Trade, Land, Power: The Struggle for Eastern North America

Chapter 5 Dutch Dominos: The Fall of New Netherland and the Reshaping of Eastern North America

Chapter 5 Dutch Dominos: The Fall of New Netherland and the Reshaping of Eastern North America At the height of the seventeenth‑​­ century Iroquois wars, Jesuit missionaries in New France attributed much of the violence to unscrupulous Dutch firearms traders.1 Yet, despite such firsthand testimony to New Netherland’s impact on power relationships in mid‑​­ seventeenth‑​­ century North America, historians have remained unimpressed with the colony’s role. Its most thorough and sympathetic recent scholar admits that “New Netherland was not of prime economic importance,” and authors of both newer and older general studies agree; Alan Taylor, for example, calls New Netherland “a relatively minor en‑ terprise in an especially wealthy, ambitious, and far‑​­ flung empire.” C. R. Box‑ er’s classic The Dutch Seaborne Empire devotes only four index entries to the colony and only seventeen to its parent, the Dutch West India Company.2 That company, another historian writes, was “an enfeebled giant,” whose “grandi‑ ose illusion of strength” masked the fact that it was the undercapitalized weak sibling of the mighty East India Company. Deeply divided over whether its North American holdings were to be trading outposts or settlement colonies (or if they were worth the trouble at all), the West India Company’s board of directors, the Heren XIX (literally the Nineteen Lords), dithered while New Netherland remained underpopulated, underfinanced, and subject to exces‑ sive profit‑​­ taking by private Amsterdam merchants operating both in‑​­and outside the company’s framework. Grand schemes for neo‑​­ feudal patroon‑ ships never got off the ground, with the exception of Rensselaerswyck on the upper Hudson. Even what should have been New Netherland’s greatest strength—​­ its trades in furs and wampum with Native people—​­ collapsed Arnoldus Montanus, De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld, of Beschrijving van America (Amsterdam, 1671). Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania. The Netherlands receive tribute from the nations of the world. 6:21 GMT) Dutch Dominos 99 spectacularly in the last years before the English conquest, to the point that the colony came to export more value in tobacco than in furs.3 Such underwhelming performance evaluations might not have been news to the Heren XIX, but they would have surprised almost everyone in eastern North America who did not speak Dutch in the middle years of the seven‑ teenth century. Modern-​­ day criticisms would also have puzzled the courts of England and France, which watched the American activities of their northern European rivals with dismay. To the Iroquois as to Native Americans and Euro‑​­ Americans alike from New England through the mid‑​­ Atlantic region through the upper Chesapeake, New Netherland appeared to be an economic colossus. Indeed, it was a comparative titan in the then-​­ puny emergent At‑ lantic economy, and the impact of its mere 9,000 colonists on the geopolitical landscape of eastern North America was profound. Perhaps the best mea‑ sures of New Netherland’s significance are the falling dominos set in motion by its erasure from the map after it was conquered by the forces of James, duke of York, in 1664 and, after a brief Dutch reconquest, confirmed to the English in the Treaty of Westminster of 1674. It is not too much to say that the Dutch collapse set in motion processes that greatly shaped—​­perhaps even caused—​­the disastrous turn that Iroquois warfare took after 1664, the gradual emergence of the “Middle Ground” in the Great Lakes, the violent outbreak of King Philip’s War in New England, and the chaotic eruption of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia. * * * By 1650, the Dutch West India Company—​­ or, more precisely, merchants and ships’ captains in one way or another affiliated with it—​­had created six Atlan‑ tic and continental trades crucial to the intertwined economies of Native and European colonial North America. First was the West African slave trade, poorly developed anywhere north of the Caribbean in this period, but almost entirely carried on by Dutch ships and large enough to make enslaved people approximately 20 percent of the population of New Amsterdam on the eve of the English conquest.4 More significant economically, but harder to quantify, is the role of the Dutch in the general carrying trade of English colonies in the Caribbean, New England, and the Chesapeake. In colonial ports everywhere, Dutch ships were nearly as likely to be found as English ones, and colonists extended them a hearty welcome. Virginia Governor William Berkeley, for example, was an outspoken supporter of commerce with the Dutch...