The seventeenth-century Dutch colony of New Netherland existed less than five decades before English conquest turned it into New York. That was enough time, as the modern story goes, for it to make religious pluralism an enduring part of the American future. Evan Haefeli would like us to think again about that popular narrative. In this judicious, and deeply researched book, he shows us how we might do just that.

Haefeli's approach is to consider New Netherland against the broader vista of Dutch church-state policy across the globe, examining the phenomenon he calls “Dutch tolerance.” The result is an exemplary work of imperial history, rich in original Dutch and English sources and attentive to places literally oceans apart, from Amsterdam to Batavia (now Jakarta), northern Brazil, and Manhattan island. During New Netherland's existence, the United Provinces were a hub of international commerce and a hotbed of philosophical and political innovation. They were also a renowned safe harbor for religious dissidents. The Dutch Reformed church was the one recognized “public” church, but it lacked the power to compel conformity with its doctrines or practices. Dutch political and trade authorities adopted a flexible, winking approach to religious differences known as “connivance,” which permitted limited gatherings by non-Dutch Reformed groups and refrained from prying into matters of conscience. In other words, they supported the Dutch Reformed church, but their hearts were not always in it.

Like the United Provinces, New Netherland possessed relatively porous boundaries across which beleaguered migrants traveled in search of both safety and opportunities. The capital, New Amsterdam (later New York City) was more densely Calvinist than old Amsterdam and more centralized too. Its intrepid Director for nearly two decades prior to English conquest was the ever commanding son of a minister, Peter Stuyvesant. Stuyvesant had little use for the soft soap policy of connivance. However, in keeping with broader Dutch practice, local magistrates practiced it anyway. As a result of such accommodations, New Netherland harbored dissenters even as it relegated them to second-class status, generally treating them as wayward believers and potential converts rather than fellow citizens equally entitled to exercise their faith.

The line that the Dutch were generally reluctant to cross—and the New Netherland Dutch especially—was the granting of what was otherwise termed “the free exercise of religion.” Only the Dutch Reformed Church possessed that coveted right. Given the subtleties of Dutch tolerance, formal petitioning by aggrieved minorities was pointless. There was no formalized, principled standard upon which a claim could be brought. New Netherland's Lutherans learned this the hard way in 1654 when they were denied the right to public worship in New Amsterdam after making appeal to authorities in the Netherlands. Of course, the mere toleration of individuals and families in their nonconforming beliefs was more than could be said of most of contemporary Europe and colonial America. According to Haefeli, these modest protections for religious diversity were sufficient to preserve the colony's religious diversity until their more accommodating English conquerors began allowing certain nonconformist groups (including the Dutch Reformed) to build places of worship and hold public services.

Haefeli is generally diffident in his claims about the history of toleration and acknowledges his debt to scholars such as Willem Frijhoff, Benjamin Kaplan, Joyce Goodfriend, and Jeremy Bangs. He generally defers to their conclusions on the tentative, ad-hoc character of early modern toleration, and the tendency for tolerant practice to get ahead of tolerant ideas. At other moments, however, he is resolutely contrarian, anchoring flights of interpretive fancy in the cold, sobering ground of documentary fact and historical particularity. For examples, Haefeli downplays the Jesuit Isaac Jogues's oft-cited description of the colony as a babel of Catholics, Puritans, Lutherans, Baptists, and Mennonites. And though he devotes a chapter to the famous Flushing Remonstrance (1657), which made broader claims for liberty of conscience on behalf of the beleaguered Quakers, Haefeli soberly adjusts the story to the realities of this specific time and place, severely qualifying its contemporary significance while also opening up the document's meaning as an historical artifact.

Haefeli is an unequivocal splitter, and an exemplary one at that, always inclined to narrow and qualify claims than to assert their transcendent applicability. The historical worlds he so artfully constructs are contingent ones, subject to the whims of imperial warfare and political exigencies. Yet there are general points encased within this study of the Dutch empire—allowances for private worship and judgment, the denial of public recognition to dissenting groups, and so forth—that were characteristic of other European and colonial regimes as well. Moreover, when Haefeli invokes “Dutch tolerance,” (5) what he describes is something others call Dutch church-state policy. Given that Dutch tolerance was not always tolerant in our sense of the term, some alternative terminology might have been both more illuminating and less impervious to engagement. The methodological limitations of a dogged adherence to contingency and particularity are apparent in the book's conclusion when Haefeli is compelled to reconcile his careful and circumscribed claims with the bolder title (“the Dutch Origins of American religious liberty”). This leaves him in the somewhat awkward position of working the colonies into a broader narrative that the rest of the work steadfastly resists. That does not diminish the value of the book so much as its title. But it does underline the need to sometimes balance the contingent and the particular with consideration for the enduring and the general.

Despite these minor weaknesses, Haefeli's book will stand for many years as the defining work in the field, both a tribute to meticulous research and to the discerning mind brought to bear on its subject. This is a major scholarly accomplishment.