Abstract
Between 1656 and 1664 the City of Amsterdam, uniquely, possessed a “City Colony” in the Dutch colony of New Netherland. Called New Amstel, this fledgling colony on the South River—the current Delaware—for a brief time cemented the commitment of Amsterdam to the preservation of the Dutch colony in New Netherland, perpetually—and fatally—under threat from English encroachment. Born out of the anxiety of the Dutch West India Company, which saw the numbers of English settlers swell each year, the City of Amsterdam was persuaded to undertake the settlement of the shores of the Delaware river. There, Dutch settlers were few and far between, and were surpassed in numbers by Swedes and Finns. After the difficult early years, the colonization gained momentum after 1660, and the settlement increased considerably until the English invasion in October 1664 put an end to the Dutch colony. Amsterdam turned to other colonial endeavors with less inhibitions and more chance of success, for example, the rich sugar-producing plantations of Guyana. The memory of the unique experiment of the short-lived City Colony quickly faded.
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Notes
See for that Frans Blom and Henk Looijesteijn, “A Land of Milk and Honey: Colonial Propaganda and the City of Amsterdam, 1656–1664,” De Halve Maen LXXXV (2012), 47–56, and the literature listed there.
This is for example argued by Michel Reinders, Gedrukte Chaos. Populisme en moord in het Rampjaar 1672 (Amsterdam: Balans, 2010).
See for example the work of Paul Knevel, Burgers in het geweer: De schutterijen in Holland, 1550–1700 (Hilversum, the Netherlands: Verloren, 1994);
Nico Slokker, Ruggengraat van de stad. De betekenis van gilden in Utrecht, 1528–1818 (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2010); and the work of Maarten Prak, Chapter 6 in this volume but also his book Republikeinse veelheid, democratische enkelvoud. Sociale verandering in het Revolutietijdvak: ‘s-Hertogenbosch 1770–1820 (Nijmegen, the Netherlands: SUN, 1999).
For example the brothers De la Court, studied by Arthur Weststeijn, Commercial Republicanism in the Dutch Golden Age. The Political Thought of Johan & Pieter de la Court (Leiden, the Netherlands, and Boston: Brill, 2012).
For his life and political struggle, see Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World. The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America (New York: Doubleday, 2004).
The view of New Amsterdam was based on a drawing, dated around 1650, which was made on the spot and brought to the Republic in order to underline the miserable state of the colony. See M. Gosselink, Land in zicht. Vingboons tekent de wereld van de 17de eeuw (Zwolle, the Netherlands: Waanders, 2007), 49–50.
Conditien die door de heeren burgemeesteren der Stadt Amsterdam (etc.) (Amsterdam: 1656); Koninklijke Bibliotheek, pamphlet nr. 7776a. See for Banningh: M. M. Kleerkooper and W. P. van Stockum, De boekhandel te Amsterdam, voornamelijk in de 17e eeuw. Biographische en geschiedkundige aanteekeningen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1914–1916), vol. I, 33.
A “morgen” was presumably the land one could plough with a span of oxen in one morning, here c.15 or 20 hectares; J. M. Verhoeff, De oude Nederlandse maten en gewichten (Amsterdam: P. J. Meertens Instituut, 1982), 101, 115.
(Anon.), ’t Verheerlickte Nederland door d’herstelde zee-vaart (s.1.: 1659); National Library, The Hague, pamphlet nr. 8176, 13; see also Frans R. E. Blom, “Picturing New Netherland and New York. Dutch–Anglo transfer of New World Information,” in: The Dutch Trading Companies as Knowledge Networks, eds. Siegfried Huigen, Jan de Jong, and Elmer Kolfin (Leiden, the Netherlands, and Boston: Brill, 2010), 103–126, 108.
Van den Enden, Kort Verhael, 19–21. Klever believes it is “without doubt” that Van den Enden’s later political theory may have been inspired partly by what he had read about Native American societies; Franciscus van den Enden, Vrije Politijke Stellingen. Met een inleiding van Wim Klever, ed. Wim Klever (Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek, 1992), 37.
See for this: R. Cordes, Jan Zoet, Amsterdammer 1609–1674. Leven en werk van een kleurrijk schrijver (Hilversum, the Netherlands: Verloren, 2008).
Van den Enden writes nothing in the Kort Verhael about Plockhoy or his contract with the burgomasters; Plockhoy never refers to him either. The attempts of most notably Klever and Israel to link the two and thus provide Spinoza with Plockhoy as a source of the philosopher’s egalitarianism should thus be regarded with some skepticism in the absence of further evidence. See for their opinions Van den Enden, Vrije Politijke Stellingen, 31–32; to be sure Klever sees here only an indirect relation: Van den Enden, Vrije Politijke Stellingen, 114, note 17. More emphatic is Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment. Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 177;
Jonathan I. Israel, “The Intellectual Origins of Modern Democratic Republicanism,” European Journal of Political Theory 3 (2004), 7–36, 17.
Jan V. Meininger and Guido van Suchtelen, “Liever met wercken, als met woorden.” De levensreis van doctor Franciscus van den Enden, leermeester van Spinoza, complotteur tegen Lodewijk de Veertiende (Weesp, the Netherlands: Heureka, 1980), 68–69, 71–72, 98, 104–105,109, 115, 118–121.
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© 2013 Margaret C. Jacob and Catherine Secretan
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Blom, F., Looijesteijn, H. (2013). Ordinary People in the New World: The City of Amsterdam, Colonial Policy, and Initiatives from Below, 1656–1664. In: Jacob, M.C., Secretan, C. (eds) In Praise of Ordinary People. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137380524_10
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