Colonial North America in the 17th Century – A Panel Discussion

This is a hybrid event. The in-person reception will begin at 4:30 PM. Please visit here to register.

This panel will explore 17th century North America and the empires present on the continent. Nathan Braccio's chapter investigates the ways in which English culture and law in 17th-century New England not only sanctioned the killing of Algonquians, but encouraged it. The chapter traces English records of “murders” involving Algonquians and English. Colonial courts doled out harsh punishments to English who killed other colonists, but often allowed those who killed Algonquians to escape with simple fines. Simultaneously, fear of potential Algonquian “murderers” preoccupied colonial imagination and fueled both official and unofficial English violence. Elizabeth Hines's paper explores imperial entanglement in seventeenth-century North America. After the Dutch colony of New Netherland and the New England Confederation settled their territorial boundaries with the Treaty of Hartford in 1650, why did the Netherlands wait six years to ratify the treaty? The paper argues that they did so in order to annex the neighboring Swedish colony of New Sweden. The broader imperial context of the decision to ratify the treaty, and the history of Dutch investment in the Swedish empire, shows that we need to study the Dutch, English, and Swedish empires together to understand early American history.