the Austrian-Netherlandish Ostend Company) as well as Muslim trading networks, through a 'connected comparison' placing these in the wider framework of an Indian Ocean World. Finally, this research also included a critical meta-theoretical perspective on early-modern 'world history', and related this to its contemporary historical residue. A fieldwork component (India) takes its past and contemporary interpretations into account.
Apart from intercultural history and anthropology, I'm also pursuing personal research and performance into Indian Dhrupad music, of which I'm a practitioner in the Dagarvani lineage since 13 years, and keep an active interest and activity in sound- and visual arts (film).
https://crossroads-research.net/projects/erc-adg-transpacific/
I hold a Ph.D. and an M.A. (greatest distinction) in History from Ghent University, where I focused exchange relations as performative elements of "intercultural connections" in a seventeenth century maritime environment (as world-historical anthropology). The result was an award-winning thesis and resulting research articles.
For my doctoral dissertation, I studied a comparative historical anthropology of cross-cultural interaction and performative exchange as building blocks for the GIC (Ostend Company)'s historical connections in the intercultural environments of late 18th c. China (Canton) and India (Bengal), against the background of Qing Chinese and Mughal Indian foreign policy.
Cross-cultural interaction consisted of improvised encounters and practical exchanges, as performative elements of connected histories. It investigated the cultural dimension and re-contextualisation of exchanges involving European maritime traders (mainly from the Austrian-Netherlandish Ostend Company) as well as Muslim trading networks, through a 'connected comparison' placing these in the wider framework of an Indian Ocean World. Finally, this research also included a critical meta-theoretical perspective on early-modern 'world history', and related this to its contemporary historical residue. A fieldwork component (India) takes its past and contemporary interpretations into account.
Apart from intercultural history and anthropology, I'm also pursuing personal research and performance into Indian Dhrupad music, of which I'm a practitioner in the Dagarvani lineage since 13 years, and keep an active interest and activity in sound- and visual arts (film).
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Articles by Wim De Winter
ウィム・デ・ウィンターは、17世紀日本におけるヨーロッパ人と日本人の文化交流を考察する。 この章では、ヨーロッパ人と日本人との出会いの鮮明な例を提供し、特定の儀式や象徴的な行動の重要な役割を演ずる、例えば、異文化間の出会いの一環となる客人をもてなすしるしとして宴席や「他者」に関するいろいろな解釈などを論ずる。
Wim De Winter는 17 세기 일본에서 이루어진 유럽인과 일본인의 문화 교류를 고찰한다. 이 장에서는 유럽인과 일본인과의 만남의 생생한 예를 제공하고 특정 의식과 상징적인 행동--예로서 손님 대접의 표현으로서의 연회는 그러한 다문화간의 만남의 일환이었다--의 중요성, 및 “타자”에 대한 다양한 해석을 논한다.
Wim De Winter討論了在十七世紀的日本, 歐洲人和日本人的文化交往。本文舉出了歐洲人和日本人之間相遇的生動例子, 討論了特定儀式和象徵性行為的關鍵作用--比如，作為好客標誌的宴會, 這種文化交往的必要部分-和對 "他者"的不同看法。
http://www.eacrh.net/ojs/index.php/crossroads/issue/archive
This article forms a critique on the formation of a colonial historiography concerning the interactions of the maritime 'Ostend Company' (GIC) in eighteenth century China and India, which at one point has even been labeled Belgium's first colony. This historiography has hitherto ignored aspects of intercultural communication, which provided the conditions of possibility for any further interaction and exchange. The conceptual influence of colonialism on this discourse, and its recuperation of the Ostend Company's interactions in Bengal, are traced through its manifestations in historiography as well as popular visual culture. This is contrasted with a source-based approach which sheds new light on vital issues of courtly communication as a learning process involving specific acts and symbols.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0971945813515023
‘The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in THE MEDIEVAL HISTORYJOURNAL, March/2014 by SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd, All rights reserved. Copyright © (2013) The Medieval History Society
Book Chapters by Wim De Winter
routinely served as bases from which 17th century French buccaneers preyed on coastal settlements and shipping. As these islands’ ecosystems provided fresh water, wood for careening the ship, and sea turtles and fish as victuals, they enabled buccaneers to remain in the Pacific for years. The buccaneers’ logs subsequently put these islands on the map for French smuggling expeditions, even enabling a Pacific crossing from 1708 onwards. The chapter looks at this illicit transpacific history from the islands’ perspective: how did their ecosystems enable their use as temporary places of resource and refuge? It looks at how sailors’ perceptions of the environment influenced their forms of island dwelling according to a ‘sentient ecology’, as they interacted with the islands’ ecosystem while contributing to the imaginative construction of these islands in logbooks and maps. For instance, the presence of volcanic rock on ‘Burned Island’ or Isabela made it appear ‘to be hell itself’, while the location of its hidden bays presented a temporary place of refuge to French buccaneers in 1688. These French buccaneers and navigators’ own journals and letters provide a first-hand account which enables us to compare and reconstruct their interactions with island ecologies, as these enabled both transpacific crossings and plundering at sea. More than intermediary stops along navigational routes, islands can thus be acknowledged as entities enabling a global history of maritime predation.
