The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World

by Wim Klooster

The author draws on a dazzling variety of archival and printed sources.... The Dutch Moment is a signal contribution to the field. ―Renaissance Quarterly In The Dutch Moment , Wim Klooster shows how the Dutch built and eventually lost an Atlantic empire that stretched from the homeland in the United Provinces to the Hudson River and from Brazil and the Caribbean to the African Gold Coast. The fleets and armies that fought for the Dutch in the decades-long war against Spain included numerous foreigners, largely drawn from countries in northwestern Europe. Likewise, many settlers of Dutch colonies were born in other parts of Europe or the New World. The Dutch would not have been able to achieve military victories without the native alliances they carefully cultivated. Indeed, the Dutch Atlantic was quintessentially interimperial, multinational, and multiracial. At the same time, it was an empire entirely designed to benefit the United Provinces. The pivotal colony in the Dutch Atlantic was Brazil, half of which was conquered by the Dutch West India Company. Its brief lifespan notwithstanding, Dutch Brazil (1630–1654) had a lasting impact on the Atlantic world. The scope of Dutch warfare in Brazil is hard to overestimate—this was the largest interimperial conflict of the seventeenth-century Atlantic. Brazil launched the Dutch into the transatlantic slave trade, a business they soon dominated. At the same time, Dutch Brazil paved the way for a Jewish life in freedom in the Americas after the first American synagogues opened their doors in Recife. In the end, the entire colony eventually reverted to Portuguese rule, in part because Dutch soldiers, plagued by perennial poverty, famine, and misery, refused to take up arms. As they did elsewhere, the Dutch lost a crucial colony because of the empire’s systematic neglect of the very soldiers on whom its defenses rested. After the loss of Brazil and, ten years later, New Netherland, the Dutch scaled back their political ambitions in the Atlantic world. Their American colonies barely survived wars with England and France. As the imperial dimension waned, the interimperial dimension gained strength. Dutch commerce with residents of foreign empires thrived in a process of constant adaptation to foreign settlers’ needs and mercantilist obstacles.

Genres: History, 17th Century, Nonfiction

432 pages, Hardcover

First published October 19, 2016

Reviews

[Jim Gallen · Rating 5 out of 5]

“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.

I received a free copy of this book without an obligation to post a review.

[Erik Champenois · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Dutch Moment" covers the Dutch Empire in the Atlantic, with a particular focus on the years 1620 to 1672 (the Dutch Golden Age). The Dutch Empire was a pivot point in history between the earlier Spanish and Portuguese empires (from which the Netherlands arose and struggled against) and the British and French empires - and understanding this period is particular important for understanding European modernity, colonialism, and the transatlantic. The Dutch were also at one point the primary slave traders of their time.

While the Dutch empire was most successful and far reaching in the east, Klooster's book deals with the Atlantic dimension of the empire, no less important to Dutch history in this particular period. He covers the history chronologically in the first three chapters and thematically in the final four chapters, with the latter chapters focused on the experiences of the soldiers and sailors, the nature of inter-imperial trade, Dutch migration and settlement (which was for the most part fairly limited), and the non-Dutch (including other Europeans working with the Dutch, slaves and indentured servants, and indigenous peoples). Klooster shows how Brazil was the focal point of the Dutch empire and how the Dutch successfully made inroads against the Portuguese in Brazil and West Africa in the mid-1600s. The Dutch also aimed to capture the silver mines of Peru, but never made it that far, before the era of decline set in.

The book covers a lot of ground but it still felt like you got only a snapshot of the history. A longer book, with more coverage and analysis of the Dutch relationship to other powers and to native peoples would have been of interest to me. For example, Toby Green's "A Fistfull of Shells" treats the Dutch and the Portuguese as side players to the Kongo, and a similar perspective would have been valuable here. Regardless, this is a worthwhile book for anyone wanting to understand the history of empire.

[Lisa]

Great scholarship on a topic that the English speaking world hears less about than they should. I am visiting Curaçao, and wanted to learn more about the Dutch empire. This is readable and has some good maps and illustrations. It covers only a short time period within the 17th century—focusing on the Dutch West India company. It’s upsetting that I’m surprised to learn about the Dutch conquest of Brazil and Angola and much of the Portuguese Atlantic world in the middle 1600s. It never made them money, but they did end up with a few islands in the Caribbean. This empire never became a settler colony so it shaped the land more by policy than by culture and demographics. I appreciated the author’s details about how much they relied on indigenous solders etc.

[Kyla · Rating 3 out of 5]

Only recommended if you're already interested in Dutch colonial history. Otherwise it's not particularly interesting and won't make you suddenly interested in Dutch colonial history. Not the book's fault but I was annoyed that the stuff I was most interested in wasn't talked about til the end. It focused more on the bureaucracy of the WIC than I was interested in, when I wanted to know more about life in the Dutch colonies.

[Laura Espondaburu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely not a book to listen to. There is a lot of data: people’s names, names of places, dates, amounts of money, battles, too confusing when you cannot page back or look at the diagram. Plus the pronunciation of names and places is confusing as it not consistently eithe native or English. But there is a wealth of information, more than enough to draw your own conclusion as to why the Dutch fail to accomplish their gran empire scheme, and the damage they cause to orhers in their attempt.