The Fall of New Netherland and Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Imperial Formation, 1654–1676 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/4/666/1793661/tneq_a_00417.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 l. h. roper N 27 August 1664,1 an English force compelled the New O World Dutch town of New Amsterdam to capitulate to eight commissioners led by Sir Richard Nicolls and including Sir Robert Carr, Sir George Cartwright, Connecticut Gover- nor John Winthrop Jr., and New England colonists Thomas Clarke, Samuel Maverick, John Pynchon, and Samuel Wyllys. Having been duly charged by King Charles II, Nicolls, Carr, Cartwright, and Maverick then executed the takeover of the rest of New Netherland, after which they proceeded to investi- gate a series of intercolonial disputes across a region stretching from Maine to Delaware Bay, an expansive territory Charles had granted as a proprietorship to his brother James Stuart, duke of York. I would like to thank Sarah Barber, Evan Haefeli, Lauric Henneton, Jaap Jacobs, Dennis J. Maika, David L. Smith, attendees at sessions of the 2012 meeting of the British Group in Early American History and the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Colloquium at SUNY–New Paltz, and the anonymous readers of the New England Quarterly for their help with this article, the Office of Academic Affairs at the State University of New York–New Paltz for defraying the costs of archival research in England, Martine van Ittersum for graciously supplying documents from the microfilm edition of the Winthrop Family Papers, and the Massachusetts Historical Society for permission to cite those documents. I would also like to thank Linda Smith Rhoads for her scrupulous editorial attention. 1Dates from the sources are rendered “Old Style” in accordance with the calendar in effect in seventeenth-century England and its colonies (the capitulation took place on 8 September 1664 under the Gregorian calendar in effect in the Dutch Republic and its colonies) but with the year beginning on 1 January. The New England Quarterly, vol. LXXXVII, no. 4 (December 2014). C 2014 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. doi:10.1162/TNEQ a 00417. 666 ANGLO-AMERICAN IMPERIAL FORMATION 667 Characterizing the significance of this episode within the con- text of English imperial history seems straightforward enough: for the first time the English state conducted a successful mil- itary operation in North America; and for the first time it des- ignated officials to report to imperial institutions, themselves newly constituted, for possible action by the center. Megan Lindsay Cherry recently restated the long-standing view that Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/4/666/1793661/tneq_a_00417.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 the capture of New Netherland reflected, in conjunction with an effort “to stop the spread of [New England’s] infectious inde- pendence,” the Restoration government’s “policy of consolidat- ing control over its North American empire.” Christian Koot, in his examination of the seventeenth-century English Em- pire, similarly concludes that the seizure of the Dutch colony and the Nicolls commission’s activities signaled “the process by which a new idea of an exclusive British empire displaced the seventeenth century’s interimperial Atlantic community.” Yet, Koot claims, Restoration “officials could not extend their fiscal-military state across the Atlantic until locals eschewed their cross-national, flexible origins and chose to conform to new imperial standards.”2 Since the “grand atavistic visions” of metropolitan imperi- alists “clashed with those of the English small-planter regimes already established in North America,” Daniel Richter argues in a recent survey of pre-independence North America, late Stu- art attempts at “state building and imperial expansion” faltered due to, on the one hand, the incompetence of policy advocates and, on the other, colonists’ successful adaptation to new im- perial circumstances.3 As David Hall explains, “the arrival of 2Megan Lindsay Cherry, “The Imperial and Political Motivations behind the English Conquest of New Netherland,” Dutch Crossing 34 (March 2010): 77–94 at 78–79,and Christian J. Koot, Empire at the Periphery: British Colonists, Anglo-Dutch Trade, and the Development of the British Atlantic, 1621–1713 (New York: New York University Press, 2011), p. 5. 