Aquil, R.; Mukherjee, T. (Ed.) (2020). An earthly paradise: trade, politics and culture in Early Modern Bengal. Manohar Publishers: New Delhi. ISBN 978-93-88540-91-9. 595 pp.
This text is the author's preferred version in proof, which may slightly differ from the final product. No changes in content have been made.
Science Outreach & Public History by Wim De Winter
Even if the story of the Ostend Company is at all known, it is mostly as a prelude to further Belgian colonial history. Historian Wim De Winter investigates the history of this trade company as a chronicle of encounters and studies the interaction between Europeans and Asians.
ISSN: 0772-0084
Wim De Winter contributed as interviewee from the ERC Advanced Grant project 'TRANSPACIFIC' at KU Leuven, by pointing to some important aspects beyond the well-known story of European conquest and exploration. The navigation which helped Europeans cross the Pacific was at least partly indebted to the botanica, resources, skills, and knowledge developed locally at the Marianne-islands, the Bay of Arauco, and beyond. Knowledge on the natural world was also developed through non-verbal interactions and exchanges with islanders. This brings the story beyond a purely European view, while taking the natural environment into account.
Online link to the article & the VLIZ newsletter:
https://www.vliz.be/testerep/nl/2021-02-legendarische-oceaanexpedities-met-belgisch-tintje
Conference Presentations by Wim De Winter
As formal documents, bills of lading contain a detailed description of a ship’s cargo. Although these documents were generally disposed of upon the cargo’s delivery, they have been preserved as Prize Papers in ships taken mid-journey. As such, they present valuable ‘snapshots’ of both ‘ordinary’ and ‘illegitimate’ early modern commodity flows.
Due to the restrictions of 18th century mercantilist policies, and as the Southern Netherlands did not hold any territory in the Atlantic basin, tropical commodities could only reach the region’s markets by way of intermediate ports belonging to the colonial maritime empires. Research on the bills of lading shows that the Southern Netherlandish ports of Ostend and Bruges were not dependent on a single empire, but traded with both French and British ports in order to get hold of sugar, coffee or rice. In an example from an international network perspective, bills of lading also unravel the connection between a local small-town shopkeeper in Enghien, a merchant in Ostend, and a slave trader in Nantes. Lastly, these documents shed light on the importance of family, national, and religious ties in shaping early modern trade networks, from the plantation economy to the ports of arrival.
Both privateering and government restrictions on enemy trade disrupted commerce during wartime. Merchants and sailors’ personal correspondence testifies to the commercial risks faced by privateering. However, interrupted trade routes often resulted in scarcity, which caused prices to rise. Resultingly, smuggling presented lucrative opportunities for ambitious merchants. We turn to the Prize Papers in order to explore these ‘illegitimate’ commodity flows, which shows us how merchants used double sets of bills of lading, as well as inventive hiding places on board the ship, to mask their real destination upon encountering privateers. Despite the fragmented nature of the Prize Papers as shipboard primary sources, they give us new and unique insights into commodity flows, and the agency of merchants confronted with the adverse economic circumstances of maritime warfare.
