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Trailblazers: Virtual Tours
History's Hinge - 'Ain Jalut

[Bart]

Conflict and Commerce: The Rise and Fall of New Netherland

by Simon Middleton - Lecturer in History, University of Sheffield

View of New Amsterdam from the water

   In September 1609, when Henry Hudson guided his ship, De Halve Maen, through the narrows dividing present day Staten and Long Islands, he was not the first European navigator to sail into what we know today as New York Bay. The Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano came in 1524; the Frenchmen, Jean Alfonse de Saintonge and Jean Cossin, made separate voyages over the next half century. But it was Hudson�s arrival that established a Dutch claim to the region and changed its history for all time.

   Hudson, an English mariner in Dutch employ, had left Amsterdam in April intending to explore the Arctic seas north of Norway for a possible eastern route to the rich trade of the Indies. When ice floes barred the way, his eighty-five-foot vessel and its crew of sixteen mariners turned to the west and journeyed five thousand miles to North America. For weeks they navigated southwards within sight of the shore, looking for an estuary or bay that might indicate the beginnings of a western route to Asia. By August they had reached Long Island and, after a few days exploring the coast around Sandy Hook, Hudson set off up the broad, deep, and promising river that now bears his name. Although the intrepid captain failed to locate a route to Asia�his navigation of the Hudson ended at the site of modern day Albany�he had discovered a territory rich in timber and furs that would please his Dutch financiers back in Amsterdam.

   Hudson�s voyage took place at a critical moment in Atlantic history, and, in particular, for the challenge of northern European states to the power of Spain. Weakened by the loss of the Armada to England in 1588 and by relentless attacks on its New World gold fleets, Spain was plagued by financial crises that pushed it to the edge of collapse. The Spanish had also been unable to put down a revolt by its northern Dutch provinces, eight of which had declared their independence and established a new Dutch Republic. In April 1609, after decades of intermittent and inconclusive hostilities, the two sides agreed to a truce, allowing Dutch merchants to back voyages such as Hudson�s without fear of Spanish attack and financial ruin.

   Once news of Hudson�s discovery reached Holland, new expeditions arrived to trade beads, knives, and hatchets for furs with the Munsee and Lenape Indians. These private traders established a fortified trading post, Fort Nassau, at the site of present day Albany and charted the coastline and river inlets between Cape Cod and the Delaware Bay. In 1614, one of them, Adrian Block, produced the first map of the territory which he named New Netherland. The following year, Block and others formed the New Netherland Company and secured a three-year monopoly of the region�s trade from the States General, the governing body of the Dutch Republic.

   New Netherland, like other early American colonies, was a state-sponsored venture, the aim of which was to realize a profit and serve the emerging Dutch state by eliminating competition from other trading ports and capturing more of the Indies from Portugal and Spain. In 1621, the States General drew up a charter for a new West India Company, granting it a monopoly of all the Dutch Atlantic trade with West Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean and North America. The Company was a joint-stock venture, financed by government investment and private capital to the tune of more than seven million guilders. Like its East Indian counterpart, it was managed by the shareholders who met in five regional chambers.

   The company enjoyed some success in its early years, establishing trading posts on both sides of the Atlantic, dealing in slaves on the coast of Africa, as well as gold, ivory, and sugar in the Caribbean, Suriname, and the northeast coast of Brazil. New Netherland was only part of the Company�s concern, and a relatively minor one at that. In the summer of 1624, the Company established a small settlement under the command of Cornelis Jacobsz May, the first provincial director, transporting some thirty families to what is now Governor�s Island. More colonists arrived the following year, and the settlement was relocated a short distance across the bay to the equally secure and more commodious lower tip of Manhattan, establishing New Amsterdam, later New York City. To secure the settlement, Peter Minuit, then the provincial director, offered sixty guilders worth of blankets, kettles, and knives to neighboring Indians, who accepted the trade goods as gifts, sealing a defensive alliance with the newcomers and not, as was once supposed, as payment for the island of Manhattan. Fifteen years after Hudson�s arrival, New Netherland, the newest commercial outpost of the Dutch empire, consisted of a small group of traders living in at the edge of a vast and rich wilderness.

