Possessing Albany 1630 1710

This book reconstructs the manifold ways by which Dutch people of seventeenth-century New York took hold of the New World. As the author 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.