Joining a growing spate of authors studying trade—licit and illicit—in the Atlantic world, Christian Koot establishes the importance of Anglo-Dutch trade in the development of the English colonies, especially Barbados, the Leeward Islands, and New York. He documents what he alternately calls “interimperial” and “cross-national” trade quite well, given the sparse, scattered, and often surreptitious nature of his sources: a combination of Dutch notarial records (Amsterdam and Rotterdam), the occasional personal journal, some merchant accounts (especially for New York), and official court records and correspondence from the English Caribbean and New York as well as New Netherland. Koot reveals trade relationships that bound together English and Dutch merchants and colonists even as their nations fought a series of wars for control of Atlantic trade. No longer will we be able to talk about the rise of the English plantation colonies without reference to the Dutch trade that nourished them. Nor will we be able to claim the British Atlantic was solely a British creation.

At the core of the book are the Navigation Acts and the dilemmas they posed for a colonial world raised on free and easy trade relationships between English colonists and Dutch traders (quite different from Asia, incidentally). However, by the eighteenth century, British colonists (or at least the Caribbean planters unable to compete with French sugar production) had embraced the protected trade environment the acts created. Koot traces the transition by documenting the trade, the legislation against it, and efforts to both suppress the trade and circumvent the legislation across three chronological phases (1620–59, 1660–89, 1689–1713) in the development of the British Atlantic from “Beginnings” to “Maturity.” It is a substantial achievement.

Through his close-to-the-ground study of colonial trade, Koot also attempts an argument about colonists’ economic ideology. He sees in his evidence of the changing patterns of business deals a “transition in thinking” rather than simply a response to altered conditions (12). Colonists “believed” their Dutch “ties to be valuable,” and by this he means more than in terms of “quantities of goods” (13). When colonists abandoned trading with the Dutch, it was out of choice because the “market need for interimperial trade faded” (213) rather than because the anti-Dutch wars and legislation promoted by the English government rendered such trade dangerous and costly.

Koot essentially argues that the Navigation Acts primarily worked because the English colonists wanted them to. As they consolidated their position within the empire, the “shift away from Dutch markets” became “acceptable” (213). The decline of Anglo-Dutch trade coincided with the rise of colonists’ acceptance of the British Empire’s trade restrictions because the colonists had “greater control of” their trade, which now lay “in the hands of locals” and not “metropolitan policy makers” (213). Nonetheless, Koot’s primary finding could be that colonial control was not incompatible with metropolitan imperialist aims—as long as metropolitan merchants and markets met colonial needs: “Just as colonists’ desires and needs had provided the impetus for Anglo-Dutch trade” in the 1620s, by the 1720s their “new interests … led to its decline. Interimperial trade did not disappear, but more than ever before British colonists now belonged to a powerful, expanding, and integrated empire” (227). It took about three decades and three wars, and would be disrupted somewhat during the wars with the French between 1689 and 1713, but it is clear that they belonged to the empire as much as any metropolitan policy maker.

Koot’s research is strong, but his interpretations can be puzzling. Must the Anglo-Dutch trade links he has demonstrated be seen as proof that “access to Dutch goods” affected the “economic ideologies” of the British colonists? Was there really a “Dutch influence” on their “commercial culture” that made them appreciate “the benefits of a collaborative and multiethnic community because it had sustained them through the early decades of building colonies” (227)? Beginning the study before the Anglo-Dutch Atlantic trade connection existed, rather than at its inception, might help distinguish the Dutch connection from the colonists’ self-interested (and transitory) endorsement of free trade.

The trajectory of Koot’s book describes a consolidation of center and periphery even as his analytical framework pits English colonists (the titular “periphery”) against the metropole. He is strongly affected by the colonists’ initial resistance, in word and deed, to the Navigation Acts. It is clear that English colonists preferred free trade when it profited them. Whether this is a story of needs and desires, as Koot insists, or simply wealth and power is uncertain. The Dutch connection may demonstrate that the British colonists were “pieces of an integrated cross-national and interdependent Atlantic community” and not just “cogs in a larger British Atlantic” (212). However, it also demonstrates that the English colonists needed power and desired wealth, and they would seize them whenever and however they could, in a world swirling with wars and revolutions. Koot rightly maintains, “the radical innovation in the middle of the seventeenth century was not colonists’ refusal to accept an exclusive empire, but rather was state builders’ attempts to impose this structure on a preexisting culture that prized cross-national exchange” (224). Nonetheless, he may underestimate the degree to which colonists prized cross-national exchange because it helped them build a British empire.

Perhaps ironically, Koot ends his book with the colonists starting to turn against each other, not the metropole. In the 1710s West Indians began “calls for restrictions on foreign trade,” even as New Yorkers argued they “needed to export flour to Dutch, French, and Spanish colonies in order to” maintain their balance of payments with Britain (222). Both claimed the empire for themselves. Koot’s analysis can be perplexing when taken at the scale of the aggregate (colonists vs. metropole, Dutch empire vs. English empire, cross-national vs. exclusive). His particular case studies (Barbados, New York, the Leeward Islands) are impressive, however, and add to our understanding of how the British Empire emerged out of a world of competing empires, even as it was divided within and without.