In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • To Be or Not to Be Dutch
  • Evan Haefeli (bio)
Donna Merwick. The Shame and the Sorrow: Dutch-Amerindian Encounters in New Netherland. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. ix + 331 pp. Maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95.

Rare is the history title that so directly evokes a moral quandary as Donna Merwick's latest study of Dutch America. Unusual also is such an extended meditation on the moral dilemmas of expansion couched as a history. Rather than reconstruct what happened, The Shame and the Sorrow explores how the Dutch thought they could rightly do what they were doing in New Netherland. Its emphasis on perceived limits, ambiguities, and lost opportunities encourages the reader to ruminate on what should have been. At the same time, the preoccupation with Dutch self-perceptions detracts from a serious analysis of why relations between the Dutch and Native Americans turned sour. In the end, this book is not so much a study of actual encounters between Dutch and Native Americans as it is of the Dutch encounter with themselves as imperialists. The suggestion is that by wading into colonial entanglements the Dutch betrayed a fundamental part of who they were.

Though present in America, Africa, and Asia, the Dutch did not penetrate as far as the French, spread as wide as the English, or sink as deep as the Spanish. As a result, they have received comparatively little recognition and less sympathy. The general assumption is that the Dutch somehow fell short of the others. Evidently incapable of establishing the sort of lasting footprint that other empires did, scholars have found it difficult to justify studying the Dutch with anything like the intensity applied to their competitors. Their operations in America persist primarily in memories of an obscure time soon overshadowed by the French and English empires. Dutch America has drawn the attention of only a handful of specialized scholars who have yet to convince most American historians of the enduring significance of their topic.

The Shame and the Sorrow opens a door to a broader reconsideration of seventeenth-century colonialism. Rather than judging colonial endeavors as a success or failure in comparison to some presumed ideal—usually New England or the Chesapeake—Merwick suggests how we can take each on its own merits. Her immersion in seventeenth-century Dutch culture creates a [End Page 10] compelling argument that the Dutch problem was not an inability to plant themselves abroad, but a deliberate unwillingness to do so. The Dutch who oversaw their nation's extraordinary expansion in the early seventeenth century did not want either the power or responsibility that came with colonization. The reasoning behind this was not simply the mercantile logic often invoked to explain Dutch decisions that went against the grain of contemporary European practice. Their own culture and history gave them sufficient grounds for believing that they had scarce any right to do so.

For close to three decades now, Donna Merwick has helped us to see the world of colonial America through different eyes—Dutch eyes. In Possessing Albany she recast what we thought was just upstate New York into a fascinating riparian landscape. Albany was transformed from a town on the edge of a seemingly infinite expanse of land to a narrow space where residents packed in tightly together to be as close as possible to places of trade and to each other. The Dutch lived in America with their distinctive urban architecture and attitudes. Death of a Notary showed us what a shock the English conquest was. Certain Dutch professions, attitudes, and practices could not survive in the changed atmosphere. The cultural loss was painful for many, and more than at least one Dutch Albany man could bear.1

With The Shame and the Sorrow, Merwick takes her talents down the Hudson River to the coast. New Netherland was an enormous swath of territory ranging from what is now Connecticut to Delaware. Extraordinary as it might seem, the Dutch thought of and treated it as an island. This was a conscious strategy at the heart of early Dutch colonial endeavors. Merwick impresses the island mentality upon us by pulling in other Dutch contexts, from the watery...

pdf

Share