War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World

"The Dutch Moment" demonstrates how the Dutch built and eventually lost an Atlantic empire, one stretching from their homeland in the United Provinces to the Hudson River, from Brazil and the Caribbean to Africa's Gold Coast. Whether as settlers or soldiers, many participants in Dutch colonisation came from other parts of Europe or the New World. Nor could the Dutch have achieved military supremacy without also carefully cul...

Wim Klooster and Gert Oostindie present a fresh look at the Dutch Atlantic in the period following the imperial moment of the seventeenth century. This epoch (1680–1815), the authors argue, marked a distinct and significant era in which Dutch military power declined and Dutch colonies began to chart a more autonomous path.

The loss of Brazil and New Netherland were twin blows to Dutch imperial pretensions. Yet the Dutch Atlantic hardly faded into insignificance. Instead, the influence of th...

The Jewish Orphanage in Leiden was the last one of eight such care homes to open its doors in the Netherlands before the Second World War. After spending almost 39 years in an old and utterly inadequate building in Leiden's city centre, the inauguration in 1929 of a brand-new building, shown on the front cover, was the start of a remarkably productive and prosperous period.

The building still stands there, proudly but sadly, to this day: the relatively happy period lasted less than fourteen y...