Volume XI of the Dutch Colonial Manuscripts comprises the correspondence of Petrus Stuyvesant from 1647 to 1653. It represents the first six years of his seventeen-year tenure as director general of New Netherland, spanning the final years of the war with Spain through the first war with England. Stuyvesant became director general of the possessions of the West India Company at a critical time in the history of the United Provinces. Major changes were taking place in European affairs. The thirty year war in Germany and the eighty-year Dutch revolt against Spain were both to be resolved within a year. England had overthrown the monarchy and was about to embark on an experiment with republicanism, which would have grave implications forthe Dutch nation. Through this volume of Stuyvesant's letters, Charles T. Gehring shows how the young Stuyvesant—only thirty-six years old when he became director—handled major problems in his administration. Through recovered correspondence from West India Company directors from Amsterdam, Gehring shows how Stuyvesant managed to confront the challenges before him. His accomplishments were many but he was renowned for the stabilization of the boundary with New England; the resolution of the dispute with the patroonship of Rensselaerswijck; and the neutralization of Swedish influence in the Delaware.

Volume XII of the Dutch Colonial Manuscripts contains the correspondence of Petrus Stuyvesant, director general of New Netherland, from 1654-1658. It represents the earliest surviving correspondence, comprising incoming letters from the directors in Amsterdam and the governors of neighboring colonies.

Jacob Leisler emigrated to the Dutch colony of Nieu Nederlandt in North America in 1660. He was the son of a Reformed minister and hailed from Frankfurt on the Main. To posterity Jacob Leisler is known for his role during the Glorious Revolution in 1689 as rebel against the English governor of the colony of New York - for which he was cruelly put to death in 1691. The essays in this collection show that Leisler's world had many more faces and sides: there is the military aspect of Leisler's career, the mercantile world in which Leisler lived (and was captured by Algerian pirates), the religious world that got him into a fierce fight with a Dutch-Reformed pastor, and finally the larger ideological, political, and economic context that ranges from a study of the role of the little port of Dover (England) to the larger issues related to the role of colonies in the Atlantic economy and the British Empire. A number of general themes hold the essays together: Two are of particular importance: The Atlantic nature of religion and the transnational character of the Atlantic economy. Most of the essays were presentations to a workshop held at the Centre for the Study of Human Settlement and Historical Change at the National University of Ireland in Galway.

The first comprehensive biography of an important yet understudied figure in the Dutch colony of New Netherland. This book tells the compelling story of the young legal activist Adriaen van der Donck (1618–1655), whose fight to secure the struggling Dutch colony of New Netherland made him a controversial but pivotal figure in early America. At best, he has been labeled a hero, a visionary, and a spokesman of the people. At worst, he has been branded arrogant and selfish, thinking only of his own ambitions. The wide range of opinions about him testifies to the fact that, more than three centuries after his death, Van der Donck remains an intriguing character. J. van den Hout follows Van der Donck from his war-torn seventeenth-century childhood and privileged university education to the New World, as he attempted to make his mark on the fledgling fur trading settlement. When he became embroiled in the politics of Manhattan, he took the colonists’ complaints against their Dutch West India Company administrators to the highest level of government in the Dutch Republic, in what became a fight for his adopted homeland and a bicontinental showdown. Denounced and detained, but not deterred, Van der Donck wrote a landmark book that stands as a testament to his vision for the country, as the changes he set in motion continued long after his early death and his influence became firmly embedded in the American landscape. Van der Donck’s determination to stand by his convictions offers a revealing look into the human spirit and the strong will that drives it against adversity and in search of justice. “A biography of Adriaen van der Donck was long overdue. With her cradle-to-grave narrative, Van den Hout presents a comprehensive timeline of one of the most fascinating figures in early colonial America. This elegantly written study, carefully researched and lavishly illustrated, also provides an excellent introduction to the seventeenth-century Dutch colony of New Netherland.” — Jeroen Dewulf, Queen Beatrix Professor in Dutch Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves

The role of proprietorships or ‘private’ colonies in imperial development has not received the attention it deserves, notwithstanding recent scholarly emphasis on ‘state-building’. The continued use of these ‘private’ devices, even as early modern European nation-states grew more potent, is not only interesting, but is indeed normative though invariably missing from modern studies of empire. This collection provides in-depth analyses of the workings of the proprietorships themselves (rather than proprietary colonies) and in studies ranging from South Carolina to Nieuw Nederland to French West Africa to Brasil, broadens this discussion beyond British North America. Contributors include: Mickaël Augeron, Kenneth Banks, Sarah Barber, Philip Boucher, Olivier Caporossi, Leslie Choquette, David Dewar, Jaap Jacobs, Maxine N. Lurie, Debra A. Meyers, L.H. Roper, James O’Neil Spady, Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, Cécile Vidal, and Laurent Vidal.

