New Netherland Connections - (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American Histo) by Susanah Shaw Romney (Paperback)

About the Book

New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"[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

"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

"Clearly shows the degree to which intimate networks structured the Dutch Atlantic, and provided a model for other scholars of early modern empire to emulate." -- New Jersey Studies

"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

"Romney offers a complex, refreshing view of the Dutch Atlantic world, constituting a much-needed intervention in the field of New Netherland studies." -- CHOICE

"Susannah Shaw Romney's excellent book is a salutary reminder that the women and men of New Netherland were part of a powerful 17th-century Dutch mercantile network that encircled the globe, and they deserve to be taken seriously." -- Saint Nicholas Society of New York