   The settlers' peace with the numerous local Native American tribes was tenuous at best. The large linguistic and cultural native groupings of Algonquian and Iroquoian Indians who inhabited the region were subdivided into smaller communities that were frequently at war or in some form of alliance with each other. The arrival of the Dutch had piqued the interest of local Indians, who regarded the newcomers as potential allies and sources of new and interesting gifts that could in turn be traded with other tribes. Thus, the Dutch found themselves drawn into a web of Indian diplomacy which they only partially understood.

   As early as 1626, the settlers at Fort Orange (formerly Fort Nassau) suffered a bloody defeat at the hands of Mohawks, the enemies of the Mahicans, the tribe with which the Dutch had been trading. Beginning in 1629, European-Amerindian commercial and diplomatic relations became even more complicated following the migration of thousands of English Puritans from New England, the territory north of New Netherland. These New Englanders provided Native Americans with yet another source of gifts and friendship, and their rapidly growing and spreading settlement soon threatened to overwhelm the thinly-populated New Netherland. The arrival of the English prompted a reassessment of the colony�s future. In June 1629, in an attempt to bolster New Netherland�s population, the Company announced its intention to offer large tracts of land to patroons (a Dutch word for landowners, from the Spanish �patr�n�) who agreed to �buy� the land from the Indians, settle fifty families within four years, and thereafter administer their settlements� civil and criminal courts. Unfortunately, the relatively prosperous conditions prevailing in the United Provinces and the limited benefits for settlers � who were expected to endure a dangerous sea voyage to live in the North American wilderness � hardly recommended the patroonships as desirable destinations. All the prospective communities except for Rensselaerswijck, established by Kiliaen van Rensselaer on both banks of the Hudson River near Fort Orange, failed to attract large numbers of investors and settlers. Those who did make the trans-Atlantic journey often deserted their designated employment, hoping to get rich quickly by defying the Company�s regulations and joining the lucrative fur trade. Meanwhile, English colonists continued to settle in the Dutch territory.

   The failure of the patroonship scheme established important precedents for the future. The easing of the patroon policy in 1640, along with the arrival of independent fur traders signalled the beginning of the end for the Company�s trading monopoly and also drew its shareholders and officers into civil rather than commercial administration. By the mid-seventeenth century, New Netherland�s future as a colony of traders and farmers was increasingly apparent; land, not furs, would prove to be its greatest resource.

   In the second half of the 1630s, groups of Puritans spread southwards into the Connecticut River Valley � territory previously claimed by the West India Company. The shareholders took steps to secure their territorial position, purchasing from the Canarsee Indians all land west of Oyster Bay on Long Island and offering revised terms and conditions in an attempt to attract new settlers. Under the new �Freedoms and Exemptions� policy, adopted in 1640, the Company gave up its trading monopoly and offered two hundred acres of land to Dutch or English immigrants who undertook to settle five colonists. The change of policy succeeded in bringing new settlers to the colony. Individual traders travelled independently to the colony to trade for furs, and some remained on a semi-permanent basis to represent the interests of major trading houses in Amsterdam. Men and women were drawn across the Atlantic by networks of family and friends. However, the policy also encouraged the Puritans to spill across Long Island Sound, where they established the towns of Gravesend, Hempstead, Flushing, and Middleburgh (later Newtown) on Long Island � a sign of the English settlers� ever encroaching presence in the region.

   By 1645, when the French Jesuit priest, Father Isaac Jogues, visited lower Manhattan, the island was populated by some four or five hundred men of different sects and nationalities speaking eighteen different languages. The population of the entire province remained no more than a couple of thousand, but as the number of free traders increased, so did the competition for Indian furs, prompting subtle changes in European-Amerindian relations. As the caution of early years diminished, familiarity bred exploitation, and, in time, mutual contempt.

   In 1639 the provincial director, Willem Kieft, made the fateful decision to try and exact a tribute from the neighbouring Raritan Indians. In Kieft�s view, since the Indians, as defensive allies, benefited from the presence of the Company and the colonists, it was only reasonable that they bear some of its costs. The Indians, for their part, could see little benefit in having allies who stuck to the coast and concentrated on trade, and they rejected Kieft�s authority to levy a tribute. The two sides clashed inconclusively until 1643, when the slaughter of some eighty Wecquaesgeek Indians across the river from New Amsterdam at Pavonia (Jersey City) succeeded in uniting almost the entire Indian population of the Lower Hudson Valley against New Netherland.

