ABSTRACT
This chapter traces how Henry Hudson’s 1609 failure to find a passage to Asia was transformed into a new promise—the participation in the profitable beaver fur trade—and initiated a new project: New Netherland. By examining Dutch interventions in the New World, Brugger allows us to see how “Projects” and “Projecting”—understood as a conceptual approach—build on temporal and geographical distances as productive dynamics that transform uncertainties and risk into promises of success and fortune. In New Netherland, Dutch global ambitions materialized in beaver fur stocks. Travel reports, engravings, and paintings sketched the North American territories as sites where trade boomed and new markets emerged. Such descriptions and depictions of an imagined promised land worked as a marketing tool to attract new settlers. Realizing and stabilizing the economic and political project, however, was controversial. The competing interests of company soldiers, who shipped goods over the Dutch Atlantic, and permanent settlers shaped the Dutch territories early on. Structural renewals like the founding of the West India Company, the liberalization and privatization of the fur trade, the founding of the capital New Amsterdam and the permission to found patronships indicate constant political, social and economic change in New Netherland.
