A few quick bullet-points about Dutch trade in early VA:

-Gates and Dale and many other early VA leaders were veterans (on the
Protestant side) of the Wars of the Low Countries that preceded the Thirty
Years War in Europe (1618-48) - Fred Fausz has written about this context
in several articles - and they figure in Darrett B. Rutman's dissertation.

-Dutch tobacco traders were all over Virginia in the early 17th century,
trading both from Europe and along the coast from New Netherlands prior to
its conquest by the English and renaming as New York. A sample of Dutch
notarial documents pertaining to the Va tobacco trade was published
several years ago in the W&M Quarterly, Dutch merchants are often found in
the county records (especially on the Eastern Shore) and there is much
more evidence out there.

-Dutch civic architecture has been cited as a design antecedent for public
buildings in Wmsbg.

-Dutch and German trade goods are plentiful in the Jamestown
archeaological findings, etc.

-London vs. Dutch tobacco trade rivalries figured in VA politics from the
1640s - many Virginians opposed the Navigation Acts of 1651 and again in
1660 because they targeted the Dutch merchants involved in the tobacco
trade.  Other Virginians like Sam Mathews and Wm Claiborne partnered with
London merchants who lobbied for the Navig. Acts - see Bremer's work on
the London Merchants published by Yale or Princeton, and my dissertation
or AHR article about the London vs Dutch alignment in Va political
factions.

-The Dutch fleet and maritime empire had rivaled the English prior to the
series of Anglo-Dutch Wars (1652-1674) and the Glorious Revolution of
1688-89. Simon Schama wrote a big illustrated book about it that warrants
attention - how do you think the Dutch middle class could afford all those
wonderfully detailed paintings?

-And then there's the Dutch East India Company . . .
   in short the Dutch play a huge and underappreciated role
   in our colonial-era Atlantic history

-P. A. Bruce's pioneering work was pathbreaking in its day and is now
seriously outdated - he did good work with the sources available a century
ago, but we now have access to so many more primary sources and modern
scholarship that relying on Bruce's scholarship would be like relying on
bloodletting to fight a fever.
-As to Bruce's two-volume Institutional History, it has been entirely
supplanted by Warren Billing's Little Parliament and other work.


Dr. Jon Kukla, Executive Vice-President
Red Hill - The Patrick Henry National Memorial
1250 Red Hill Road
Brookneal, Virginia 24528
www.redhill.org

>> On Thu, 22 Feb 2007 13:28:58 +0000, Emily Rose wrote
>>> I have recently read in a scholarly work that Dale and Gates were
>>> paid by the Dutch to promote trade in Virginia (no citation). It
>>> also said that the colonists were afraid that the Dutch were
>>> inciting the Indians. While it is well known that they were paid, I
>>> have not seen the commercial justification. Any references?
. . . .
>> There is some discussion of early Dutch trade in Phillip A. Bruce's
>> "Economic
>> History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century: An Inquiry into the
>> Material
>> Condition of the People, Based on Original and Contemporaneous Records."

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