Through an analysis of thousands of letters, account books, lawsuits, and testaments left by two prominent merchant families from Antwerp, this dissertation investigates the strategies used by kin to maintain and refashion social structures disrupted by the Dutch Revolt, early modern capitalism, and the life-cycle of families. The marriage of Daniel van der Meulen and Hester della Faille in 1584 connected two sibling groups who were divided in their political and religious allegiances. This dissertation traces the lives of the two sibling groups from the time that they entered into marriages and began careers as merchants in the 1560s until the last years of their lives in the second decade of the seventeenth century.

In the face of multiple forces pulling the siblings apart, the Van der Meulens and Della Failles constructed an ideal of a united house centered around the tight bonds of siblings and radiating out to collateral kin. The transition of power and property from the generation of the parents to a group of siblings acted as the primary test of siblings bonds. The tensions between horizontal kin and interest in the preservation of patrimony created tension in relations among siblings. For their entire lives, the Della Faille siblings struggled to administer and divide the vast capital left by their father, Jan della Faille de Oude. The Van der Meulens proved more able to live together in harmony, constructing an image of family bonds strengthened through exile. Though often divided by religious, political, and personal divisions, the siblings perceived the bonds of kinship to be eternal.

The experience of the Van der Meulen and Della Faille siblings provides an opportunity to examine the intertwined nature of private-order solutions and institutions in early modern trade. This dissertation argues that sibling groups constituted the core of the increasingly global networks of exchange at the end of the sixteenth century. However, trust among siblings did not flourish naturally. The creation of trust and friendship between siblings depended upon hierarchical family structures fortified--but also mediated--through affection and exchanges of gifts, favors, capital, and credit.

This dissertation looks at three voluntary societies formed in London shortly after the revolution of 1688. These societies, with overlapping membership, shared a broad vision for the improvement of manners and morals throughout the burgeoning British Empire. The Society for Reformation of Manners, founded in 1691, called for the enforcement of the civil laws against prostitution, swearing, drunkenness, gambling, and other moral crimes. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, founded in 1698, established schools and distributed books--forming some of the first public lending libraries--throughout England and its colonies. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, founded in 1701, sent missionaries abroad to convert, educate and civilize the European settlers, African slaves, and American Indians.

I show that in response to the uncertainties of the post-revolutionary period and the establishment of religious toleration in 1689, religiously motivated reformers advanced new ideas about the nature of society. They looked to shared manners, habits, customs and mores--rather than shared religious beliefs and practices--as the binding agents of society. Reformers described the benefits good manners brought individuals and communities; good manners, they said, were essential to a stable, commercial, tolerant society. Thus I show that some of the most religious people in this period spoke in secular terms. As the ideas and practices of religious toleration became more firmly rooted in English society, people turned to manners as the glue that held the community--or nation--together. This is the birth of a particular strand of social thinking.

This dissertations then follows the process by which ideas of religious diversity were transformed in the context of the colonies. The societies hoped to encourage better--and more uniform--manners and habits on both sides of the Atlantic, bringing all peoples of the empire under a common cultural denominator. In doing so, they created a new imperial ideology. An explication of the writings of these reformers, then, offers new insights into the making of secular culture in the Atlantic World and the origins of the Enlightenment in England.

Abstract

In The Hague, on August 20th, 1672, the Grand Pensionary of Holland, Johan DeWitt and his brother Cornelis DeWitt were publicly killed, their bodies mutilated and hanged by the populace of the city. This dissertation argues that this massacre remains such an unique event in Dutch history, that it needs thorough investigation. Historians have focused on short-term political causes for the eruption of violence on the brothers’ fatal day. This work contributes to the existing historiography by uncovering more long-term political and social undercurrents in Dutch society. In doing so, issues that may have been overlooked previously are taken into consideration as well. Research pertaining the exposure to and acceptance of violence in the public sphere shows that, between 1650 and 1672, the municipal court of The Hague decreased the use of violent public punishment. The idea that the populace was usurping the role of judge and executioner, as some theories suggest, is therefore unlikely. Exploration of actual day-to-day crime records reveals that violent crime was not dominant in The Hague. However, migration to The Hague increased significantly between 1650 and 1672. Without a permanent solution for the large influx of people, the magistrates resolved to ban all beggars from The Hague. There was no system in place to assure the expulsion of those “criminals.” This may have put a substantial group of homeless folks on the scene on August 20, 1672. Furthermore, the threat of a French invasion in the early months of 1672 had resulted in economic disarray in Holland, while reports on a failure to defend the East of the Republic from the French must have caused fear and anxiety among Dutch people. In combination, these long-term factors show that the image of the Dutch as tolerant of “others,” - during the prosperous seventeenth-century- may have only applied to people of a wealthier status. The threat of the French invasion of 1672 for a people that had experienced several wars in combination with the lack of governmental assistance for common people, probably set the events in motion that accumulated into the most famous massacre in Dutch history.