   When Keift's War ended two years later, dozens of colonists and some 1600 Indians had been killed, and New Netherland was almost wiped out. Appealing for intervention to the States General in Holland, the settlers declared that �almost every place is abandoned�we, wretched people, must skulk, with wives and little ones that still survive in poverty together� whilst the Indians daily threaten to overwhelm us.�1

   In 1647 the Company shareholders dispatched Peter Stuyvesant to restore the colony. A stern and sober man, Stuyvesant was also a fiercely loyal employee who had lost a leg in the Company�s service while fighting the Portuguese on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin. No sooner had he arrived than Stuyvesant and his hand-picked council issued a flurry of orders on matters ranging from compulsory church attendance to fire prevention and the keeping of hogs and goats. This set the tone for his seventeen-year administration, during which time he negotiated boundary agreements with the English to the north, led a force of seven hundred men to expel the Swedes from the Delaware River to the south, and, through a combination of diplomacy and armed force, managed to rebuild Dutch influence and strength in the region. Stuyvesant managed to navigate a middle course between the competing demands of settler lobbies seeking greater autonomy and distant Company shareholders trying to preserve their authority and chartered prerogatives. Although he acquired a reputation as a domineering and autocratic administrator, most historians agree that under Stuyvesant�s care, New Netherland�s population of independent traders and farmers collaborated, establishing orderly villages and small towns.

   New Amsterdam quickly became known as the major port and capital of this increasingly prosperous provincial society. The origins of the city�s government can be traced to a campaign for municipal reform begun by local merchants in the 1640s and culminating with the first meeting of the municipal government on February 2, 1653. The city�s first burgomasters and schepens (roughly equivalent to the English mayors and aldermen) were given charge of the school, the docks, and a newly-established public weigh-house. But they added to their administrative powers in subsequent years. In the course of the decade, the lives of ordinary settlers in New Amsterdam came to resemble those of the urban Dutch brede middenstand, roughly equivalent to the English middling sort, who balanced their private pursuits with public obligations and adherence to a regulatory order, and served as a powerful integrating force upon an otherwise diverse settler group.

   During this period of growth, neither the burgomasters nor the ordinary colonists realized that their success was about to become the source of their undoing. In the late 1650s the colony's new-found prosperity attracted the attention of powerful English interests who were jealous of the Dutch imperial success. Within months of Charles II�s restoration in 1660, Parliament adopted another Navigation Act, designed to drive the Dutch from the English-controlled American trade. The keenest advocates of England's commercial empire gathered around the king's younger brother, James, Duke of York. By March 1664 James and his counsellors had succeeded in persuading the King to grant his brother part of present-day Maine and a handful of islands near its shores. In an act of superlative aggrandizement, the most substantial part of James's grant awarded him control of all the territory lying between the Delaware and Connecticut rivers � the territory comprising New Netherland.

   In May of 1664 James, Duke of York, dispatched Colonel Richard Nicolls with four ships and three hundred soldiers to secure the �entyre submission and obedience� of England's newest colonial American subjects. In mid-August the invaders disembarked from vessels anchored off Long Island in Gravesend Bay and moved west to Brooklyn. Nicolls enlisted residential militias from the English towns on Long Island and distributed handbills ahead of the advancing troops offering fair treatment for those who surrendered.

   The English commander repeated his terms in a letter written to Stuyvesant, promising that in return for capitulation the settlers would �peaceably enjoy whatsoever God's blessing and their own honest industry have furnished them with and all other privileges with his majesty's English subjects.� Stuyvesant wanted to make a fight of it. But when he tried to convince New Amsterdam�s leaders to keep news of the lenient surrender terms � and reports of the fort�s limited supply of good gun powder � from the inhabitants, the burgomasters left the meeting �greatly disgusted and dissatisfied.� Furious at their defiance, Stuyvesant tore up Nicolls's letter offering terms. Within hours work on the city's fortifications ceased, and a delegation of the �inhabitants of the place assisted by their wives and children crying and praying� confronted the director and demanded that he re-assemble the letter and negotiate surrender. The following day ninety-three prominent burghers � including Stuyvesant�s own seventeen-year-old son � presented a remonstrance denouncing resistance as a folly that would not save �the smallest portion of our entire city, our property and (what is dearer to us), our wives and children, from total ruin.� Stuyvesant relented, and merchant leaders met with Nicolls and his officers to draft the Articles of Capitulation under which New Netherland and New Amsterdam became New York, New York.