3Daniel K. Richter, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), pp. 241–56 at 241, 242. The standard account of the takeover, from which Richter’s survey of pre-independence American history derives, remains Robert C. Ritchie, The Duke’s Province: A Study of New York Politics and Society, 1664–1691 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), pp. 9–24. For more measured views of James II, see Scott Sowerby, Making Toleration: The 668 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY four commissioners dispatched by the government of Charles II to terminate the colonists’ de facto independence from En- gland” threatened the “rights or privileges” of New England’s freemen. As the freemen saw it, the constitution of their an- cient church accorded them the right “first and foremost . to install popular participation, consent, and ‘Fundamental’ law at the heart of civil governance, and second . to create a Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/4/666/1793661/tneq_a_00417.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 purified church, the Congregational Way.”4 Just beneath the surface of Cherry’s, Koot’s, Richter’s, and Hall’s various characterizations lingers an age-old comprehen- sion of Anglo-American history as a benchmark of modernity, the key elements of which, in this view, include “state building” or “state formation” and the progress of liberty: seventeenth- century colonists—New Englanders specifically—successfully (in general) resisted the encroachments of a centralizing state— especially the governments of Charles II (r. 1660–85)andJames II (r. 1685–88)—on their particular liberties. The prevailing in- terpretation has correspondingly relegated the aforementioned James Stuart, often identified as the chief English proponent of Louis XIV–style “absolutism,” to Clio’s dunghill as the losing party in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688–89.5 The modern- ization thesis tends, however, to overestimate the interest in and capacity for pursuing “a centralized overseas territorial em- pire,” let alone “a modern absolutist state,” on the part of late Repealers and the Glorious Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), pp. 1–55; John Callow, The Making of King James II: The Formative Years of a Fallen King (Stroud, Gloucester, U.K.: Sutton Publishing, 2000), pp. 7–21, and John Miller, James II (1978; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000). 4David D. Hall, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), p. 191. 5J. C. D. Clark, “Secularization and Modernization: The Failure of a ‘Grand Narra- tive,’” Historical Journal 55 (March 2012): 161–94,doi:10.1017/S0018246X11000586. The case of New Netherland/New York supports to a degree Robert Bliss’s claim that an understanding of the “politics of empire,” which incorporates the reality of “colonial dependence,” must “supplant” both the “debate over the sources of English ‘imperial policy’” in the seventeenth century and the view that the Restoration “marked a central turning point (or a useful starting point) for imperial history” (Revolution and Empire: English Politics and the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century [Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993], pp. 3–4). Remarkably, Bliss’s study offers no discussion of the run-up to the capture of New Netherland. ANGLO-AMERICAN IMPERIAL FORMATION 669 Stuart governments.6 The characterization also misapprehends the degree to which that state could and did assume respon- sibility for “imperial policy” as well as, more significantly, the degree to which colonists resisted sociopolitical developments ostensibly orchestrated from London, and, accordingly, the de- gree to which the nature of Anglo-American imperial politics Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/4/666/1793661/tneq_a_00417.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 in the third quarter of the seventeenth century can be styled as “colonial versus imperial.” To comprehend the English imperial enterprise properly, then, we must assess its achievements and failures within the context of seventeenth-century England’s political culture, where the interests of the state required, at the least, the cooperation of local leaders. In the case of empire, “success,” even after the Restoration, arose from the activities of “pri- vate” individuals—such as Martin Noell, Thomas Povey, and Maurice Thompson—in conjunction with the metropolitan as- sociations they formed. These men—whose perspectives and interests transcended “colonial” or “imperial,” “merchant” or “planter” and ranged from the East Indies to West Africa to the West Indies to Hudson’s Bay—supported, even provided the impetus for, the state’s greater role in imperial affairs that was palpable after 1649. There is evidence to suggest, for ex- ample, that they had a hand in establishing a council for foreign plantations, which protected and advanced their interests.7 Povey, whose colonial concerns originated with plantations on Barbados, took charge of imperial affairs from September 1658 (after Cromwell’s death) through May 1660 (the Restoration),