Donna Merwick – författare

In Possessing Albany, 1630-1710, Donna Merwick reconstructs the manifold ways by which Dutch people of seventeenth century New York took hold of the New World. As Merwick reminds us, the Dutch understood themselves to be republican, urban, mobile, mercantile, and amphibious; in short, properly Dutch. She shows how the Dutch possessed the land, traded over it, surrendered it to the English, and then lived out their lives balancing a 'gaze' that the conquerors had for land against their own. The Dutch preferred to 'navigate the land', and as a consequence they settled in the New World along trade routes: navigatable rivers. The English, in contrast, who came in 1664, were concerned with land mass, with 'occupying the land'. The proprieties that lay behind all the practices involved in 'navigating' and 'occupying' the land were cosmological. That is, the smallest action taken on the land reconfirmed the deepest sense of what it meant to be 'civilized'. The conquest of 1664, then, was far more traumatic for the Dutch inhabitants than we have allowed ourselves to imagine. Merwick's study moves across the boundaries of disciplines. She tries to understand those archives as the Dutch, the insiders to the culture, would have done.

In Possessing Albany, 1630-1710, Donna Merwick reconstructs the manifold ways by which Dutch people of seventeenth century New York took hold of the New World. As Merwick reminds us, the Dutch understood themselves to be republican, urban, mobile, mercantile, and amphibious; in short, properly Dutch. She shows how the Dutch possessed the land, traded over it, surrendered it to the English, and then lived out their lives balancing a 'gaze' that the conquerors had for land against their own. The Dutch preferred to 'navigate the land', and as a consequence they settled in the New World along trade routes: navigatable rivers. The English, in contrast, who came in 1664, were concerned with land mass, with 'occupying the land'. The proprieties that lay behind all the practices involved in 'navigating' and 'occupying' the land were cosmological. That is, the smallest action taken on the land reconfirmed the deepest sense of what it meant to be 'civilized'. The conquest of 1664, then, was far more traumatic for the Dutch inhabitants than we have allowed ourselves to imagine. Merwick's study moves across the boundaries of disciplines. She tries to understand those archives as the Dutch, the insiders to the culture, would have done.

This outstanding contribution to Colonial social history is highly recommended for all undergraduate and graduate history collections.― Choice"He was the only one. He was the only man to have committed suicide in the town's seventeenth-century history." So begins Donna Merwick's fascinating tale of a Dutch notary who ended his life in his adopted community of Albany. In a major feat of historical reconstruction, she introduces us to Adriaen Janse van Ilpendam and the long-forgotten world he inhabited in Holland's North American colony. Her powerful narrative will make readers care for this quiet and studious man, an "ordinary" settler for whom the clash of empires brought tragedy.Like so many of his fellow countrymen, Janse left his Dutch homeland as a young adult to try his luck in New Netherland. After spending a few years on Manhattan Island, he moved on to the fur trading settlement today known as Albany. Merwick traces his journey to a new continent and re-creates the satisfying existence this respected burgher enjoyed with his wife in the bustling town. As a notary Janse was, in the author's words, "surrounded by stories, those he listened to and recorded, the hundreds he archived in a chest or trunk." His familiar life was turned upside down by the British conquest of the colony. Merwick recounts the changes brought about by the new rulers and imagines the despair Janse must have felt when English, a language he had never learned, replaced his native tongue in official transactions.In any military adventure, truth is alleged to be the first casualty. Merwick offers a poignant reminder that the first casualties are in fact people. As much a musing on what history obscures as what it reveals, her book is a superior work by a master practitioner of her craft.

This outstanding contribution to Colonial social history is highly recommended for all undergraduate and graduate history collections.― Choice"He was the only one. He was the only man to have committed suicide in the town's seventeenth-century history." So begins Donna Merwick's fascinating tale of a Dutch notary who ended his life in his adopted community of Albany. In a major feat of historical reconstruction, she introduces us to Adriaen Janse van Ilpendam and the long-forgotten world he inhabited in Holland's North American colony. Her powerful narrative will make readers care for this quiet and studious man, an "ordinary" settler for whom the clash of empires brought tragedy.Like so many of his fellow countrymen, Janse left his Dutch homeland as a young adult to try his luck in New Netherland. After spending a few years on Manhattan Island, he moved on to the fur trading settlement today known as Albany. Merwick traces his journey to a new continent and re-creates the satisfying existence this respected burgher enjoyed with his wife in the bustling town. As a notary Janse was, in the author's words, "surrounded by stories, those he listened to and recorded, the hundreds he archived in a chest or trunk." His familiar life was turned upside down by the British conquest of the colony. Merwick recounts the changes brought about by the new rulers and imagines the despair Janse must have felt when English, a language he had never learned, replaced his native tongue in official transactions.In any military adventure, truth is alleged to be the first casualty. Merwick offers a poignant reminder that the first casualties are in fact people. As much a musing on what history obscures as what it reveals, her book is a superior work by a master practitioner of her craft.

The Dutch, through the directors of the West India Company, purchased Manhattan Island in 1625. They had come to the New World as traders, not expecting to assume responsibility as the sovereign possessor of a conquered New Netherland. They did not intend to make war on the native peoples around Manhattan Island, but they did; they did not intend to help destroy native cultures, but they did; they intended to be overseas the tolerant, pluralistic, and antimilitaristic people they thought themselves to be-and in so many respects were-at home, but they were not.For the Dutch intruders, establishing a settled presence away from the homeland meant the destabilization of the adventurers' values and self-regard. They found that the initially peaceful encounters with the indigenous people soon took on the alarming overtones of an insurgency as the influx of the Dutch led to a complete upheaval and eventual disintegration of the social and political worlds of the natives.How are the Dutch to be judged? Donna Merwick, in The Shame and the Sorrow, asks this question. She points to a betrayal both of their own values and of the native peoples. She also directs us to the self-delusion of hegemonic control. Her work belongs alongside the best of today's postcolonial studies in the description of cross-cultural violence and subtle questioning of the nature of writing its history.