   The conquest of New Netherland expelled the Dutch from the continent and consolidated the English colonization of North America. Thereafter the English turned their attention to the French as their major European competitor in the North Atlantic, culminating with the French and Indian War (1756-63), which ushered in the era of the American Revolution. But Dutch New York lived on in the marriage choices, inheritance practices, and naming patterns of a population which, in New York City, remained "Dutch" until at least the end of the seventeenth century and up the Hudson River Valley for a decade or more into the eighteenth. For those who care to look, Dutch New York lives on still in the names of streets and noteworthy families, and in the "cookies" and "coleslaw" which the rest of the world has come to consider so quintessentially American.

1 O�Callaghan, E.B. and Fernow, Berthold, eds. Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New York. 15 vols. Albany: 1856-87, 1: 139.

http://www.historynow.org/06_2007/historian6.html

[Jesus of Lubeck]

Conflict and Commerce: The Rise and Fall of Rates of Exchange in the Gunpowder Empires.

Mr. Middleton�s comments on Dutch activity in New Amsterdam is a very nice snapshot of the Northern European Protestant response to Imperial Spanish expansion in the New World.  Additionally, the entire topic of Conflict and Commerce is worth expanding upon.  One of the riddles of history that appears to be gaining the attention of a growing number of academics studying early modern history is that of the rather steady decline of the Ottoman Empire during the two centuries spanning approximately 1650 to 1850.  As the Spanish, English, French, Dutch, and I suppose we should not forget the Danes, expanded into the North and South American continents following the twin impulses of conflict (conquest?) and commerce.  Each of these groups also pushed progressively into the Asia-Pacific basin and grafted themselves effectively onto traditional trade routes.  What affect did this Western European conflict and commerce across such a wide-ranging field of activity have on the great Eurasian Empires?

The Ottoman Empire, for example, is usually not given high marks for administrative alacrity, particularly in the period after 1670 C.E.  Moreover, many of the great economic powers of the 17th century, Mogul India, and Qing Dynasty China, are characterized by Western historians as entering into a period of steady decline during the same period.  It is often presented that the decline of these early modern Asian empires resulted from poor administration and obsolete technology in the face of European expansion.  The comments below are based on works of scholars who are taking a fresh look at more complex economic, social, and political relationships between these states in the early modern period. Because of the HH Forum format, there is a works consulted section and the end of these comments.  All of the ideas discussed here were formulated by the scholars whose works are listed below.  I look forward to any comments, clarifications, or additions anyone would like to make.

Throughout most of the late medieval period, with the exception of the XIV century and the Black Death, the rates of exchange between silver and gold coinages stayed within a relatively stable range, periodic debasements and recoinages led to economic crises, true, but these crises were generally confined to a single economic region where a sovereign had fiddled with the purity of his own realm�s coinage (Henry VII for example).  However, in the XVII century the bimetallic monetary systems of all of the early modern states were destabilized to a degree that no contemporary administrator could have foreseen.  In these great series of monetary destabilizations, some academics find part of the answer for some of the otherwise inexplicable elements attending the decline of the Eurasian Empires during the period between 1650 and 1850.  These same scholars believe that among the chief culprits responsible for these destabilizing economic effects were Spanish New World silver mines from whence galleons shipped unprecedented amounts of Spanish silver into Europe and China where the bullion then passed into circulation into monetized portions of the economies of Eurasia.

