The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World

In the seventeenth century, the Dutch built an Atlantic empire that stretched from the Caribbean to the African Gold Coast and from present-day New York to Brazil. This empire was forged on the battlefields and the high seas, as Dutch armies and fleets extended the decades-old independence war against Spain across the ocean. Dutch transatlantic fleets, armies, and colonies included numerous foreigners, largely drawn from countries in northwestern Europe. Nor would the Dutch have been able to achieve military victories without the native alliances they carefully cultivated. Indeed, the Dutch Atlantic was quintessentially inter-imperial, multinational, and multiracial. At the same time, it was an empire designed to benefit the Dutch Republic.