Putting the Dutch Republic Back in New Netherland

In 1993, Karen Kupperman described "Dutch colonization and the continuing Dutch presence," as having been an "uncomfortable, somewhat indigestible lump of early American history."¹ In 1999 Joyce Goodfriend published her article "Writing/Righting Dutch Colonial History" in which she called for the rehabilitation of colonial Dutch history and praised the steps that had been taken thus far. Goodfriend explained that, because the existence of New Netherland spanned only the decades of the 1620s through the 1660s, and because the Netherlands made no real effort to defend or repopulate its colony after the English takeover in 1664, the Anglocentric approach to the history of the areas that once comprised New Netherland reduced the history of the Dutch colonists into a footnote, "instead of portraying them as actors in a drama of empire."² Many scholars have answered Goodfriend's call and have made the history of New Netherland a bit more digestible and significant in the historiography of seventeenth-century North America. In The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth-Century America, Jaap Jacobs provides the clearest answer to Goodfriend's call to both write and right Dutch Colonial History. Jacobs' synthesis offers the most comprehensive analysis of the uniqueness and significance of the relatively short-lived and often overlooked Dutch colony.

Jacobs stated in an earlier edition of this work that his central questions were "how and to what extent culture was transplanted from the Dutch Republic to New Netherland and what factors were of influence on the colonial culture."³ His focus in this much more streamlined edition is on the former questions; in answering them, Jacobs situates his work in a "trans-Atlantic" context "with the comparison between New Netherland and the Dutch Republic as its backbone" (p. x). It is a direct connection between old Amsterdam and New Amsterdam with very little veering onto paths connecting the disparate parts of the Dutch Atlantic, although he does touch on these connections when relevant. While offering a seemingly limited approach, New Netherland serves as the best laboratory to analyze Jacobs' main questions within such a context because the Dutch were the first colonizing power in the area, and, in effect, had a blank slate on which to write their colonial policy without interference from previously established European institutions. New Netherland also serves as a unique experiment in analyzing cultural continuity because, by 1650, the Dutch colonial experiment in North America had shifted from a trade colony to a settlement colony with Dutch institutions and a large non-Dutch population. Therefore, New Netherland serves as a unique example to investigate how Dutch culture both transferred and developed in a multiethnic colonial setting.⁴

Jacobs offers the first synthesis of the maturing field of New Netherland history from both sides of the Atlantic. It seems safe to say that nobody knows the historiography of New Netherland as well as Jacobs, who offers reassessment of both primary and secondary sources on both continents. While he gives proper credit to Charles Gehring and the New Netherland Project for making New Netherland history more accessible through careful translation of Dutch sources housed in Albany, Jacobs' own readings of various sources offer some exciting new interpretations for our understanding of the workings and significance of New Netherland in this transatlantic world.

Jacobs begins his analysis by illustrating how different the landscape of New Netherland was from the Dutch Republic—from climate to fauna to the biggest difference of all: the presence of a significant native population. Even with the differences, New Netherland promoters such as Adrian van der Donck, like most colonial promoters, made concerted efforts to emphasize the potential of North American lands to indeed become a New Netherland. After this first chapter, however, the North American landscape, and even the Indians of the area, are of little significance except to serve as a foreign, but potentially fertile, environment in which to plant...