Co-Sponsored by the Merchant’s House Museum

2024 marks 400 years since the Dutch arrived in what is now New York City, establishing the colonies of New Amsterdam and New Netherland. In honor of this historic milestone, we revisit the untold or forgotten parts of our city’s history.

Join us for a book talk with author Andrea C. Mosterman to discuss her new book, Spaces of Enslavement.

In Spaces of Enslavement, Mosterman addresses the persistent myth that the colonial Dutch system of slavery was more humane. Investigating practices of enslavement in New Netherland and then in New York, Mosterman shows that these ways of racialized spatial control held much in common with the southern plantation societies.

Mosterman describes how the movements of enslaved persons were controlled in homes and in public spaces such as workshops, courts, and churches. She addresses how enslaved people responded to regimes of control by escaping from or modifying these spaces so as to expand their activities within them. Through a close analysis of homes, churches, and public spaces, Mosterman shows that, over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the region’s Dutch communities were engaged in a daily struggle with Black New Yorkers who found ways to claim freedom and resist oppression.

Spaces of Enslavement writes a critical and overdue chapter on the place of slavery and resistance in the colony and young state of New York.

About the Author:

Andrea Mosterman is a professor of Early American History at the University of New Orleans. She completed her Ph.D. at Boston University, specializing in Atlantic and Early American History. In her work, she explores the multi-faceted dimensions of slavery, slave trade, and cross-cultural contact in the Dutch Atlantic and Early America with special emphasis on Early New York. She has published her work in, among others, the Journal of African History and Early American Studies, and she curated the digital exhibit Slavery in New Netherland for the New Netherland Institute. Her book Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York (Cornell University Press, October 2021) won the 2020 Hendricks Award for best book-length manuscript related to New Netherland and the Dutch colonial experience.