To give a brief example of the kind of monetary chaos that ensued during the period in question, here is a list of exchange rates between silver and gold for several areas of the late XVI century economy, it is worth noting that prior to 1492, the Ottoman silver to gold ratio was closer to the Chinese figure sited below.  The Chinese, who up until the appearance of the Spanish in the Philippines imported much of their silver from Japan, had established by the XVI century a fairly stable silver to gold ratio of between 1:4 and 1:5.  Because of the shear scale of the Ming and early Qing economies, China was able to absorb a significant amount of silver bullion and it is noteworthy that as Spanish silver began to invade the Asian Pacific economies, the Chinese silver to gold ratio was able to stabilize at about 1:6.  Europe and the Ottoman Lands were not so fortunate, according to one source, here are a table of silver to gold ratios from the end of the XVI century:

 �1:11 or 1:12 in Europe, 1:10 in Persia, and 1:8 in India.�(Pomeranz, 2000, p.98)

By the close of the XVI century, the silver to gold ratio had gone from approximately 1:6 to 1:11 in Tunis and North Africa, and between 1:9 and 1:10 in Egypt and the core areas of the Empire.  Because the silver minting of coinage was decentralized in the Ottoman Empire, the central government had almost no effective means to meet the deadly inflationary cycles that ripped through various economic regions of the Empire with the arrival of each New-World treasure fleet at the roadstead of Seville.  It should also be understood that the Spanish silver anemia did not only affect the great Eurasian Empires but the Kingdoms of Europe as well.  The XVII century was notable for a wide range of societal ills that were exacerbated, in some part, by the inflation caused by the infusion of Spanish silver.

While many historians appear to recognize the affects of Spanish silver on the early modern global economy, what ecomomic affects followed in the wake of Dutch, English, and French activities?  How did the establishment of North American trade in furs effect or destabilize the traditional global economy?

Comments based on the following sources:

Kenneth Pomeranz.
2000. The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy.  Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ. p.

Sevket Pamuk.
2005. Core vs. Periphery: Monetary and Fiscal Institutions in the Ottoman Empire 1600-1800. Paper presented at the GEHN Workshop on Imperialism, Istanbul, September 11-12, 2005.

Best Regards,

David Pelfrey (Lubby)

[Jesus of Lubeck]

In continuing the discussion of commerce and conflict, here is a brief sketch from a primary source, Abu L�Hasan Ali Al Ma�sudi, on the vast maritime trade route that linked the Red Sea (Sea of Zanj), the Indian Ocean, and the Gulf of Tonkin in the medieval period prior to the arrival of Vasco Da Gama in these waters in 1448.  It is worth noting that this source supports facts discussed in the HH Administration's article, "The Sinbad Voyage."  John Lawton, the author of the article made the following observation regarding this important sea route and the Arab trader-seafarers that survived their voyages:

For those who did succeed, however, profits were high. Because no European power had ever found a sea route to China, the Arabian role as intermediary in East-West trade grew and flourished. By the middle of the eighth century the flow of such precious goods as gold, ivory and gems from India, and silk and fine porcelain from China, had made Baghdad the most important commercial center in the world, and for the next 500 years Muslim dominance of East-West trade continued. (John Lawton, The Sinbad Voyage)

Abu L�Hasan Ali Al Ma�sudi (hereafter Masudi), writing between 890-956 CE, left an early Muslim record of his knowledge concerning the Land of the Zanj in his passage titled Meadows of Gold.  Masudi�s work is one of the earliest descriptions of the cultures that were linked together by trade across the Indian Ocean.  Musadi, a Muslim Omani merchant, counted himself among those Arab middle-men who plied these trade routes between the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean and whose commercial links stretched to the Indian subcontinent and China.  While the Indian Ocean was certainly a major component knitting Africa,  Arabia, India, and China, to call it the heart of Africa Eurasia needs some qualification.

