journal of early american history 7 (2017) 33-80 brill.com/jeah Book Forum ∵ The Empire that Never Was The Nearly-Dutch Atlantic Empire in the Seventeenth Century Trevor Burnard (review) The University of Melbourne
[email protected] Joyce Goodfriend (review) University of Denver
[email protected] Cynthia Van Zandt (review) University of New Hampshire
[email protected] Willem Frijhoff (review) Erasmus University, Rotterdam
[email protected] Wim Klooster (response) Clark University
[email protected] Abstract This book forum focuses on Wim Klooster’s The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settle- ment in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World (Cornell University Press, 2016). In his book, Wim Klooster shows how the Dutch built and eventually lost an Atlantic empire that stretched from the homeland in the United Provinces to the Hudson River and from Brazil and the Caribbean to the African Gold Coast. The fleets and armies that © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/18770703-00701004 <UN> 34 Burnard et al. fought for the Dutch in the decades-long war against Spain included numerous for- eigners, largely drawn from countries in northwestern Europe. Likewise, many settlers of Dutch colonies were born in other parts of Europe or the New World. According to Klooster, the Dutch would not have been able to achieve military victories without the native alliances they carefully cultivated. Indeed, Klooster concludes, the Dutch Atlantic was quintessentially interimperial, multinational, and multiracial. At the same time, it was an empire entirely designed to benefit the United Provinces. The four reviewers – Trevor Burnard, Joyce Goodfriend, Cynthia Van Zandt, and Wil- lem Frijhoff – all offer praise, some more profusely than others.