The first printed maps of the Río de la Plata were produced in the Netherlands as part of works dedicated to the New World published in the 16th and 17th centuries, before and after its independence from the Habsburg monarchy. Only fragmentary evidence of these works exists in the Río de la Plata today, because local collectors in the 19th century, for fundamentally financial and nationalistic reasons, used to buy only the map referring to the territory of their respective countries. As a result, in the public libraries and museums of Uruguay and Argentina it is possible to consult only the maps referring to the Río de la Plata, but not the complete works and atlases of which these maps were originally part. This project aims to remedy this by means of a two-pronged movement. The first movement involves carrying out a research phase in museums and archives in the Netherlands with the aim of gaining a more complete understanding of the context in which these works were produced and their current materiality. The second movement implies that this research allows us to value the cartographic heritage existing in Uruguay and Argentina, with special attention to the cartography printed by the Dutch in the 17th century, which has been little considered.
It is true that in the case of the Río de la Plata, the presence of the Dutch in the 17th century did not acquire the dimension that it would acquire in other American spaces, such as in Brazil, the Caribbean spaces and Surinam, or in other parts of the world, such as in Asia. As a result, researchers in the Netherlands have not paid enough attention to the study of the connections of Dutch merchants with the Río de la Plata spaces.
The development of this proposal will allow the results obtained in previous research carried out by the main applicant in Uruguay and by the co-applicants in the Netherlands to be connected, so that both academic spaces can be strengthened by this initiative to co-create knowledge by creating a dialogue between two historiographic traditions that have had little dialogue with each other. In this way, if this proposal is funded, the cartographic objects existing in the Netherlands regarding the Río de la Plata in the 16 and 17th century, produced in the context of inter-imperial disputes, can also be reconsidered in dialogue with the knowledge already accumulated regarding other parts of the world.