While the activities and knowledge production of 18th century proto-scientists and collectors have been well-studied (Adamowsky 2015, MacGregor 2018), research on new and previously unexplored sources reveals how sailors perceived and interacted with marine life from within their own technical traditions, on board their ‘wooden world’ at sea (De Winter 2019). As an isolated working environment in which they faced the challenges of oceanic navigation, the ship itself provided the infrastructure for developing knowledge on unfamiliar marine environments. Case studies on selected ship logbooks, such as those of ship’s chaplain Michael de Febure (De Winter 2019) or navigational sources from the Southern-Netherlandish Prize Papers collection, urge us to reconsider the ship as a historical space for knowledge production on the marine environment during the early modern period. Taking into account the working experience and technical traditions of seamen influenced how sailors as well as proto-scientists interacted with the environment as ‘organic intellectuals’ (Egmond and Mason 1996). Their testimonies show how the role of curiosity, exoticism, and utilitarianism all served as drivers for the expansion of early modern knowledge on the natural world (Daston & Park 1998). This production of knowledge at sea was formed by a culture of maritime navigation as well as a developing culture of reading embedded within a burgeoning geographical literature and scientific discussion during the 18th century (Shapin and Schaffer 2011).
Both long-distance expeditions to Asia or Latin America and shorter distance voyages across the Atlantic reveal how 18th century sailors perceived the ocean as an environment, within which specific human-environment interactions took place. These voyages coupled the exoticism and curiosity involved in the perception of an unfamiliar environment to the environmental, climatological and oceanographic challenges faced by sailors in the creation of practical shipboard knowledge.
Newly encountered geographical features, such as islands and other ‘seamarks’, received names while exotic marine wildlife was observed and compared to familiar European fauna, which was also plundered by sailors as part of their food supply, or as a pastime. These elements were also treated as signs within navigational practices forming a shared knowledge within the maritime working community (Rediker 1987).
Experimental scientific approaches, such as the temperature measurements conducted at sea by de Febure in 1721, could also be coupled to these observations. Resultingly, early modern ships can be reconsidered as precursors to later systematic uses of research vessels or ‘vessels of opportunity’ as a means for developing knowledge on the marine environment.
This poster forms a provisional summary of my research-project.
ABSTRACT
"This research forms a comparative historical anthropology of cultural interaction and local exchange relations in late 18th- century China (Guangdong) and India (Bengal and Cabelon). It considers improvised encounters and practical exchanges as performative elements connecting histories. It investigates the cultural dimension and re-contextualization of exchanges involving European maritime traders from the Ostend- and East India Companies and Muslim trading networks, through a 'connected comparison' in an Indian Ocean World. It also includes a critical theoretical reflection on the possibilities of 'early modern' 'world-history'."
Papers & Miscellanea by Wim De Winter
This paper also shows how the (semi-)processed states of the commodities both determined their potential declaration as illegal goods and the practical possibilities for their clandestine transport. Consequently, the refined or finished state of the commodities mattered in smuggling as much as it did in legitimate commerce, as it influenced and determined both their valuation and physical form as they moved along the commodity chain, with an impact on the agency and organisation of the workers transporting them.
New evidence from archives in Potosí and Peru, coupled with European sailors’ personal letters, reveals ways in which the processed and unprocessed states of silk textiles and unminted bullion played a crucial role in the long-running smuggling culture of the Spanish colonies and at sea. This paper aims to indicate on what levels this subversive economy extended. It looks at which agents were involved, how it crossed over the contingent line between legal and illegal economic practices, and what consequences and influences this had on subsequent commercial developments. It questions how the qualitative nature of silk and bullion as unfinished or processed commodities determined or impacted transpacific smuggling. Lastly, it also indicates how information was gathered on the nature of these commodities, and the state in which they could be smuggled. This paper thus provides a sweeping look at the early-modern trans-Pacific smuggling trade from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and its extension into the Ostend-Asia ventures, providing some indications on how these questions can be addressed.
