Shires and Sachems: Languages of Political Theory in Dutch and English Narratives of Contact

In New England’s Prospect, William Wood begins his ethnographic account of the Algonquians in New England by invoking a territorial concept familiar to his readers: “The country as it is in relation to the Indians, is divided as it were into Shires, every severall division being swayed by a severall King” (75). Connecting Indians to shires and kings, Wood establishes a direct connection between the geopolitical divisions of America and Europe. Through this connection, he suggests that for him and his readers the lens of the monarchy is the best way of understanding Indian territorial and political entities. While Wood’s monarchical description of Indian government appears typical for English colonial writing, other ways of comprehending Indian polities did in fact exist in the early modern transatlantic world. The Dutch describe Indian geographical and political organization by drawing on republican concepts which were developing in the Netherlands at the time. The multiple ways of describing Indian polities become visible only when we approach colonial materials comparatively; they suggest that both Dutch and English colonial writing results from and participates in the formulation of political thought in the seventeenth century.¹

In this essay, I will trace the differences between Dutch and English representations of Indian territory and government.² I will argue that both Dutch and English writers of colonial narratives of contact participate in a larger European discussion concerning the viability of different forms of governments. Comparing Johannes Megapolensis’s and Harmen Meyndertz van den Bogaert’s ethnographic descriptions of Mohawk territory and political organization with Thomas Morton’s and William Wood’s depiction of Algonquian polities, I will demonstrate how Dutch authors relied on the language of the republic and English authors on the language of the monarchy. My emphasis on the transnational extent of European political discourses challenges our understanding of New England and England as connected through an exclusively national discursive system. By extending the focus of transatlantic colonial studies from England to Europe, my argument attests to the importance of New Netherland and the Netherlands as important players in the transnational early modern world. Importantly, while New England with its meetinghouse culture and church government has often been viewed as a microcosm of republican thought, I show that it is instead part of a macrocosm of a transatlantic and transcolonial political debate that spans the colonial, Atlantic, and European world.

The political debates about the different forms of government stemmed from the political and religious clashes between subjects and kings that had begun in the wake of the Reformation. Like other parts of Europe, both the Netherlands and England underwent political crises during the first decades of the seventeenth century. In both countries, internal religious struggles led to a consolidation of aristocratic power: to end a major religious crisis, the Dutch regent Maurits decisively abridged the republican power of the States General in 1617;³ likewise, the English kings James I and Charles I tried and succeeded in curbing the power of religious dissenters and Parliament.⁴ These assertions of personal over collective power in both countries sparked new interest in the colonization of America; New Netherland became the hope of Dutch merchants, and Plymouth Plantation and Massachusetts Bay Colony provided a refuge for English dissenters. Both countries’ colonies were connected to the political goals of interest groups for whom the colonies offered a way to evade the concentration of power in the hands of an individual at home. As important as these political considerations were, officially Dutch and English colonization aimed at spreading reformed religion to the Indians and increasing the reach and power of both the Dutch and the English empire. In both countries, then, colonization served to relieve externally the stresses and tensions of competing political, religious, and economic ideologies that were tearing the countries apart internally.

The debates over what constitutes the right to govern and the role of the individual in relation to his community were central to the political controversies in England and the Netherlands. Early modern European political theorists differentiated between two forms of social and political...