Overview

Susanah Shaw Romney locates the foundations of the early modern Dutch empire in interpersonal transactions among women and men. As West India Company ships began sailing westward in the early seventeenth century, soldiers, sailors, and settlers drew on kin and social relationships to function within an Atlantic economy and the nascent colony of New Netherland. In the greater Hudson Valley, Dutch newcomers, Native American residents, and enslaved Africans wove a series of intimate networks that reached from the West India Company slave house on Manhattan, to the Haudenosaunee longhouses along the Mohawk River, to the inns and alleys of maritime Amsterdam. Using vivid stories culled from Dutch-language archives, Romney brings to the fore the essential role of women in forming and securing these relationships, and she reveals how a dense web of these intimate networks created imperial structures from the ground up. These structures were equally dependent on male and female labor and rested on small- and large-scale economic exchanges between people from all backgrounds. This work pioneers a new understanding of the development of early modern empire as arising out of personal ties.

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9781469633480

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A complex, refreshing view of the Dutch Atlantic world.-Choice Critically engages Dutch and American historiographies of colonization while presenting a suggestive new approach for understanding empires as social networks based in intimacy.-The Journal of American History An important book in demonstrating how early modern empires were built and functioned and how inhabitants from all social ranks on both sides of the Atlantic negotiated and made sense of their place within empire.-de Halve Maen An innovative and important addition to the thriving field of New Netherland studies, as well as to the study of early modern European colonization.-William & Mary Quarterly Romney offers a complex, refreshing view of the Dutch Atlantic world, constituting a much-needed intervention in the field of New Netherland studies.-Choice [Romney] has given historians a new way of conceptualizing and understanding Atlantic world empires.-American Historical Review An excellent book that is narrowly focused with wide implications.-Itinerario

Author Information

Susanah Shaw Romney is assistant professor of history at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock.

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