Gateways to Empire: Quebec and New Amsterdam to 1664 [Hardcover]

In Gateways to Empire: Quebec and New Amsterdam to 1664, historian Daniel Weeks has provided the first comprehensive comparative study of the North-American fur-trading colonies New France and New Netherland. While neither colony profited very much, if at all, from the fur trade (though many individuals fortunes were undoubtedly made), Weeks finds that New France, which far outpaced New Netherland in this trade, grew more slowly and had greater difficulty sustaining itself. As he demonstrates in Gateways to Empire, other factors, including New Netherlands openness to religious and ethnic diversity and wider connections to the Atlantic World, allowed it to become more economically secure than its rival north of the St. Lawrence. And yet, in both cases, the principal towns of these European coloniesQuebec and New Amsterdammoved beyond their initial purposes as hubs for trade with the indigenous peoples to become gateways to European settlement. In this, New Amsterdam, by the late 1640s, was singularly successful, so that it rapidly fostered the production of new European towns in its hinterlands, organizing the landscape for settlement and also for trade within the European-dominated Atlantic-World system.Daniel Weeks is assistant research professor at the Thomas A. Edison Papers, Rutgers University.

A scholarly, original and well-informed comparison of seventeenth-century New Amsterdam with French Quebec that illuminates each settlement's distinctive features. Peter Moogk, The University of British Columbia

Daniel Weeks has provided a stimulating new comparative analysis of why New Amsterdam prospered more than Quebec as outposts for two distinctive empires. His work takes us beyond explanations that begin and end with the fur trade, and he looks more broadly at the Atlantic and regional networks that made both settlements gateway centers for the movement of people, ideas, and consumer goods as well as furs. Paul G. E. Clemens, Rutgers University