Indian Affairs in Colonial New York - by Allen W Trelease (Paperback)

About the Book

"This is an important contribution to our knowledge of seventeenth-century New York, both in terms of its Dutch and English settlers and of its Algonquian and Iroquian Indian inhabitants, written with care and precision."--New England Quarterly

Book Synopsis

First published in 1960, Indian Affairs in Colonial New York remains the only one-volume study of Indian-European relations in seventeenth-century New York. In the first half of this book, Allen W. Trelease describes the Dutch period that followed Henry Hudson's 1609 voyage and details New Netherland's dealings with the Algonquian peoples of the Hudson Valley and Long Island.The second half of the book, addressing the English period after 1664, emphasizes the colonists' relations with the Iroquois. Still widely cited and read, this pioneering work remains an authoritative study of its subject and a valuable contribution to the historiography of both seventeenth-century colonial New York and Indian-European relations in this formative period.

Review Quotes

Her book marks an important new direction in the historiography of the early modern French empire. Agmon's work not only presses scholars to examine the French Indian Ocean, but specifically the complex political and commercial environments of France's so-called comptoirs... A Colonial Affair raises as many exciting new questions as it answers.

The method followed by the book is striking as it peels layer by layer the confused archive of events and episodes. It is therefore an excellent instantiation of micro-history as a method; it uses an event and its excavation to address issues of kinship, language practice, and judicial protocols resorted to by local Indian intermediaries and Europeans and their implications for the expression of sovereignty and its limits.

This is a most important book... on the history of contacts between American Indians and the colonial powers.... It is a piece of ethnohistorical research and writing of the best sort.

This is an important contribution to our knowledge of seventeenth-century New York, both in terms of its Dutch and English settlers and of its Algonquian and Iroquian Indian inhabitants, written with care and precision.

About the Author

Allen W. Trelease is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.