The Dutch comptoir as information centre

Abstract

While sitting in their comptoir (office), merchants in early modern Holland were able to manage their plantations in the West Indies or, nearby, their seigniories in the Netherlands because they could make use of records spanning space and time. The merchants knew that information was not only instrumental in running their own business, but was also effective on a larger scale in exercising knowledge, control, and power. The performative power of records—that they may make, and in fact do make a difference in status before and after—was used in the management at a distance. From the seventeenth century, women became involved in business. They got access to the office where records supported business outside the home, but as part of everyday life.