Please consult the paper via the following link:
https://commoditiesofempire.org.uk/publications/working-papers/working-paper-35/
ウィム・デ・ウィンターは、17世紀日本におけるヨーロッパ人と日本人の文化交流を考察する。 この章では、ヨーロッパ人と日本人との出会いの鮮明な例を提供し、特定の儀式や象徴的な行動の重要な役割を演ずる、例えば、異文化間の出会いの一環となる客人をもてなすしるしとして宴席や「他者」に関するいろいろな解釈などを論ずる。
Wim De Winter는 17 세기 일본에서 이루어진 유럽인과 일본인의 문화 교류를 고찰한다. 이 장에서는 유럽인과 일본인과의 만남의 생생한 예를 제공하고 특정 의식과 상징적인 행동--예로서 손님 대접의 표현으로서의 연회는 그러한 다문화간의 만남의 일환이었다--의 중요성, 및 “타자”에 대한 다양한 해석을 논한다.
Wim De Winter討論了在十七世紀的日本, 歐洲人和日本人的文化交往。本文舉出了歐洲人和日本人之間相遇的生動例子, 討論了特定儀式和象徵性行為的關鍵作用--比如，作為好客標誌的宴會, 這種文化交往的必要部分-和對 "他者"的不同看法。
http://www.eacrh.net/ojs/index.php/crossroads/issue/archive
This article forms a critique on the formation of a colonial historiography concerning the interactions of the maritime 'Ostend Company' (GIC) in eighteenth century China and India, which at one point has even been labeled Belgium's first colony. This historiography has hitherto ignored aspects of intercultural communication, which provided the conditions of possibility for any further interaction and exchange. The conceptual influence of colonialism on this discourse, and its recuperation of the Ostend Company's interactions in Bengal, are traced through its manifestations in historiography as well as popular visual culture. This is contrasted with a source-based approach which sheds new light on vital issues of courtly communication as a learning process involving specific acts and symbols.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0971945813515023
‘The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in THE MEDIEVAL HISTORYJOURNAL, March/2014 by SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd, All rights reserved. Copyright © (2013) The Medieval History Society
routinely served as bases from which 17th century French buccaneers preyed on coastal settlements and shipping. As these islands’ ecosystems provided fresh water, wood for careening the ship, and sea turtles and fish as victuals, they enabled buccaneers to remain in the Pacific for years. The buccaneers’ logs subsequently put these islands on the map for French smuggling expeditions, even enabling a Pacific crossing from 1708 onwards. The chapter looks at this illicit transpacific history from the islands’ perspective: how did their ecosystems enable their use as temporary places of resource and refuge? It looks at how sailors’ perceptions of the environment influenced their forms of island dwelling according to a ‘sentient ecology’, as they interacted with the islands’ ecosystem while contributing to the imaginative construction of these islands in logbooks and maps. For instance, the presence of volcanic rock on ‘Burned Island’ or Isabela made it appear ‘to be hell itself’, while the location of its hidden bays presented a temporary place of refuge to French buccaneers in 1688. These French buccaneers and navigators’ own journals and letters provide a first-hand account which enables us to compare and reconstruct their interactions with island ecologies, as these enabled both transpacific crossings and plundering at sea. More than intermediary stops along navigational routes, islands can thus be acknowledged as entities enabling a global history of maritime predation.
Aquil, R.; Mukherjee, T. (Ed.) (2020). An earthly paradise: trade, politics and culture in Early Modern Bengal. Manohar Publishers: New Delhi. ISBN 978-93-88540-91-9. 595 pp.
This text is the author's preferred version in proof, which may slightly differ from the final product. No changes in content have been made.
Even if the story of the Ostend Company is at all known, it is mostly as a prelude to further Belgian colonial history. Historian Wim De Winter investigates the history of this trade company as a chronicle of encounters and studies the interaction between Europeans and Asians.
