Our Man in Amsterdam? Nicolaas Witsen and Russo-Dutch Relations in the Seventeenth Century

Nicolaas Witsen (1641–1717) was the scion of a successful merchant dynasty of Amsterdam in the Dutch Golden Age. From humble shipmen to successful merchants, his family had risen to the ranks of Amsterdam’s burgher elite. As such, Witsen’s training was more genteel than mercantile. Upon completing his studies at the University of Leiden, the 23 year-old Witsen traveled to Russia, not as a merchant, but as an attaché to a Dutch embassy. The trip proved formative. Witsen and his kin had interests that spanned the globe: from the West Indies to the East Indies, from Aleppo to China, from Jakarta and Tasmania to the arctic coasts. Yet, from his privileged perch in Amsterdam—the throbbing heart of the first age of globalization—Witsen spent much of his life and work looking eastward to Russia. Delving into the linkages that tied this prominent son of Amsterdam to the Russian Empire before and during the reign of Peter the Great, this talks explores Russo-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century, inviting a reconsideration of Russia’s place in the early modern world. 

Erika Monahan (Stanford PhD, 2007) is currently a visiting associate professor at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH. She is an associate professor at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque where she teaches graduate seminars on commerce in the early modern world and Eurasian borderlands. Her first book, The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016) won the Lincoln Prize for a first monograph of exceptional merit and lasting significance in understanding Russia’s past. Her intellectual agenda seeks to better contextualize Russia in the early modern world, which drives her interest in connections and circulation of all things early modern. She is the author of “Locating Rhubarb: Early Modernity’s Relevant Obscurity,” in Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories, ed. Paula Findlen (Routledge, 2013) and most recently, “Moving Pictures: Tobol’sk Travelling in Early Modern Texts,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 52.2-3 (2018). She co-edited, along with Michael Flier, Valerie Kivelson, and Daniel B. Rowland, the volume Seeing Muscovy Anew: Politics–Institutions–Culture. Essays Honoring Nancy Shields Kollmann (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2017). Her current projects include a book project tentatively entitled “Spinning Russia: Nicolaas Witsen and the Making of Russia’s Image in Early Modern Europe” and updating and expanding Lindsey Hughes’ The Romanovs, Ruling Russia, 1613–1917 (Bloomsbury, 2009) She is the Book reviews editor for Canadian-American Slavic Studies and invites Slavists from a range of disciples interested in reviewing recent scholarship to contact her.