Heaven's Wrath explores the religious thought and religious rites of the early Dutch Atlantic
world. D. L. Noorlander argues that the Reformed Church and the West India Company forged and
maintained a close union with considerable consequences across the seventeenth century. Dutch
merchants officers sailors and soldiers found in their faith an ideology and justification
for mercantile and martial activities. The West India Company supported the Reformed Church
financially in Europe and helped spread Calvinism to other continents while Calvinist
employees and colonists benefitted from the familiar aspects of religious instruction and
public worship. Yet Noorlander argues the church-company union also encouraged destructive
military operations against Catholic enemies abroad and divisive campaigns against sinners and
religious nonconformers in colonial courts. Religious fervor violence and intolerance imposed
financial and demographic costs that the small Dutch Republic and its people-strapped colonies
could not afford. At the same time the Reformed Church in the Netherlands undermined its own
religious mission by trying to control colonial hires publications and organization from
afar. Noorlander's argument in Heaven's Wrath questions the core assumptions about why the
Dutch failed to establish a durable empire in America. He downplays the usual commercial
explanations and places the focus instead on the tremendous expenses incurred in the
Calvinist-backed war and the Reformed Church's meticulous worried management of colonial
affairs. By pinpointing the issues that hampered the size and import of the Dutch Atlantic
world Noorlander is poised to revise core notions about the organization and aims of the Dutch
empire the culture of the West India Company and the very shape of Dutch society.