ISSN: 0772-0084
Wim De Winter contributed as interviewee from the ERC Advanced Grant project 'TRANSPACIFIC' at KU Leuven, by pointing to some important aspects beyond the well-known story of European conquest and exploration. The navigation which helped Europeans cross the Pacific was at least partly indebted to the botanica, resources, skills, and knowledge developed locally at the Marianne-islands, the Bay of Arauco, and beyond. Knowledge on the natural world was also developed through non-verbal interactions and exchanges with islanders. This brings the story beyond a purely European view, while taking the natural environment into account.
Online link to the article & the VLIZ newsletter:
https://www.vliz.be/testerep/nl/2021-02-legendarische-oceaanexpedities-met-belgisch-tintje
As formal documents, bills of lading contain a detailed description of a ship’s cargo. Although these documents were generally disposed of upon the cargo’s delivery, they have been preserved as Prize Papers in ships taken mid-journey. As such, they present valuable ‘snapshots’ of both ‘ordinary’ and ‘illegitimate’ early modern commodity flows.
Due to the restrictions of 18th century mercantilist policies, and as the Southern Netherlands did not hold any territory in the Atlantic basin, tropical commodities could only reach the region’s markets by way of intermediate ports belonging to the colonial maritime empires. Research on the bills of lading shows that the Southern Netherlandish ports of Ostend and Bruges were not dependent on a single empire, but traded with both French and British ports in order to get hold of sugar, coffee or rice. In an example from an international network perspective, bills of lading also unravel the connection between a local small-town shopkeeper in Enghien, a merchant in Ostend, and a slave trader in Nantes. Lastly, these documents shed light on the importance of family, national, and religious ties in shaping early modern trade networks, from the plantation economy to the ports of arrival.
Both privateering and government restrictions on enemy trade disrupted commerce during wartime. Merchants and sailors’ personal correspondence testifies to the commercial risks faced by privateering. However, interrupted trade routes often resulted in scarcity, which caused prices to rise. Resultingly, smuggling presented lucrative opportunities for ambitious merchants. We turn to the Prize Papers in order to explore these ‘illegitimate’ commodity flows, which shows us how merchants used double sets of bills of lading, as well as inventive hiding places on board the ship, to mask their real destination upon encountering privateers. Despite the fragmented nature of the Prize Papers as shipboard primary sources, they give us new and unique insights into commodity flows, and the agency of merchants confronted with the adverse economic circumstances of maritime warfare.
While the activities and knowledge production of 18th century proto-scientists and collectors have been well-studied (Adamowsky 2015, MacGregor 2018), research on new and previously unexplored sources reveals how sailors perceived and interacted with marine life from within their own technical traditions, on board their ‘wooden world’ at sea (De Winter 2019). As an isolated working environment in which they faced the challenges of oceanic navigation, the ship itself provided the infrastructure for developing knowledge on unfamiliar marine environments. Case studies on selected ship logbooks, such as those of ship’s chaplain Michael de Febure (De Winter 2019) or navigational sources from the Southern-Netherlandish Prize Papers collection, urge us to reconsider the ship as a historical space for knowledge production on the marine environment during the early modern period. Taking into account the working experience and technical traditions of seamen influenced how sailors as well as proto-scientists interacted with the environment as ‘organic intellectuals’ (Egmond and Mason 1996). Their testimonies show how the role of curiosity, exoticism, and utilitarianism all served as drivers for the expansion of early modern knowledge on the natural world (Daston & Park 1998). This production of knowledge at sea was formed by a culture of maritime navigation as well as a developing culture of reading embedded within a burgeoning geographical literature and scientific discussion during the 18th century (Shapin and Schaffer 2011).
Both long-distance expeditions to Asia or Latin America and shorter distance voyages across the Atlantic reveal how 18th century sailors perceived the ocean as an environment, within which specific human-environment interactions took place. These voyages coupled the exoticism and curiosity involved in the perception of an unfamiliar environment to the environmental, climatological and oceanographic challenges faced by sailors in the creation of practical shipboard knowledge.
Newly encountered geographical features, such as islands and other ‘seamarks’, received names while exotic marine wildlife was observed and compared to familiar European fauna, which was also plundered by sailors as part of their food supply, or as a pastime. These elements were also treated as signs within navigational practices forming a shared knowledge within the maritime working community (Rediker 1987).
