Realm between Empires

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 the Dutch remained, as they were increasingly drawn into the imperial systems of Britain, Spain, and France. In their synthetic and comparative history, Klooster and Oostindie reveal the fragmented identity and interconnectedness of the Dutch in three Atlantic theaters: West Africa, Guiana, and the insular Caribbean. They show that the colonies and trading posts were heterogeneous in their governance, religious profiles, and ethnic compositions and were marked by creolization. Even as colonial control weakened, the imprint of Dutch political, economic, and cultural authority would mark territories around the Atlantic for decades to come.Realm between Empires is a powerful revisionist history of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world and provides a much-needed counterpoint to the more widely known British and French Atlantic histories.

Realm between Empires acts as a synthetic work that is also rich in colorful anecdotes and archival details. Both aspects will greatly benefit anyone seeking an introduction to the Dutch Atlantic literature or attempting to integrate the Dutch into their Atlantic history surveys. Though occasionally hesitant in its historiographical engagement, Realm between Empires provides a useful snapshot of where Dutch Atlantic history stands, and points to where it might need to go next., This work makes a valuable contribution to the growing literature addressing the Dutch Atlantic's interconnectedness to the other Atlantic empires, and the social and economic significance of minor, commerce-oriented island and frontier colonies in the eighteenth-century Atlantic., The authors make a convinving case that the Dutch played a much more prominent role in the Atlantic after 1680 than is commonly believed. Realm between Empires clearly demonstrates that the Dutch can no longer be ignored when examining the eighteenth-century Atlantic., Klooster and Oostindie's Realm between Empires provides an essential revision of Atlantic history that portrays the Dutch as an influential economic, social, and political force in an era of upheaval.

Wim Klooster is Professor of History at Clark University. He is author of, among other books, The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World. Gert Oostindie is Professor of Colonial and Postcolonial History at the University of Leiden and Director of the KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies.