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This chapter focuses on the years after the Pequot War and Kieft's War. During this period, villages began rising across the shoreline, some on the exact places where Indian towns had been recently destroyed. Before the fighting started almost a hundred miles separated the nearest English and Dutch communities; by 1650 they stood as close as ten miles apart. The overseeing bodies of these overlapping colonies, the United Colonies of New England and the Dutch West India Company, regularly bickered over boundaries. But until the 1650s they had preferred to keep their disputes on paper, only rarely making direct threats over small trespasses. The Dutch Republic and English Commonwealth went to war for the first time in 1652. The relationships between the Indians, English, and Dutch also changed. The threat of violence from all directions made cross-cultural partnerships all the more vital. Algonquians sought colonists to serve as their scribes, arms dealers, and engineers, while Europeans continued to hire Natives as spies, couriers, pilots, and translators. Indians were finding that the foreigners' suspicions could be put to use in winning campaigns against their Native neighbors, as these local conflicts concerned them more than colonial affairs.

This chapter considers the nature of day-to-day interactions between the Dutch settlers and Native American villagers who already had their own social networks covering the mid-Atlantic coast in a web of personal and economic ties. Close contact resulted in either increasing peace or increasing violence in a particular colonial setting. Although people in the mid-Atlantic region developed a highly effective, widespread set of interpersonal economic networks, their failures to form intimate connections failed to staunch the violence that resulted as people lived closer together.

This chapter examines the Dutch colonization of northeastern Brazil from 1630 to 1654. The colony was governed by the West India Company (WIC), which depended on a strong navy and army. Without enormous investments in soldiers, ships, and weapons, the company would never have been able to wrest away the rich sugar provinces of northeastern Brazil from the Iberian powers, to which Brazil belonged as part of the Spanish–Portuguese Doublemonarchy from 1585 to 1640. In addition to European company soldiers, the WIC greatly depended on indigenous allies in Brazil. These included the Tupi-speaking peoples who lived along the coast. The Tupis were sought out as military allies of the WIC because of their numerical strength and their familiarity with European weapons.

In 1763, a slave rebellion erupted in the Dutch colony of Berbice in northern South America. The great majority of the colony's enslaved people were caught up in the rebellion, as either rebels or fugitives. It took the Dutch almost two years to restore their authority. This was made possible by Dutch reinforcements who forced the rebels deeper into the jungle and the help of Amerindians who possessed the strength, local knowledge, and military skills for jungle fighting that the Dutch lacked. This chapter sketches the unfolding of the Berbice slave rebellion and describes the role of Amerindians in its suppression. What did the alliance of natives and colonists consist of? How was it organized? What held it together? How did Amerindian assistance help the Dutch project power and establish its coercive authority?

This chapter reviews how some of the company's enslaved laborers took advantage of the lack of spatial control in the Dutch colony and their close proximity to each other and several important institutions. It explores a variety of reasons why some of New Amsterdam's enslaved men and women had been able to attend the Dutch Reformed Church, use the courts to secure wages or defend property, and obtain a (conditional) freedom. The chapter then analyses the importance of place, space, and geography. Because enslaved people had very little control over their mobility or the environment in which they lived, the physical and social spaces that they inhabited played an especially important role in the ways they were able to partake in society. Ultimately, the chapter looks at the ways in which enslaved people navigated these systems and the colonial spaces.

This chapter explicates the lives of Akan persons and their roles in the development of a composite African culture shaped by diasporic experiences in the Dutch and Danish colonies of the Americas. It examines Akan culture and politics in the Danish Caribbean and pays specific attention to the colonial holdings of St. Croix, St. Thomas, and St. John. In doing so, the Akan emerge as Maroons delimited by an uneasy coexistence within the same neo‐European social order they fought against, insurrectionists who, in the St. John revolt, overthrew the plantocracy in 1733–1734, and as runaways, conspirators, skilled laborers, and individuals known as (A)mina, who were situated between levels of emancipation and brutal enslavement. These thematic identities for the Akan in Danish America were also true for those in the Dutch colonies, where Akan‐based maroonage and culture left indelible marks on its colonial and postcolonial societies. Thematically, the Akan were thus Maroons, runaways, collaborators, forgers of culture, and seekers of polities of their own making on the Gold Coast and in the Americas.

This chapter looks at the demography of the Jews as well as the economic and social structures in the Netherlands, emphasizing that the area underwent a process of accelerated change, expansion, and prosperity during the half-century after 1870. The period 1870–1940 showed a clear growth in the Jewish population in the Netherlands, from around 68,000 in 1869 to a peak of more than 115,000 in 1920 and still as many as 112,000 in 1930. A factor in the rapid growth of the Jewish population from 1869 to 1889—faster than that of the total Dutch population—was a drop in death rates. Migration, conversion to a Christian denomination and departure from the Jewish community also had an impact on statistical trends in the country's Jewish population. Furthermore, the chapter looks at how the new dynamism in the national and international economy after 1870 created opportunities for the Jews in the Netherlands. The discussion covers religious life, cultures and subcultures, and the pillarization phenomena. It also tackles the integration and acculturation of the Jews, as well as Dutch antisemitism. Then it looks at international Jewry and Zionism. The chapter likewise examines the experience of Jews in the Dutch Colonies.

Explores the role of the Dutch in the Indies from 1595, when sailors from Amsterdam first arrived in the islands, to 1942, when the Japanese invaded the colony and inflicted a devastating defeat upon the Dutch. The history of the Dutch in the Indonesian archipelago is critical to understanding the impact of the Japanese occupation after 1942, and the nature of the war crimes committed by the Japanese. This is because the ultimate goal of the Japanese occupiers was to erase all aspects of Dutch culture and influence the islands. The chapter begins with an examination of the early Dutch settlement of the islands, and the development of the colonial economy. It then discusses the so-called “Ethical Policy,” which sought to unify the islands under Dutch rule and implement European ideas about civilization, culture, and prosperity. The chapter looks at the colony’s social structure prior to World War II and closes with a discussion of the colony’s preparations for war with the Japanese in 1942. A short postscript explains what occurred between August 1945, when the Japanese surrendered, and December 1949, when the Netherlands East Indies ceased to exist.

Most scholars examining the relationship between European men and Native American women in the colonial situation tend to see a consistently exploitative one on the part of men. Here we look at that relationship through a different lens and discover the agency of Native women in their intimate relationships with European men in the Dutch colony of New Netherland. This chapter argues that these relationships were part of a continuation and expansion of traditional societal practices of exchange and gift giving, and the Europeans, probably unknowingly, conformed to those practices. These relationships are examined in the context of the roles of European men and African women who inhabited the colony.

This chapter summarizes the preceding discussions and presents some final thoughts. It concludes that people reconciled the challenges of distance posed by the new Atlantic world through various personal and intimate networks. These networks also show how empire took shape, through the actions of diverse collections of people pursuing their own differing goals and interests.

This chapter recounts the last gasps of the East India Company (VOC) and West India Company (WIC) that became quickly overwhelmed by convulsions from the Batavian Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, which brought an end to the Dutch Republic and forever changed its commercial empire. It discusses how the Netherlands fell to French forces in 1795, and in the ensuing eighteen years Britain eventually came into possession of all Dutch overseas territories except several posts on the West African coast. After the defeat of Napoleon and the restoration of European monarchies in 1815, the new Kingdom of the Netherlands regained control over Surinam, Curaçao, and the East Indies. The chapter highlights how the Dutch waged a series of bloody wars in Borneo, Sumatra, and Java to oust local rulers and put down rebellions. All Dutch colonies came under direct administration by the Dutch government.