New Netherland Connections (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press)

.Well-written and carefully researched."New Netherland Connections" focuses mostly on mid-seventeenth century Dutch life along the Hudson River, exploring the relationships between the old world and the new; women as business people; Native Americans and Dutch; Africans and Dutch; and all of the above in relation to the English.I was especially interested in the section on Africans in New Netherland, and the sections on Dutch and Indian "go-betweens," as La Malinka, Pocohontas, Sacajewa and Conrad Weiser are often spoken of in this role, but Oratam of Hackensacky and Sara Roeloff Kierstede are new to me.With its emphasis on networking and exploration of differing cultural and social norms, this book will be as interesting to sociology and anthropology students as it is to historians.Worth reading.Kim BurdickStanton, Delaware

Beautifully written! Explains the importance of family relationships from Holland to the New World.

What does and can a common Dutch visual of a “young woman bathed in the pure light of an open window, at a table with a man, who appears largely in dark silhouette” (p.1) tell us about world history, and specifically, the burgeoning Dutch commercial empire of the seventeenth century? The reproduction “Officer and a Laughing Girl,” a 1657 Johannes Vermeer tableau, with the young woman cradling a glass of wine in her right hand, with her left hand held out and open while smiling at her suitor, shows dramatically a map of Holland and West Friesland hanging on the wall behind them. Each set of depictions, taking up equal halves of the image, with the map commanding the upper half while the girl and her suitor occupy the bottom half, is the assemblage on which Susanah Shaw Romney stakes the claims of her text. Romney’s meditation on Vermeer’s tableau stands as representation of the text’s thesis, reorienting the historiography of empire and commerce from large-scale, formal institutions towards tangible, less structured forms of participation. Romney’s intervention is that we cannot have full comprehension of the “seventeenth-century Dutch expansion along the Atlantic coast of North America … without bearing in mind the correlations between intimacy and empire captured in Vermeer’s painting” (p. 5). Sutured by archival research in the Netherlands and the United States, what the reader encounters is a critical engagement with Dutch and American historiographies of colonization while theorizing a different approach to understanding empires as social networks organized around intimate ties. Succinctly, Romney’s argument is that empires are made, built by everyday actions of everyday people in their intimate networks across transatlantic ties. As such, the text extends and troubles the oft framing of empire as an imposed historical occurrence. It invites us to take another look, to shift our gaze, to look elsewhere and see what networks like this reveal about the ways people negotiated the challenges and opportunities posed by the emerging Atlantic world. The text spectacularly shows how old and familiar technologies of affect oriented themselves around a novel political and economic emergence of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, showing ultimately that “continuity, not rupture, characterized the early years of overseas empire” (304-305).

Romney writes clearly and has excellent footnotes, amplifying the text and suggesting further reading. I haven't even finished the book yet, but it has already gone beyond what I had been hoping for. I was looking for conversation about how family networks stayed in touch across the Atlantic in the 1600s as the Dutch built out in the North American colony, but she has also taken an extensive look at the grassroots economic network supporting the extension of the Dutch empire across oceans, with credit from ordinary Amsterdammers both enabling and compelling seamen on their voyages. Great stuff! I'm looking forward to devouring the rest of it, anticipating even more revelations as I go.