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In the 1650s, Balthazar Gerbier launched a mining scheme to search for gold in Guyana. In the late 1660s, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) initiated intensive mining operations on the west coast of Sumatra. Contrary to the enduring myth of Dutch disinterest in precious metals during early modern overseas expansion, the pursuit of gold and silver was, in fact, a central theme of Dutch colonialism. Our paper explores Dutch global mining ventures in the seventeenth century by examining Gerbier’s mining project in South America alongside the VOC’s mining operation in Sumatra. While these two ventures each have their own distinctive features, they share significant overlaps in terms of expertise necessitated, attitudes toward nature, and obstacles faced. We show that the Dutch efforts to obtain precious metals overseas relied on a transnational network of metallurgical expertise, encompassing not only extractive practices, but also a perfective view of nature. Given that the Netherlands entirely lacked mining operations, German miners and alchemical practitioners were recruited, overlaying central European mining and metallurgical traditions onto unfamiliar nature and cultural practices. Exploring areas such as assaying, shaft versus alluvial mining practice, and alchemical secrets to gain wealth, our paper tells a story where alchemy, speculative investing, rival transnational interests and colonial projecting, intersect with complex and shifting relationships with indigenous knowledge. It queries current views of Dutch commerce and science as productive of stable, reliable, and empirical intellectual goods.
Vera Keller, Professor of History at the University of Oregon, is the author of over forty articles, six edited volumes and journal special issues, and three monographs: Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725 (Cambridge UP, 2015), The Interlopers: Early Stuart Projects and the Undisciplining of Knowledge (Hopkins UP, 2023), winner of the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize from the Renaissance Society of America, and Curating the Enlightenment: Johann Daniel Major and the Experimental Century (Cambridge UP, forthcoming in 2024).
Wenrui Zhao is a postdoctoral associate in the History Department at Cornell University. She received her PhD from Columbia University in 2022. Her research mainly focuses on the visual and material culture of science and medicine in early modern northern Europe and its connections to the wider world. Her new project studies the German artisans who travelled to Southeast and East Asia under the employment of the Dutch East India Company.
