New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America by Susanah Shaw Romney (review)

In this original and deeply researched monograph, Susanah Shaw Romney uses the concept of “intimate networks” to reveal how “a web of ties that developed from people’s immediate, affective, and personal associations and spanned vast geographic and cultural distances” (18) shaped New Netherland as much as political institutions such as the Dutch West India Company. To do so Romney makes impressive use of underutilized Dutch language sources, including seventeenth-century New Netherland manuscripts held in Albany, and especially the notarial records of the municipal archive of Amsterdam, a treasure trove of information on Dutch informal activities in the Atlantic world. According to Romney, face-to-face relationships and kinship ties enabled men and women from all social ranks and ethnic backgrounds to survive and occasionally thrive in the volatile Dutch Atlantic world of the seventeenth century.

Romney’s approach builds upon the pioneering scholarship of Oliver A. Rink’s Holland on the Hudson, which also downplays the importance of the West India Company and highlights ordinary people in the shaping of New Netherland. ¹But while Holland on the Hudsonconcentrates on private trade companies and on European settler society, New Netherland Connectionsforegrounds the roles played by individuals, including Africans and Natives, in the development of the Dutch colony in North America. In doing so, Romney provides a much more comprehensive and nuanced picture of New Netherland society than Rink. Informed by many recent Dutch-language studies on the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, the book is also an excellent resource for scholars unfamiliar with this rich literature.

The book’s opening two chapters are the most compelling, vividly demonstrating the transatlantic characteristics of the intimate networks connecting New Netherland with the rest of the Dutch Atlantic world. Here Romney makes her most effective use of the rich Amsterdam notarial sources to detail the active role played by ordinary people in the development of the Dutch overseas world. In the first chapter, Romney discusses the role of personal ties in the maritime city of Amsterdam. Most Dutch ships destined for New Netherland and other Dutch Atlantic colonies and outposts originated in Amsterdam and carried a constant stream of settlers, traders, soldiers, and sailors. In a detailed manner Romney discusses how many impoverished young men from the Dutch countryside, Scandinavia, Scotland, and Germany arrived in Amsterdam to gain employment as sailors and soldiers for the Dutch West and East India Companies. As the job-seeking men lodged in Amsterdam’s countless inns and taverns, many of them run by women whose husbands were away at sea, they quickly accumulated large debts with the innkeepers, partially through drinking and visits to prostitutes, but also through purchasing food and other daily necessities on credit. Unable to repay their large debts, the men were placed in the service of the large trade companies by the female innkeepers, who made sure by way of notarial contracts to receive most of the future wages of the indebted men. By serving as liaisons between the financially vulnerable men and the trade companies, the Amsterdam landlords and landladies contributed to the rise of the Dutch overseas empire. Romney also examines the manner in which sailors, soldiers, and settlers leaving for the colonies used relatives in Europe to look after their financial matters. This was essential since the West India Company paid its employees in the Republic, not in the colonies. To ensure that they were being paid, personnel of the West India Company authorized spouses, relatives, and close friends in Amsterdam to serve as their legal agents.

Romney’s second chapter demonstrates how familial ties were extended and maintained across the Dutch Atlantic. Reminiscent of A. J. R. Russell-Wood’s discussion of the mobility of people in the Portuguese maritime world, Romney’s book delivers a much...