The Centre for Statecraft & National Security is excited to host Prof Alexander B. Bick for a talk on his new book, Minutes of Empire: Dutch West India Company Politics, 1618–1648.

In September 1645, when the directors of the West India Company gathered for their semi-annual board meeting, they faced the most important crisis in the company's history, one that would determine the fate of a burgeoning Dutch imperial project in the New World.In this book, Alexander Bick tells the story of this meeting, applying the tools of microhistory to the boardroom of one of early modern Europe's most enigmatic trading companies. Chartered by the States General in 1621, the West India Company's principal aim was to open a new front in the struggle against Habsburg Spain by attacking its colonial revenues at their source. This required close cooperation between the company and the central organs of the Dutch state responsible for military affairs. Unlike the merchant-dominated ventures of popular imagination, the company emerges as an instrument of war in which noblemen, courtiers, and magistrates played a decisive role. Through portraits of figures like Johannes de Laet and Hendrik van der Capellen, the book reveals how the company and its leaders wrestled with fundamental questions of political authority, colonial governance, and the relationship between private enterprise and public power—questions that crystalized in the fall of 1645 in the debate over the future of the lucrative but embattled Dutch sugar colony in northeastern Brazil While this colony was ultimately lost, the West India Company's contributions to securing a favorable peace with Spain in 1648 would prove more enduring.Minutes of Empire offers an intimate an perspective on the cosmopolitan politics of overseas trading companies that challenges conventional accounts of how empire helped to forge the Dutch state in the Republic's political and economic ascent in the Golden Age.

About the Speaker:

Prof Alexander B. Bick, Associate Professor of Practice at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia and a Faculty Senior Fellow at the Miller Center. He is a historian of early modern Europe and a former U.S. national security official.

Bick served as director for strategic planning at the National Security Council during the first year of the Biden administration. In that role, he led the “Tiger Team” charged with planning the U.S. response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and helped to craft the 2022 National Security Strategy, the overarching strategic framework for U.S. national security and foreign policy. Later, he served as a senior advisor and member of the Secretary’s Policy Planning staff at the U.S. Department of State. There he earned a Superior Honor Award for his work conceiving and co-directing an initiative to improve the Department’s ability to anticipate and plan for major global crises.

Earlier in his career, Bick served at the State Department and the White House in the Obama administration, where he focused on the Middle East and North Africa and played a key role developing the U.S. strategy to defeat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Before entering government, he worked for former U.S. President Jimmy Carter on elections and peace initiatives in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Venezuela, and Libya, and as a researcher on development policy in the UK Parliament.

A historian by training, Bick previously taught at Barnard College and Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where he helped to establish the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs. He has held research fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the University of Leiden, where he was a Fulbright Fellow. Bick graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Chicago with a BA in political science. He received a diploma in economics and an MSc in economic history from the London School of Economics and a PhD in history from Princeton.