The Dutch, through the directors of the West India Company,
purchased Manhattan Island in 1625. They had come to the New World
as traders, not expecting to assume responsibility as the sovereign
possessor of a conquered New Netherland. They did not intend to
make war on the native peoples around Manhattan Island, but they
did; they did not intend to help destroy native cultures, but they
did; they intended to be overseas the tolerant, pluralistic, and
antimilitaristic people they thought themselves to be-and in so
many respects were-at home, but they were not. For the Dutch
intruders, establishing a settled presence away from the homeland
meant the destabilization of the adventurers' values and
self-regard. They found that the initially peaceful encounters with
the indigenous people soon took on the alarming overtones of an
insurgency as the influx of the Dutch led to a complete upheaval
and eventual disintegration of the social and political worlds of
the natives. How are the Dutch to be judged? Donna Merwick, in The
Shame and the Sorrow, asks this question. She points to a betrayal
both of their own values and of the native peoples. She also
directs us to the self-delusion of hegemonic control. Her work
belongs alongside the best of today's postcolonial studies in the
description of cross-cultural violence and subtle questioning of
the nature of writing its history.
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