It is perhaps safer to say that the Indian Ocean and the Zanj sea was but one chamber in the commercial heart of the Africa-Eurasia trade routes.  Masudi repeatedly demonstrates the commercial character of Indian Ocean trade throughout the selection in our reading. The opening paragraph serves notice on the commercial importance of Arab merchants from Oman, whose vessels ranged the sea of Zanj and the Indian Ocean, whose boundaries on three great ancient economies, Persia, India, and China served to connect Africa with the trade routes of Eurasia:

The sea of Zanj and that of Abyssinia lie on the right of the sea of India, and join up. (Abu L�Hasan Ali Al Ma�sudi, Meadows of Gold)

Masudi spends much of this passage listing the exotic exports from the African lands bordering the Zanj Sea.  Masudi focuses on two major commodities, leopard skins and elephant ivory:

The land of the Zanj produces wild leopard skins.  The people wear them as clothes, or export them to Muslim countries.  They are the largest leopard skins and the best for making saddles. (Abu L�Hasan Ali Al Ma�sudi, Meadows of Gold)
   
Masudi notes the size and quality of the Zanj skins as well as remarks upon both the local African and foreign Arab use of this item.   In his remarks on elephant ivory, Masudi relates that there really is no domestic use for elephant products; they are hunted and killed by the Zanj peoples solely for the export market in ivory.

There are many wild elephants but no tame ones� The Zanj rush upon them armed with very long spears and kill them for their ivory.   It is from this country that come tusks weighing fifty pounds or more.  They usually go on to Oman, and from there are sent to China and India.  This is the chief trade route, and if it were not so, ivory would be common in Muslim lands. (Abu L�Hasan Ali Al Ma�sudi, Meadows of Gold)

   The Arab trader outlines the route that the Zanj ivory takes as it winds its way presumably via sea to India and China.  At this point in the narrative, Masudi comments again on the use of the commodity African ivory in these two foreign markets, China and India:

In China the kings and military officers use ivory palanquins: no officer or notable dares to come into the royal presence in an iron palanquin, and the ivory alone can be used. Thus they [the Chinese] seek after straight tusks in preference to the curved, to make things we have spoken of.  (Abu L�Hasan Ali Al Ma�sudi, Meadows of Gold)

And:

In India ivory is much sought after.  It is used for the handles of daggers harari or harri in the singular: and also for the curved sword-scabbards called kartal, in the plural karatil, but the chief use of ivory [in India] is making chessmen and backgammon pieces�. (Abu L�Hasan Ali Al Ma�sudi, Meadows of Gold)

Musadi�s discussion of ivory is of interest for several reasons.  First, his comments clearly show the role that the Zanj-Indian Ocean sea routes played in joining the commercial cultures of accessible to one another through this vast oceanic highway.  Second, the farther one moves from the African source of the elephant ivory, the more expensive and enhanced the value of the commodity.  In India, the ivory was used for relatively upper cast objects, i.e. hilts, scabbards, and chess pieces, whereas in China, the African ivory was associated with the litters of the highest elites in imperial Chinese society.

While Musadi�s narrative is instructive particularly with respect to commercial matters touching on the Indian Ocean basin, he does not discuss the spread of cultural or religious ideas in any great detail.  His knowledge of Africa in fact shows some signs of having come at second-hand, as if collected from an Arab island or coastal outpost, as in this instance when he describes the Abyssinians as possessing �tribes [that] sharpen their teeth and are cannibals.� (Abu L�Hasan Ali Al Ma�sudi, Meadows of Gold)

Additionally, Musadi describes the flow of African commodities in only one direction; he does not shed light in this passage on what the Africans themselves sought in trade from the Arabs.  Nowhere in this passage is there any indication of what specifically the Africans derived from this trade.  Although this is only a small portion of a larger work, Musadi�s writings tend to focus on the Indian Ocean�s importance as a major trade connection between the Middle East, Africa, India, and China.  From Musadi�s passage, it is not possible to weigh this vast oceanic trade against the equally vast trade that flowed between these areas largely via land routes that used local passages across the Zanj Sea in order to reach Africa.  It is likely that Oman was not just the point at which Indian Ocean shipping touched, but also the locus of trans-Arabian-Eurasian caravan routes whose wares also found their way to Africa�s east coast.  Certainly trade and ideas traveled between these cultural areas via both routes.

This, then, is a brief sketch of the healthy state of maritime trade in the Indian Ocean basin and the South China Sea in the era prior to the arrival of the Europeans in these waters.  Again, how, and by what processes, economic, cultural, political, and technological, were the Europeans able to displace or supplant the Arab and Asian powers who hitherto controlled this commerce?

Best Regards,

David Pelfrey