The Whole is More than the Sum of its Parts

Abstract

The Whole is More than the Sum of its Parts Deborah Hamer (bio) Wim Klooster. The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016. 419 pp. illustrations, maps. $35.00. For many American historians, New Netherland resides at the center of an otherwise dimly contoured Dutch Atlantic world. There are many legitimate reasons for this. The search for a national narrative that could root the United States' multicultural and polyglot present in the past drew early attention to the diversity and toleration that distinguished the Middle Colonies, including New Netherland, from either New England or the Chesapeake. New York's rise in the eighteenth century as a British imperial hub and its current position as one of world's preeminent cities have also encouraged interest in its past. Translation projects—most recently the superb, painstaking work of Charles Gehring and Janny Venema of the New Netherland Institute in Albany—have accomplished the difficult work of making documents associated with New Netherland accessible to those who cannot read Dutch. And recent works on New Netherland like Susanah Shaw Romney's New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth Century America (2014) have shown that New Netherland's history and the Dutch archives tell stories that change the way we think about the entire Atlantic world. As productive as this focus on New Netherland has been, it scarcely scratches the surface of Dutch colonial aspirations in the seventeenth century. With the publication of Wim Klooster's deeply researched, brilliant book, English speaking readers will finally have the chance to explore the rest of a geography that extended well beyond New Netherland and North America. Central to Klooster's work in an effort to write a history that can encompass all of the highly variegated, sometimes successful and sometimes unsuccessful Dutch activities on the Atlantic rim. Klooster has written extensively about Curaçao and its inter-imperial trade, and it is perhaps because of this geographical orientation that he has been able to write a history that is at once Atlantic, hemispheric, and transnational. In particular, Klooster aims "to put Brazil front and center in the Dutch Atlantic" (p. 7). In 1957, C.R. Boxer's The Dutch in Brazil 1624-1654 offered a [End Page 12] political history of the Dutch colony, and it seemed for decades that his would be the last word. Only recently has the colony re-emerged as a subject of significant inquiry, first with the appearance of Mark Meuwese's Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade: Dutch-Indigenous Alliances in the Atlantic World, 1595-1674 (2011) and then the work of Michiel van Groesen, particularly the wonderful Amsterdam's Atlantic: Print Culture and the Making of Dutch Brazil (2016), which shows the outsized place of Brazil in the Dutch imagination. Klooster draws together a number of strands in the secondary literature to show how entanglements that would long outlast Brazil—the Dutch trade in enslaved people on the Gold Coast and the concomitant rise of Curaçao as a center for inter-imperial trade, the arrival of Jews in the larger Atlantic world, and Dutch plantation society in Suriname—came out of this ultimately failed project. Focusing on the half-century from 1620 to 1670, Klooster also asks us to consider how the Dutch mattered at a key moment in Atlantic history, which he terms "the Great Transformation." This was the moment when the Iberian powers lost their monopoly on transatlantic voyaging and—much to their dismay—northern Europeans established trading networks and colonies in territory that the Iberians thought of as their own. The degree of difficulty involved in answering this question cannot be overstated, as it requires knowledge of the historiography and archives of the Dutch as well as the Spanish, Portuguese, English, and French empires, and Klooster does not disappoint. He offers a compelling yet measured assessment of the Dutch contribution, arguing that the Dutch hastened and affected the shape of this reconfigured Atlantic that came to include English, French, Dutch, and Danish colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But they were also only one of a number of actors who helped...