This book explores the development of the fur trade in Chesapeake Bay during the seventeenth century, and the wide-ranging links that were formed in a new and extensive transatlantic chain of supply and consumption. It considers changing fashion in England, the growing demand for fur, at a time when the Russian fur trade was in decline, examines native North Americans and their trading and other exchanges with colonists, and explores the nature of colonial society, including the commercial ambitions of a varied range of investors. As such, it outlines the intense rivalry which existed between different colonies and colonial interests. Although the book argues that fur never supplanted tobacco as the region's principal export, noting that the trade declined as new, more profitable sources of supply were opened up, nevertheless the case of the Chesapeake fur trade provides an excellent example of how different elements in a new transatlantic enterprise fitted together and had a profound impact on each other.

Susanah Shaw Romney locates the foundations of the early modern Dutch empire in interpersonal transactions among women and men. As West India Company ships began sailing westward in the early seventeenth century, soldiers, sailors, and settlers drew on kin and social relationships to function within an Atlantic economy and the nascent colony of New Netherland. In the greater Hudson Valley, Dutch newcomers, Native American residents, and enslaved Africans wove a series of intimate networks that reached from the West India Company slave house on Manhattan, to the Haudenosaunee longhouses along the Mohawk River, to the inns and alleys of maritime Amsterdam. Using vivid stories culled from Dutch-language archives, Romney brings to the fore the essential role of women in forming and securing these relationships, and she reveals how a dense web of these intimate networks created imperial structures from the ground up. These structures were equally dependent on male and female labor and rested on small- and large-scale economic exchanges between people from all backgrounds. This work pioneers a new understanding of the development of early modern empire as arising out of personal ties.

In The Memory of All Ancient Customs, Tom Arne Midtrød examines the complex patterns of diplomatic, political, and social communication among the American Indian peoples of the Hudson Valley—including the Mahicans, Wappingers, and Esopus Indians—from the early seventeenth century through the American Revolutionary era. By focusing on how members of different Native groups interacted with one another, this book places Indians rather than Europeans on center stage.Midtrød uncovers a vast and multifaceted Native American world that was largely hidden from the eyes of the Dutch and English colonists who gradually displaced the indigenous peoples of the Hudson Valley. In The Memory of All Ancient Customs he establishes the surprising extent to which numerically small and militarily weak Indian groups continued to understand the world around them in their own terms, and as often engaged— sometimes violently, sometimes cooperatively—with neighboring peoples to the east (New England Indians) and west (the Iroquois ) as with the Dutch and English colonizers. Even as they fell more and more under the domination of powerful outsiders—Iroquois as well as Dutch and English—the Hudson Valley Indians were resilient, maintaining or adapting features of their traditional diplomatic ties until the moment of their final dispossession during the American Revolutionary War.

The settlers of New Netherland were obligated to uphold religious toleration as a legal right by the Dutch Republic's founding document, the 1579 Union of Utrecht, which stated that "everyone shall remain free in religion and that no one may be persecuted or investigated because of religion." For early American historians this statement, unique in the world at its time, lies at the root of American pluralism. New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty offers a new reading of the way tolerance operated in colonial America. Using sources in several languages and looking at laws and ideas as well as their enforcement and resistance, Evan Haefeli shows that, although tolerance as a general principle was respected in the colony, there was a pronounced struggle against it in practice. Crucial to the fate of New Netherland were the changing religious and political dynamics within the English empire. In the end, Haefeli argues, the most crucial factor in laying the groundwork for religious tolerance in colonial America was less what the Dutch did than their loss of the region to the English at a moment when the English were unusually open to religious tolerance. This legacy, often overlooked, turns out to be critical to the history of American religious diversity. By setting Dutch America within its broader imperial context, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty offers a comprehensive and nuanced history of a conflict integral to the histories of the Dutch republic, early America, and religious tolerance.

Employing a frontier framework, this book traces intercultural relations in the lower Hudson River valley of early seventeenth-century New Netherland. It explores the interaction between the Dutch and the Munsee Indians and considers how they, and individuals within each group, interacted, focusing in particular on how the changing colonial landscape affected their cultural encounter and Munsee cultural development. At each stage of European colonization - first contact, trade, and settlement - the Munsees faced evolving and changing challenges. Understanding culture in terms of worldview and societal structures, this volume identifies ways in which Munsee society changed in an effort to adjust to the new intercultural relations and looks at the ways the Munsees maintained aspects of their own culture and resisted any imposition of Dutch societal structures and sovereignty over them. In addition, the book includes a suggestive afterword in which the author applies his frontier framework to Dutch-indigenous relations in the Cape colony.