Transnational Connections: Special Issue Introduction

Every century, on the anniversary of Henry Hudson’s 1609 voyage to the New World, New York remembers its Dutch connection. In 1809 the members of the newly incorporated New-York Historical Society enjoyed a commemorative speech followed by a banquet; the first number of the society’s Collections, issued two years later, reprinted Hudson’s journals of his voyages.¹ For the 1909 tercentenary, New York State established a special commission to organize the festivities. Its final report, which ran to an astounding two thousand pages, detailed events ranging from an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to a program of “aquatic sports.” Most of the events hewed closely to the commemoration’s overall narrative, which depicted the active Dutch role in American history as ending in the mid-seventeenth century.²

Led by New York City’s annual Five Dutch Days program, the state again celebrated its links to the Low Countries in 2009. Yet the quadricentennial differed markedly from the earlier anniversaries. Instead of focusing on the Dutch presence in early New York, the 2009 celebration looked more broadly at the Netherlands and its links with the United States—ranging from tastings of modern Asian-inflected Dutch cuisine to performances by avant-garde Dutch theater and dance companies.³ This shift from commemorating the local to invoking the global corresponded to the fading influence of old-line Dutch families in New York society as well as to the growing cachet that Dutch companies and cities (especially Amsterdam) have in the United States.⁴ But the shift also reflects the way in which the globalization of the 1990s and early 2000s drew the attention of scholars and the general public to the United States’ deep ties with the wider world.

The 2009 conference at Columbia University at which versions of the papers in this special issue were first presented, entitled Cities in Revolt: The Dutch-American Atlantic, ca. 1650–1815, reflected the distinctively international and global spirit of the Hudson quadricentennial. For early Americanists, work on the Dutch has long been associated primarily with the regional history of the mid-Atlantic, where several thousand Dutch colonists remained after the United Provinces ceded its territorial claims to England in 1674.⁵ Rather than look again at this well-known group and its legacy, Cities in Revolt explored an equally important and comparatively little-studied aspect of the Dutch role in early American history: the extensive, fruitful links that colonial North America and the early United States developed with the Dutch Republic and its Atlantic colonies from roughly 1680 to 1815. To tackle this topic, the conference moved outside the disciplinary bounds of early American history: roughly half of the participants were scholars specializing in the history of the Netherlands and its Atlantic empire.

One goal of this special issue, “Anglo-Dutch Revolutions,” is to share with early Americanists some of the new research on Dutch-American connections that came out of the 2009 conference. The papers we have chosen to present here focus on the first age of revolutions, circa 1760–1815, a period during which the web of exchanges between North America and the Dutch Atlantic played an especially important role in transforming the political and economic life of each region. We also selected the papers with the aim of introducing early Americanists to particularly relevant work by Europeanists working on related topics. The majority of the essays in this issue are the work of historians of the Dutch Republic and empire based in Europe. They include the first English-language publications by two authors and a first publication in an early Americanist venue for a third. To introduce these papers, which necessarily engage with the complex and relatively unfamiliar terrain of Dutch history, we offer an orientation to the history and historiography of the Dutch Atlantic empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The second and broader aim of this special issue is to help develop approaches to writing the transnational history of eighteenth-century America in the Atlantic world. In the second part of the introduction, we propose...