Abstract

This dissertation reexamines Dutch-English relations in New Netherland and New England during the pre- and inter-English-conquest periods from 1624 to 1674. Specifically, this dissertation reevaluates the New Netherland-New England border disputes that transpired prior to the English conquest and the so-called Dutch resistance and violence that followed the English conquest. Where other historians have found post-English-conquest resistance to English culture, this historian finds pre-English-conquest cultural affinity that carried over into the inter-conquest period. Originating in fourteenth- to seventeenth-century London, Dutch-English affinity was the byproduct of centuries of nearly identical political, economic, spiritual, and syntactical interaction. Such interaction left both societies with closely related culture, institutions, and world outlook. While they were not the same people, one could easily assume they sprang from the same source. So successful was Dutch-English affinitive accommodation that the Dutch were able to spark a power-sharing scheme that left the Dutch in charge of their own affairs during the inter-conquest period. Such affairs included relative control of New Netherland's Dutch courts and the economy. Historians of ethnicity measure the post-English-conquest survival of Dutch culture in decades. New Netherland's post-English-conquest alliance was not the result of such a limited period but of centuries of interaction before they even met in Amsterdam, Leiden, or New Netherland. Rather than engaging in post-English-conquest resistance and violence, New Netherlanders continued to engage the New and the Old English in affinitive interaction. Believing the English conquest was a ruse to gain control of the New England colonies, the New English of Long Island and New England systematically resisted Colonel Richard Nicolls, Charles II's commander, and New York's first governor, and Francis Lovelace, New York's second governor.