Experimental scientific approaches, such as the temperature measurements conducted at sea by de Febure in 1721, could also be coupled to these observations. Resultingly, early modern ships can be reconsidered as precursors to later systematic uses of research vessels or ‘vessels of opportunity’ as a means for developing knowledge on the marine environment.
This poster forms a provisional summary of my research-project.
ABSTRACT
"This research forms a comparative historical anthropology of cultural interaction and local exchange relations in late 18th- century China (Guangdong) and India (Bengal and Cabelon). It considers improvised encounters and practical exchanges as performative elements connecting histories. It investigates the cultural dimension and re-contextualization of exchanges involving European maritime traders from the Ostend- and East India Companies and Muslim trading networks, through a 'connected comparison' in an Indian Ocean World. It also includes a critical theoretical reflection on the possibilities of 'early modern' 'world-history'."
This paper also shows how the (semi-)processed states of the commodities both determined their potential declaration as illegal goods and the practical possibilities for their clandestine transport. Consequently, the refined or finished state of the commodities mattered in smuggling as much as it did in legitimate commerce, as it influenced and determined both their valuation and physical form as they moved along the commodity chain, with an impact on the agency and organisation of the workers transporting them.
New evidence from archives in Potosí and Peru, coupled with European sailors’ personal letters, reveals ways in which the processed and unprocessed states of silk textiles and unminted bullion played a crucial role in the long-running smuggling culture of the Spanish colonies and at sea. This paper aims to indicate on what levels this subversive economy extended. It looks at which agents were involved, how it crossed over the contingent line between legal and illegal economic practices, and what consequences and influences this had on subsequent commercial developments. It questions how the qualitative nature of silk and bullion as unfinished or processed commodities determined or impacted transpacific smuggling. Lastly, it also indicates how information was gathered on the nature of these commodities, and the state in which they could be smuggled. This paper thus provides a sweeping look at the early-modern trans-Pacific smuggling trade from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and its extension into the Ostend-Asia ventures, providing some indications on how these questions can be addressed.
Please consult the paper via the following link:
https://commoditiesofempire.org.uk/publications/working-papers/working-paper-35/
https://commoditiesofempire.org.uk/publications/working-papers/working-paper-32/
This working paper emanates from the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ)’s ongoing research into the Prize Papers Collection kept at the National Archives in Kew, and their significance for eighteenth-century Southern Netherlandish maritime history. This collection contains shipboard documents captured from enemy ships by the British Navy during the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1714), the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) and the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783). These unexplored sources offer the shipboard perspective of sailors circulating on the seas between rivalling empires during wartime, while transporting colonial commodities.The paper takes the Prize Papers collection as a starting point in order to investigate commodity flows of American and Caribbean commodities such as sugar, coffee, tobacco, indigo and rice towards Flemish merchant networks. As elsewhere in Europe during the eighteenth century, consumption patterns in the Southern Netherlands were marked by an increasing demand for such colonial products.
Despite the fragmented nature of these Prize Papers as shipboard primary sources, the products of corsairing and maritime warfare, it is possible to gain some insight on colonial commodity flows during Early Modern wartime. They show how both maritime and land-based warfare interrupted peacetime commerce in Europe and colonial territories, while simultaneously providing risky and lucrative trade opportunities. This paper focusses on the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1714), the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) and the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783). This chronological demarcation intentionally leaves out the period of the General Imperial India Company or ‘Ostend Company’ and its preceding private ventures (1719-1743), when the Austrian Netherlands directly engaged in Asian colonial trade via expeditions to Mughal India and Qing China from the port of Ostend. This period has been treated more extensively elsewhere. Instead, the focus here is on the indirect role of Southern Netherlandish commodity flows from French (and to a lesser extent British) colonial trade.
Lastly, these prize papers reveal the agency of captains, sailors and merchants in deploying navigational and commercial strategies in order to gain from this lucrative colonial traffic while risking privateering encounters. They show how the correspondence of brokers and merchants regulated colonial commodity flows, and directly affected both sailors and their ships’ journeys.