New Netherland's Legacy

Robert Livingston (1654-1728) exemplifies the assimilative nature of Dutch culture in colonial New York. The son of a Scots Presbyterian minister, Livingston arrived in Albany in late 1674. The following year he became secretary to Nicholas Van Rensselaer, director of Rensselaerswijck, would marry Van Rensselaer's widow, Alida Schuyler, in 1679, and found a dynasty that would dominate Anglo-Dutch politics in the region for the next two centuries.

Bilhah Abigail Levy Franks (c. 1696-1756), daughter of German-Jewish merchant, Moses Levy, is another example of the assimilative nature of New York's Dutch culture. The Levy family moved to New York City from London, and in 1712 Abigail married successful New York Jewish merchant Jacob Franks. The Levy and Franks families became among the prominent mercantile families of colonial New York.

A Social Legacy

The rapid economic growth of cities in the Netherlands during the late Middle Ages attracted an enormous number of immigrants. As a result, ethnically diverse commercial interests dominated these cities and their overseas enterprises. The Dutch West India Company's settlement of New Netherland reflected the heterogeneous society of the Dutch Republic's largest province, Holland. As in Holland, the Company's directors allowed various nationalities to settle in discrete communities under its auspices. By the time of the English conquest, New Netherland contained ethnically diverse populations coexisting in a patchwork of communities that mirrored Holland's metropolitan culture. The tolerant yet assimilative culture that the Dutch established continues to echo in the Mid-Atlantic American states today.

In the early modern Netherlands, towns dominated the countryside, and merchant elites known as regents dominated the towns. The Dutch brought this urban tradition with them to the New World. The West India Company's grant of local governing rights to Beverwijck (Albany) in 1652 and municipal rights to New Amsterdam (New York City) in 1653, resulted in the re-creation of a familiar Old World social structure. As an individual acquired wealth through trade, the community elevated his or her social and political standing.[1] An indication of the status of merchants is in their prominence as church officers, and in their appointment as magistrates and to positions of militia commands.[2] The result was the emergence of a middle-class (burgerlijke) urban patrician class that gained social and political dominance after 1664.[3] New York's mercantile urban culture particularly flourished, albeit in Dutch fashion, following England's incorporation of New Netherland into its colonial world.

1. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Siân Reynolds, trans. (New York, 1976), 1:277-78

2. For the prominence of merchants see Beverly McAnear, "Politics in Provincial New York 1689-1761" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1935), 1:69-71; and Thomas J. Archdeacon, New York City 1664-1710 (Ithaca, 1976), 58-77; Joyce Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York, 1664-1730 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

3. For the development of oligarchies in New York see Alice P. Kenney, The Gansevoorts of Albany: Dutch Patricians in the Upper Hudson Valley (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1969), particularly the introduction.