Original and deeply researched, The Slow Death of Slavery in Dutch New York: A Cultural, Economic, and Demographic History, 1700–1827 (Cambridge University Press, 2025) provides a new interpretation of Dutch American slavery which challenges many of the traditional assumptions about slavery in New York.
With an emphasis on demography and economics, Michael J. Douma shows that slavery in eighteenth-century New York was mostly rural, heavily Dutch, and generally profitable through the cultivation of wheat.
Slavery in Dutch New York ultimately died a political death in the nineteenth century, while resistance from enslaved persons, and a gradual turn against slavery in society and in the courts, encouraged its destruction.
This important study is expected to reshape the historiography of slavery in the American North. It joins several recently published works in the same subject area:
A Hudson Valley Reckoning: Discovering the Forgotten History of Slaveholding in My Dutch American Family by Debra Bruno (Cornell University Press, 2024) which documents the author’s journey uncovering the forgotten history of slavery in the Hudson Valley and among her own ancestors;
Bearing Witness: Exploring the Legacy of Enslavement in Ulster County, New York (Black Dome Press, 2024), a companion piece to A Hudson Valley Reckoning;
Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York by Andrea C. Mosterman (Cornell University Press, 2021), which challenges the myth of a more humane form of Dutch slavery and explores how the enslaved resisted control in their living and working spaces; and
In Defiance: Runaways from Slavery in New York’s Hudson River Valley 1735–1831 by Susan Stessin-Cohn and Ashley Hurlburt-Biagini (Black Dome Press, 2016) which documents the stories of enslaved people who escaped bondage in the Hudson River Valley.
Read more about slavery in New York, or about New Netherland.
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