Abstract
The profitability of buying beaver pelts in North America and selling them in Amsterdam provided the economic incentive which, along with geopolitical considerations, motivated the Dutch to establish New Netherlands as a permanent settlement in the Hudson River Valley with its capital, New Amsterdam, on Manhattan Island. This chapter, therefore, centers on the North American market for beaver pelts: the identities and situations of the sellers and buyers, the sources of demand and supply, the venues for and structures of transactions, the ancillary activities that developed to sustain the trade, its profitability, and that it was the settlement’s principal economic raison d’etre.
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Notes
- 1.
Unless otherwise indicated the source of the material in this discussion of Iroquoian culture is (Richter, 1992).
- 2.
O’Rourke & Williamson (1999) highlight the concentration of early modern intercontinental trading growth in spices, tobacco, and sugar and the relationship between seventeenth-century trade expansion and the growth of “surplus income.” Unfortunately, they do not discuss the market for furs and fur products, which provides a counterexample to some of the points they made.
- 3.
There are of course no studies of beaver populations around the lower Hudson Valley in the seventeenth century. Evidence for a tendency toward depletion comes from the policies adopted by the Hudson Bay Company, a monopsonist in the market for pelts in Northern Ontario and Quebec, starting in the eighteenth century, that capped the number of furs purchased in certain places, in certain years, or at certain times of year (McManus, 1972, pp. 45–46). Exactly when beaver became scarce in the Iroquois territory is subject to dispute (Norton, 1974).
- 4.
Russell Shorto expresses the cause and effect view as follows: “In 1640 the company gave up its monopoly on trade in the region, which had kept the place from developing in any areas except piracy and smuggling…The effect was electric. Small scale entrepreneurs in Amsterdam who were willing to brave the hazards of the ocean voyage now had, in Manhattan, a hub to exploit – a base around which the circle of Atlantic trade could turn” (Shorto, 2004).
- 5.
The main exceptions to this generalization were the English settlers on eastern Long Island, whose economic lives were more closely integrated into New England’s markets than New Netherland’s.
- 6.
His name was Reinholt Reinholts.
- 7.
Since the seventeenth century guilder was stably pegged at 10.4 grams of silver, at year-end 2013 prices 60 1626 guilders would be worth about $430 (Kugler, 2013).
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Gurwitz, A. (2019). Beverstad. In: Atlantic Metropolis. Palgrave Studies in American Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13352-8_1
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