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in our colonial-era Atlantic history -P. A. Bruce's pioneering work was pathbreaking in its day and is now seriously outdated - he did good work with the sources available a century ago, but we now have access to so many more primary sources and modern scholarship that relying on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." To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html