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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 June 2011
The conquest of Olinda in 1630 by forces of the Dutch West Indian Company (WIC) was the beginning of a period that has become known as Dutch Brazil. The enterprise flourished after the board of directors of the WIC, the gentlemen XIX, appointed Count Johann Moritz von Nassau in 1636 as Governor General. Recife, the present capital of the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, became the administrative centre of an area reaching from the state of Alagoas to the state of Maranhāo. The uprising of a large part of the Portuguese population in 1645, a year after the departure of Nassau, turned Recife into a beleaguered fortress that surrendered itself and all other WIC possessions in Brazil on 26 January 1654.