Personal Interactions and Imperial Geographies in Early Modern Dutch Colonies

FAIN: FA-231915-16

Susanah Shaw Romney
University of Arkansas, Little Rock (Little Rock, AR 72204-1000)

A comparative study of the early modern Dutch empire in North and South America, southern Africa, and southeast Asia.
 

My book project explores how women and men staked claims to physical space in seventeenth-century Dutch colonies in the Hudson Valley, Guayana [sic], Java, and the Cape of Good Hope. In each place, indigenous, immigrant, and enslaved populations established unique patterns of residence and correspondingly distinct geographies of sovereignty. I seek to understand the relationship among people, households, and power at these sites of early colonial activity. Where and with whom people lived shaped the nature of the colonies that developed, giving personal relationships geopolitical significance. I aim to create a composite picture of early modern colonies to reveal how gender and personal relationships delineated territorial control and the advent of empire.