Evan Haefeli here presents a meticulously researched and detailed exploration of New Netherland's religious regime. His conclusions correct standard depictions of the colony as a model of tolerance and harbinger of American religious pluralism. On the contrary, Haefeli demonstrates, religious policy was set by an insistent band of Reformed pastors and governors on-site, especially the Calvinist preacher's son Petrus Stuyvesant, with the support of their clerical patrons in Amsterdam and (usually) the acquiescence of the directors of the West India Company. These all tried, in season and out, to enforce the Dutch formula of religious liberty – and conformity. On the one hand, no one would be persecuted for personal convictions privately observed (i.e. within the immediate family circle). On the other, no public demonstration would be allowed of any faith other than that of the Dutch Reformed Church.

Exaggerations and misunderstandings about the New Netherland case have resulted from a failure to grasp this twofold policy in itself and in all its subtle applications, the author argues – that is, from a failure to measure Dutch realities by Dutch standards rather than by English measures or the putative universal norms of all right-thinking people. Haefeli enriches his argument, and helps the nonspecialist reader along the way, by setting New Netherland against the backdrop of other contemporary Dutch colonies and of the Netherlands itself, with all its internal variety on matters of religious observance. Too often the accommodations of Amsterdam are taken to have been typical of the rest of the country when they were in fact exceptional. Unlike Brazil and Batavia, where Amsterdam-like allowances proved useful, New Netherland along with the Cape Colony resembled more the zealous Calvinist model of the province of Zeeland.

The history behind this range of patterns is masterfully captured in the book's two opening chapters, covering religion and politics in the Dutch Republic from the 1560s through 1672 as adumbrated in the artful dance of “connivance” by which local authorities accommodated foreigners' religious convictions. (Home-grown dissenters faced higher barriers. Thus Jews could build synagogues in Amsterdam as “Portuguese,” while native Mennonites and Catholics had to worship in secret.) These two chapters, along with the Conclusion, merit attention from all readers interested in early modern Europe and colonial America.

The five chapters that shift from the global scene to New Netherland up close will more reward specialists in that colony's history. To summarize a bit baldly: most of the authorities' problems arose from fellow Protestants, especially Dutch Lutherans and English Baptists, rather than from theologically more distant Catholics and Jews. Quakers constituted an intermediate case, taking Protestant logic so far as to seem exotic. Whatever the case, Haefeli shows that New Netherland authorities prosecuted dissenters for disobeying Dutch law, not for their religious convictions per se. Stuyvesant emerges from these pages as no sweetheart but still a man with his own integrity. Likewise, visiting Jesuit Isaac Jocques's storied characterization of New Amsterdam as a virtual Babel, and the canonical Flushing Remonstrance from Quakers on Long Island, are both demythologized by being put back in their original, very political, contexts.

If it was not the Dutch, then who did forge the template for religious pluralism that came out of the Middle Colonies? Haefeli credits the Quakers in particular, England's Restoration monarchs in general, and an accidental convergence of circumstances most of all. There was no innate Dutch character that led to this outcome, nor an inevitable course of progress, nor an inherent superiority of Right Ideas. Rather the accidents of wars and treaties amid sustained imperial competition for North America allowed a by-product of peculiar Stuart stratagems to plant what no one in command, and few out of power, had intended – a garden of religious toleration. Nor was there anything in American character, circumstances, or intentions that necessitated this outcome; the demand was all European-driven.

What, then, was the Dutch contribution to this configuration? Haefeli wryly argues that it was to hold the Middle Colonies open from New English and Chesapeake occupancy until another type of English regime could be installed there. The Dutch system of religious liberty in itself comes off as a Reformed Protestant scheme aimed to advance that church's cause in a pluralistic world. It was kinder than some in not persecuting for belief; narrower than others in its constraints on public behavior; characteristically Dutch in making case-by-case local accommodations without surrendering anything on principle; and a minor, though detectable, strain that went into the ultimate American system of religious liberty.