Courted and Highly Prized: Dutch Traders in the 17th Century Chesapeake

This presentation examines the role that Dutch trader played in the economic and cultural development of the Chesapeake during the seventeenth century. Relying on court records, mercantile accounts, correspondence, and material culture evidence Professor of History and author, Dr. Koot reconstructs the mercantile and kinship networks that tied Dutch traders in New Netherland (New York) to English planters as well as the rich artifactual residue of this trade. When England’s Restoration government ordered a clamp down on Anglo-Dutch smuggling in the Chesapeake in the 1660s Dutch and English traders in Maryland were at the forefront of blazing a new smuggling route in the Upper Chesapeake that avoided increased English patrols. Not coincidently, this route connected the Dutch city of New Amstel on the Delaware River to the western coast of the Chesapeake Bay in northern Maryland. These individuals, including the governors of Maryland and Virginia (Charles Calvert and William Berkeley), worked throughout the 1660s to maintain the Chesapeake’s connections to Dutch New Netherland. Every day Virginians and Marylanders ate from Dutch stoneware, smoked tobacco from Dutch pipes, and stored their possessions in Dutch kasen. In short, New Netherland traders and residents of the English Chesapeake belonged to the same community in the seventeenth century.