The Dutch Overseas Empire, 1600–1800


Book Description

This pioneering history of the Dutch Empire provides a new comprehensive overview of Dutch colonial expansion from a comparative and global perspective. It also offers a fascinating window into the early modern societies of Asia, Africa and the Americas through their interactions.




Imagined Homelands


Book Description

A ground-breaking study of nineteenth-century British colonial poetry. Imagined Homelands chronicles the emerging cultures of nineteenth-century British settler colonialism, focusing on poetry as a genre especially equipped to reflect colonial experience. Jason Rudy argues that the poetry of Victorian-era Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada—often disparaged as derivative and uncouth—should instead be seen as vitally engaged in the social and political work of settlement. The book illuminates cultural pressures that accompanied the unprecedented growth of British emigration across the nineteenth century. It also explores the role of poetry as a mediator between familiar British ideals and new colonial paradigms within emerging literary markets from Sydney and Melbourne to Cape Town and Halifax. Rudy focuses on the work of poets both canonical—including Tennyson, Browning, Longfellow, and Hemans—and relatively obscure, from Adam Lindsay Gordon, Susanna Moodie, and Thomas Pringle to Henry Kendall and Alexander McLachlan. He examines in particular the nostalgic relations between home and abroad, core and periphery, whereby British emigrants used both original compositions and canonical British works to imagine connections between their colonial experiences and the lives they left behind in Europe. Drawing on archival work from four continents, Imagined Homelands insists on a wider geographic frame for nineteenth-century British literature. From lyrics printed in newspapers aboard emigrant ships heading to Australia and South Africa, to ballads circulating in New Zealand and Canadian colonial journals, poetry was a vibrant component of emigrant life. In tracing the histories of these poems and the poets who wrote them, this book provides an alternate account of nineteenth-century British poetry and, more broadly, of settler colonial culture.




The Colony of New Netherland


Book Description

The Dutch involvement in North America started after Henry Hudson, sailing under a Dutch flag in 1609, traveled up the river that would later bear his name. The Dutch control of the region was short-lived, but had profound effects on the Hudson Valley region. In The Colony of New Netherland, Jaap Jacobs offers a comprehensive history of the Dutch colony on the Hudson from the first trading voyages in the 1610s to 1674, when the Dutch ceded the colony to the English. As Jacobs shows, New Netherland offers a distinctive example of economic colonization and in its social and religious profile represents a noteworthy divergence from the English colonization in North America. Centered around New Amsterdam on the island of Manhattan, the colony extended north to present-day Schenectady, New York, east to central Connecticut, and south to the border shared by Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, leaving an indelible imprint on the culture, political geography, and language of the early modern mid-Atlantic region. Dutch colonists' vivid accounts of the land and people of the area shaped European perceptions of this bountiful land; their own activities had a lasting effect on land use and the flora and fauna of New York State, in particular, as well as on relations with the Native people with whom they traded. Sure to become readers' first reference to this crucial phase of American early colonial history, The Colony of New Netherland is a multifaceted and detailed depiction of life in the colony, from exploration and settlement through governance, trade, and agriculture. Jacobs gives a keen sense of the built environment and social relations of the Dutch colonists and closely examines the influence of the church and the social system adapted from that of the Dutch Republic. Although Jacobs focuses his narrative on the realities of quotidian existence in the colony, he considers that way of life in the broader context of the Dutch Atlantic and in comparison to other European settlements in North America.




Holland on the Hudson


Book Description

Holland on the Hudson traces the history of New Netherland from Henry Hudson's exploration of the region in 1609 to the surrender of the Dutch colony to an English fleet in 1664. Oliver A. Rink's approach is both narrative an analytic as he describes in detail the colony's commercial origins, its social and economic development, and the colonists' rivalry with the English in the New World.










Innocence Abroad


Book Description

Innocence Abroad explores the encounter between the Netherlands and the New World in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.




Borderless Empire


Book Description

Borderless Empire explores the volatile history of Dutch Guiana, in particular the forgotten colonies of Essequibo and Demerara, to provide new perspectives on European empire building in the Atlantic world. Bram Hoonhout argues that imperial expansion was a process of improvisation at the colonial level rather than a project that was centrally orchestrated from the metropolis. Furthermore, he emphasizes that colonial expansion was far more transnational than the oft-used divisions into "national Atlantics" suggest. In so doing, he transcends the framework of the "Dutch Atlantic" by looking at the connections across cultural and imperial boundaries. The openness of Essequibo and Demerara affected all levels of the colonial society. Instead of counting on metropolitan soldiers, the colonists relied on Amerindian allies, who captured runaway slaves and put down revolts. Instead of waiting for Dutch slavers, the planters bought enslaved Africans from foreign smugglers. Instead of trying to populate the colonies with Dutchmen, the local authorities welcomed adventurers from many different origins. The result was a borderless world in which slavery was contingent on Amerindian support and colonial trade was rooted in illegality. These transactions created a colonial society that was far more Atlantic than Dutch.




Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585-1740


Book Description

Despite its small size and population, the Dutch Republic functioned as the hub of world trade, shipping, and finance for nearly two centuries. This is the first detailed account of that hegemony from its sixteenth-century origins to the final collapse of the Dutch trading system in the eighteenth century. The economic structure of the early modern world was such that the Dutch Republic, particularly Amsterdam, was able to dominate the world economy to a far greater degree than any commercial power before or since. Using archival and secondary sources, this book explains how such a small nation was able to achieve and sustain this ascendancy for so long. In particular, Professor Israel emphasizes the interaction between Dutch commercial activity in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the Middle East, and its penetration of nearby European markets. - ;Introduction; The origins of Dutch world-trade hegemony; The breakthrough to world primacy, 1590-1609; The Twelve Years' Truce, 1609-1621; The Dutch and the crisis of the world economy, 1621-1647; The zenith, 1647-1672; Beyond the zenith, 1672-1700; The Dutch world entrep--ocirc--;t and the conflict of the Spanish succession, 1700-1713; Decline relative and absolute, 1713-1740; Afterglow and final collapse; Conclusion -




The Netherlands Indies and the Great War, 1914-1918


Book Description

Kees van Dijk examines how in 1917 the atmosphere of optimism in the Netherlands Indies changed to one of unrest and dissatisfaction, and how after World War I the situation stabilized to resemble pre-war political and economic circumstances.