The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World Hardcover – August 1, 2016 by Wim Klooster (Cornell University Press)

The Dutch Moment” is an in-depth examination of that half century from 1620-1670 during which Dutch sailors, soldiers, merchants and officials burst across the Atlantic to make their country a serious player in the contest for dominance in the Atlantic World.

As an American student, I learned about Peter Stuyvesant surrendering New Amsterdam to the British who renamed it New York, but this work reveals a much broader story. It opens the curtain on a sizable colony in what is now New York state and the takeover of New Sweden in Delaware, but shows that the greatest focus of Dutch colonialism was in Brazil with involvement in the Lesser Antilles (Curacao and Bonaire and Tobago), Surinam and the African coast with settlements in Luanda, now in Angola, and Western Africa. These colonial outposts involved considerable warfare against Portugal and, to a lesser extent, England as well as both with and against natives. Dutch Privateers raided enemy shipping while merchants traded cod with Newfoundland, delivered foodstuffs to their settlers in the Americas and, most profitably, dominated the African slave trade. At the end of their Moment, Dutch adventurers turned their sights to trade with colonies of their former rivals and to Asiatic ports.

Author Wim Klooster presents his subject from all aspects. He introduces readers to initiation, expansion and contraction of Dutch colonialism in the Atlantic. Klooster discusses the settlers and soldiers who established and defended the colonies as well as their sustenance. Any empire is based on trade and Chapter 5 deals with trade within the Dutch Empire, with Africans and Amerindians, the search for gold and silver and production of and trade in salt and sugar and slaves. The Dutch are described as unique in their ability to trade with English, French and Spanish America in an era when trade was frequently restricted within one’s own empire.

Chapter 6 explores patterns of migration and settlement, who emigrated, why, their family and occupational attachments, religion and their destinations. Tables show the European population of Dutch America of that Moment to have been predominantly centered in Brazil. With shifting control, not everyone in Dutch colonies was from The Netherlands and Chapter 6 is the story of the place of other nationals and their churches in the Dutch Atlantic.

“The Dutch Moment” is a very well researched, detailed study of an otherwise obscure age of history. One searching for a deep understanding of the saga of Dutch colonialism in the mid Seventeenth Century will be very well served by this book. I consider myself to be more of a general student of history. Some like me may view this as being too detailed for their tastes. I see it differently. Detailed though it is, it enhanced my view beyond what I learned in school. In contrast to the broad strokes of Brazil and Angola being Portuguese, the rest of South and Central America being Spanish and the Dutch holding the Big Apple when it was just a bud, I now appreciate the breadth of Dutch activity in the 17th Century Atlantic world. It has whetted my appetite to know more about this time and place in history. It can do the same for many of you.