ABSTRACT
Europeans contended with an immense and influential body of literature describing America—travel accounts, illustrated histories, tropical geographies, epic poetry, decorative maps, and so forth—which conveyed, in an immediate and often striking form, the meaning and message of the so-called New World. The imaginative maneuver of the Dutch vis-à-vis America offers a prime example of how geography could work in early modern Europe, and how representations of the expanding globe came to reflect debates closer to home. News of the New World had circulated in Northern Europe, of course, from the moment of Columbus’ first reports in 1493. Transformations taking place in the New World also altered the political and polemical landscape. The process of geographic fashioning in the early modern Netherlands, and particularly the appropriation of the New World, attests to the exceptional agility and outstanding ingenuity of the Republic’s promoters.
