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From New Netherland to New York: European Geopolitics and the transformation of social and political space in colonial New York City

The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate the ways in which the core-periphery relationships of English and Dutch colonial ventures in North America were impacted by local events in New Amsterdam-New York, a Dutch colony that was lost to the English following the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1664. Increased peripheralization of New Amsterdam-New York negated centralizing efforts of the Dutch and effectively ended the potential for Dutch geopolitical power in North America. While the Atlantic World has traditionally been understood as a framework for understanding international phenomenon and global processes, this thesis suggests that it was impacted by multiple geopolitical scales simultaneously. Placing New Amsterdam-New York’s colonial history in a framework of evolving core-periphery relationships and highlighting the central role of local social, political, and spatial processes provides a foundation for understanding the outbreak of ethnic hostilities in the late 1680s. I argue that the increasing importance of the local is demonstrated by the attention given to social, political, and spatial ordinances that sought not to control “the English” or “the Dutch”, but to control the actions and actors of individual streets, wards, and districts.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:theses-1594
Date01 January 2010
CreatorsLegrid, John Allen
PublisherScholarWorks@UMass Amherst
Source SetsUniversity of Massachusetts, Amherst
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceMasters Theses 1911 - February 2014

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