The Contest for the Delaware Valley: Allegiance, Identity, and Empire in the Seventeenth Century by Mark L. Thompson (review)

Contest for the Delaware Valley was recently named the 2014 winner of the Philip S. Klein prize for the best book on Pennsylvania history. It is well deserved. Making excellent use of Dutch and Swedish archives to study an often-neglected region, Thompson has crafted a compelling framework for understanding the intersection of nationalism and cosmopolitanism in early America. He argues that “cosmopolitan forms of interaction and communication coexisted with, and indeed reinforced, national identities,” and that “empire fostered an interpenetration of the local and the national in the colonial setting” (13).

Thompson begins with the earliest European visitor to the Delaware Valley, Henry Hudson. The crew of the Halve Maen were both English and Dutch, and Hudson was an Englishman even if he captained a ship belonging to the Dutch East India Company. This kind of international cooperation was common, because ostensibly national ventures often became international as merchants cast a wide net for capital and talent. In other words, imperial ventures were often “Patriotic in principle” but “cosmopolitan in practice” (33).

The bulk of the book—three of the six chapters—focuses on the Söderkompaniet (Swedish South Company) and its colony Nya Sverige, better known as New Sweden. The South Company was a corporate chimera: dreamt up by the Dutchman Willem Usselincx, sponsored by the Swedish crown but funded by Dutch and German capital, operated largely by colonists from Finland, and led by the Dutch-born German Peter Minuit, who cut his teeth in the Dutch West India Company (WIC) as director of New Netherland. This multinational patchwork of capital and political allegiance was ambiguous enough to contain many contradictory visions, to be simultaneously a machine for generating Dutch profits and the vessel of Swedish imperialism in the Baltic and Atlantic.

Thompson is at his best when he examines the way that these contradictions played out on the ground, through the everyday actions of colonists rather than through the words of mercantile theorists. New Sweden was a trading colony, and was therefore predicated on flow; it welcomed people and goods from all nations. Yet the Swedish South Company was not the only power to claim the Delaware Valley: the region was contested by the WIC, the English proprietors of Maryland, and rogue New Englanders led by George Lamberton. So the South Company also blocked the flow of people and goods as a way of performing sovereignty, including acts of aggression such as tearing down trading posts and trampling the flags of rival princes. The actions of cosmopolitan men often served patriotic ends, as when South Company employees from Finland, Germany, and England threatened interlopers in the name of the Swedish crown. In this way, Thompson argues, the formation of imperial identities—the crafting of the relationship that turned subjects and sovereigns into a transatlantic imagined community—often flowed from the colonial fringes to the metropolitan center rather than the other way around.

Thompson’s supple analysis also shows the limitations of national identification, and the points at which they simply fractured. Allegiance, he points out, was often conditioned upon protection, and colonists from all nations were often willing to declare allegiance to any sovereign whose officers could provide effective governance. The WIC conquered New Sweden in 1654 and transformed it into New Amstel, and then in 1664 the Duke of York’s agents conquered New Amstel and transformed it into an appendage of New York. In each case conquest followed a prolonged period of decay, and colonists deserted in droves as it became clear that their governments could not defend them against Native American attacks or aggression from encroaching Europeans. Colonists of all nations were often willing to transfer allegiance to their conquerors. Because their loyalty was so important for the new regimes to secure, however, they were able to extract recognition as minority populations, often with...