Christian Koot's Empire at the Periphery, with other recent studies by Daniel Richter and Owen Stanwood, makes the case for the relatively under-scrutinized late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as the setting for fundamental and far-reaching imperial reform. Opening with engravings of prosperous port scenes in turn-of-the-eighteenth-century New York and Barbados, he proposes that the organized and profitable imperial trade depicted implies a central direction and order that belies the reality of cross-cultural competition and collaboration. In fact these and other colonial ports were transnational communities originating in large part in the earlier Dutch trade, which provided the foundation for later English imperial hegemony. The later and integrated English empire thus depended on colonists’ giving up commitments to earlier interimperial connections and embracing the regulated trade exclusivity for which the Navigation Acts had aimed since the 1650s. In this sense, and as others have commented, the first English empire was not so much made as taken – from the Dutch. And early Anglo-Dutch colonial traders and their local choices have as much to do with this process as did centrally conceived and executed imperial designs.

The book comprises six chapters presented in three parts. Part One, “Beginnings, 1620–1659,” traces the interimperial foundations to Anglo-Dutch trade in the Caribbean and New Amsterdam. It shows how earlier settlers in precarious circumstances shared common enemies in the Spanish, pirates and, occasionally, Native Americans. In the interests of survival and trade they tended not to discriminate by ethnicity or nationality. The 1652 falling out between England and the Dutch Republic, following the latter's rejection of Cromwell's plan for union, threatened to disrupt the pattern of Anglo-Dutch collaboration and competition on both sides of the Atlantic. When the English looked more closely at their American colonies they found it was Dutch shippers who catered to the needs of English planters and thereby dominated the sugar and tobacco trades. However, the choices of these early and still fragile colonial economies depended on settler preferences rather than on imperial mandates, and for the time being there was not much the metropolitan authorities could do. Offering an admirable re-creation of the ties and complexities of mid-century trade, Koot shows how Barbadian planters shifted from tobacco, to cotton, and then to sugar, helped at each stage by the quality and price of Dutch supplies. When the Barbadians rebelled in support of Charles I, the Commonwealth enacted new regulations to pull them into line. But the islanders defended and maintained their ties to Dutch suppliers. In New Netherland the end of the West India Company's trade monopoly in 1639 nurtured independent traders and Dutch ventures in Virginia and the tobacco trade. The symbiotic relationship is explored especially well in the case study of Augustine Herrman, who is also the subject of Koot's recent and excellent William and Mary Quarterly piece concerning mapmaking and mid-century territorial confusions.Footnote ¹ In the monograph we learn more about Herrman: how he came to New Amsterdam in June 1644 as a representative of the Dutch trading firm Peter Gabry & Sons and used his Amsterdam connections to become a prolific trader, supplying salt, horses, slaves, manufactured goods and lumber to Virginian customers in exchange for tobacco, and ultimately acquiring land in the English colony.

Part Two opens with a chapter considering interimperial trade amidst war and crisis. English merchants and statesmen became increasingly frustrated by foreign incursions into their colonial trade. But wartime conditions imperilled West Indian communities and encouraged them to stick close to tried and trusted Dutch and French providers. If anything, the Restoration surge in colonial management and regulation motivated West Indian planters to insist on flexibility in their choice of trading partners. Planters resented the advantages enjoyed by price-gouging English merchants. And as colonists who had settled with self-proclaimed, and actual, hazards and costs they asserted their authority to judge what was right for them and their trade over a distant Parliament in which they were unrepresented. In this way economic concerns contributed to emerging political ideologies, justifying resistance to trade restrictions and continued foreign commerce in the name of English rights. This emerging view added a colonial spin to contemporary metropolitan debates concerning the state, empire and economic freedom and regulation.

In the early 1660s the Council for Plantations also received more complaints regarding Dutch intrusion into the Virginia tobacco trade and thereafter planned the invasion of New Netherland. The conquest was straightforward; the settlement a rather more lengthy affair. The simple truth was that the English needed the Dutch trade to make the colony viable. Thus early English governors made exceptions for Dutch vessels coming from Amsterdam, encouraged local Dutch merchant trade with the West Indies, and even favoured Dutch traders over their English competitors, or so the latter claimed. The Dutch played along by using English vessels and crews, or invoking their newfound status as English denizens. Where regulations were effective, for example against Atlantic traders based in Amsterdam, it only served to encourage the rise of colonial merchants such as those in New York. The 1664 conquest had interrupted, but clearly not cut out, interimperial trade. London officials rarely understood the particular circumstances that prompted this, to their mind, illegal commerce. For imperial officers interimperial trade was evidence of self-interest driving disloyalty. For the colonists, living through conflicts and natural disasters, trade was as much about survival as about profit.

Chapters 4 and 5 consider local adaptations to the post-Restoration Anglo-Dutch trade in the West Indies and New York. The Dutch continued to adopt canny strategies to survive but defeat by the English and (as James Pritchard has argued) the French in the 1670s severely weakened their position in the Caribbean.Footnote ² Dutch decline meant that by the final decade of the seventeenth century the Navigation Acts had started to bite, at least in the high-value sugar and tobacco trades. However, illicit supply voyages continued to occupy the many middling coastal traders and to stimulate debates concerning economic freedom and regulation. In the end it was macroeconomic changes in the slave trade and the marketing of sugar that forced further change: planters using credit offered by the Royal Africa Company committed their crops ahead of harvests and came to see benefits rather than restrictions in the tools of empire; Dutch sugar traders purchased their supplies on the London market rather than risking voyages to the Caribbean. In New York the city and colony's distinctive ethnic makeup continued Dutch trade long after the conquest. Eventually English merchants would be able to meet the colonists' demands for household and trade goods at competitive prices. But in the 1670s and 1680s the province continued to rely on Anglo-Dutch trade. Governors dispatched with orders to curtail the Dutch trade realized that meeting local needs and expectations required reinterpreting these orders. In this way, aspiring merchant families – the Van Cortlandts, Schuylers, Philipses, Livingstons and DeLanceys – confirmed their status as a provincial economic and social elite.

Part Three, the final and shortest section of the book, with one chapter, considers “maturity” and the evolution of intra-colonial networks in the 1689–1713 period. Although a lively and illicit trade between the Caribbean English colonies would continue throughout the eighteenth century, Koot argues that twenty-four years of war from 1689 to 1713 caused sufficient disruption for a new pattern to emerge. The Caribbean colonies increasingly looked to the empire and each other, rather than to foreign traders, and New York turned to its hinterland and domestic economy to compensate for depressed merchant trade. In both contexts colonists modified older interimperial networks and trading techniques, as imperial attention shifted from the Dutch to the French, establishing the grounds for English imperial integration in the eighteenth century. Koot has worked with difficult materials and produced an excellent study of merchant trade, looking beyond the traditional perspective of the port towns and capturing the importance of Atlantic ties. More critically, one would have liked to know more about the politics and ideology of this interimperial trade. One of the strongest themes is the way in which the colonists' assertion of trade interests develops into an imperial allegiance that sees no contradiction in trading with the enemy, and this continues throughout the eighteenth century.Footnote ³ It would have been interesting to hear more about the character and scope of these arguments and how they connected to other emerging and contemporaneous discourses of colonial autonomy that are attracting increasing scholarly attention.Footnote ⁴