During the seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic was a great trade rival of Great Britain throughout the globe, including within the Atlantic world. Historians of Britain hoping to learn more about the seventeenth-century Dutch Atlantic and its impact on the region's history now have an indispensable overview of the topic, Wim Klooster's The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World.

In recent years, there has been a wide variety of excellent publications on specific aspects of the Dutch Atlantic, among them studies by Michiel van Groesen, Jaap Jacobs, Christian J. Koot, Donna Merwick, and Mark Meuwese. What has been lacking, however, is a monograph that ties all this scholarship together by examining the Dutch Atlantic as a whole. In The Dutch Moment, Klooster skillfully fills this gap.

Klooster's book focuses on the 1620s to 1670s, a period that saw a shift from Iberian dominance of the Atlantic world to a more widespread European participation in it. Klooster ably argues that the Dutch played a key role in this “Great Transformation” (1), in the process becoming intimately involved in the other European Atlantic empires and having a profound impact on various groups in the Americas and Africa. Unlike scholars such as Merwick, who argue that the Dutch participated in the Atlantic world primarily as traders, Klooster contends that the Dutch also had a “Grand Design” to establish an empire there. This attempt ultimately failed, but the conflict it engendered with the Spanish, Portuguese, and English in particular made this period in the Atlantic's history much more violent than is often recognized.

In the first section Klooster details the creation, rise, and eventual collapse of the West India Company. Chapter 1 covers Dutch trade in the Atlantic during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries before the creation of the West India Company. Chapter 2 details the often-violent rise of Dutch power in the Atlantic during the years immediately following the company's founding. Indeed, the company's emphasis was more on waging war against Spain and Portugal in the Atlantic than conducting trade there. The Dutch were initially quite successful in this attempt, with victories such as Piet Heyn's capture of the Spanish treasure fleet and the conquest of large portions of Brazil. The company's Atlantic empire reached its greatest extent in 1642. Chapter 3 details the company's decline, beginning with the successful revolt against Dutch rule in Brazil. Anglo-Dutch rivalry and war further weakened the company. The original West India Company was eventually dissolved in 1674, ending Dutch dreams of an Atlantic empire.

Klooster takes a more topical approach during the second part of the book, focusing on the lives of the people living in the Dutch Atlantic and their trading activities there. Chapter 4 examines the soldiers and sailors crucial to the operation of the Dutch Atlantic. Both groups were quite diverse and faced significant violence and deprivation. While Dutchmen made up the majority of sailors in the Dutch fleet, most soldiers were foreigners, including large numbers of Englishmen. Dutch trade in the Atlantic is the focus of chapter 5. Most of this trade was with foreigners, and the Dutch became “the champions of interimperial Atlantic trade” (147). By the middle decades of the seventeenth century, much of this trade consisted of transporting slaves from Africa to the Americas. Klooster rightly argues that the Dutch dominated the transatlantic slave trade during this period, although he exaggerates when he states that historians “have failed to acknowledge” this fact (164). Chapter 7 details Dutch migration and settlement within the Atlantic. Klooster acknowledges that Dutch migration was relatively low, arguing that Dutch prosperity played an important role in keeping migration levels down. A majority of Europeans settling in Dutch colonies were actually not from the United Provinces. Chapter 8 details these “non-Dutch,” including the English, along with the Amerindians and Africans who interacted with the Dutch in the Atlantic. In the process, Klooster details how necessity led Dutch authorities to extend significant amounts of religious toleration to Catholics and Jews in their colonies. Racial views toward Africans decreased significantly as the Dutch became increasingly involved in the slave trade, and Klooster characterizes Dutch relations with Amerindians as close, complicated, and all too often marked by Dutch suspicion and violence.

In covering this “Dutch moment” in Atlantic history, Klooster provides more than just a synthesis of the existing scholarship (although he does that very well). He also incorporates a significant amount of original archival research, from Dutch, English, and Spanish repositories. Klooster's extensive research is reflected in the endnotes: there are over 130 pages of endnotes for a text of 263 pages. The sources cited in these notes reflect an encyclopedic knowledge not only of the scholarship on the Dutch Atlantic but of the Atlantic world as a whole, for they include works written in Dutch, English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. Throughout, Klooster acknowledges his debts to other historians—while succinctly skewering historical arguments he finds unsupported by the sources or based on faulty inferences. Although Klooster does not include a bibliography, he does provide a useful section “For Further Reading.”

The Dutch Moment is organized well and is mostly well written. Klooster's writing style is engaging, and he often uses interesting anecdotes and asides to add color to the text. Maps, images, and tables are used effectively throughout to support his arguments. Occasionally, however, Klooster describes a historical event or concept so quickly that it can be hard to follow his line of argument. Overly long paragraphs sometimes have the same effect. Klooster also occasionally assumes that the reader will have previous knowledge of an event, person, or topic, and, as a result, glosses over it too hastily.

Overall, however, The Dutch Moment is an excellent work and necessary reading for anyone wanting to understand the Dutch Atlantic and developments in the Atlantic world as a whole during the seventeenth century.