Drawing on experimental notebooks, account books, estate inventories, and bureaucratic memoranda, this dissertation demonstrates that the investigation and manipulation of the natural world in Restoration London stretched beyond the well-known Royal Society. The Society relied on skills, labor, and unexpected expertise outside its Fellowship to shape its work, while skills valued by the Society’s Fellows were found in pre-existing industries. In addition, the experimentation, observation, and collection practices essential to the new science occurred in small shops, Royal palaces, and the streets of metropolis.

Chapter Two argues that the Society’s first home at Gresham College was an uncontrolled space, neither public nor private, through which many Londoners moved. While some servants, craftspeople, and experts were invited in to contribute skill or labor, the experience and knowledge outsiders unexpectedly brought into the Society, the College, or London itself also influenced the questions investigated by the Society.

Chapter Three is a detailed examination of apothecary John Conyers’s years-long efforts to disprove the theory of air pressure by observing changes in atmospheric moisture. Conyers’s commitment to the explanatory power of Galenic humoral theory and aspects of Aristotelian physics, while simultaneously embracing observation, experiment, and basic mechanism, demonstrate that the ideas of the new science were accepted in piecemeal amalgamation with older theories.

Chapter Four reconstructs Conyers’s collections of curiosities, antiquities, and naturalia and argues that the formation of such small-scale collections involved people and locations across the social spectrum. In Restoration London, collecting objects of curiosity, antiquity, or natural history intersected seamlessly with existing local commercial routines and the chance discoveries unearthed in a city constantly under construction.

Chapter Five examines the importance of practical natural knowledge for the Restoration Royal Mint. The production of dependable English coinage relied on mathematical, chymical, and technological skills, but the work of the Royal Mint did not attract attention from devotees of the new science. Chymically minded Fellows of the Royal Society simultaneously spoke of embracing learning from those with manual experience, and dismissed the skills practical metalworkers had to offer, obscuring the similarities between laboratories of the virtuosi and workshops at the Mint.

The dramatic arrival of horses to the American continents on Columbus's second voyage in 1493 also introduced a historical set of practices, ideals, and institutional hierarchies from the Iberian Peninsula surrounding the horse and rider. Using new archival material from more than a dozen national and municipal archives in Spain, Mexico and Peru, I demonstrate how the management of horse populations affected the social order maintained by municipal, regional, and vice-regal governments, and the negotiated limits of centralized power in the developing early modern Spanish empire. Initially, structural elements of horse husbandry in Spain directly influenced conquest and settlement strategies in the Americas, as concern about the scarcity and supply of horses influenced acquisition of social status, access to governing positions, and legal regulations. Some environments naturally suited horse populations and others, far more challenging, required strategic intervention to support Spanish military and economic interests. Subsequently, the rapid growth of equine livestock under colonial rule shaped local indigenous adoption of horses, as well as newly developing typologies to categorize horses. Under constraints of local environment and practices of animal husbandry, governing strategies illustrated an increasing focus on regulating the physical type of the horse well into the sixteenth century. In turn, experience in Spanish America influenced horse breeding in Spain during the reign of Philip II. By focusing on the practices that defined social interactions between horses and humans, this dissertation contributes a new derivation for the complex terminology of race and caste that informed the development of controlled breeding programs in early modern Spain and colonial Spanish America. The story of the horse in Spain and Spanish America reveals the special imprint of the horse on forms of governance, social hierarchies, and the reach of empire.

This dissertation examines the transatlantic entanglements between the Dutch and American Patriots during the eighteenth century. Between 1747 and 1787, the American and Dutch Patriot revolutions shared ideological origins in classical republicanism, early liberalism, and Enlightenment thought. Based on this shared political ideology, revolutionaries in both countries created similar and interconnected institutions as well as initiated reforms that hearkened back to an imaginary past of ordered liberty. In addition, the Dutch and American Patriot revolutions were contemporaneous moments in history and intimately connected in political and commercial networks. They were thereby embroiled in interconnected events that moved each revolution forward. In thought and practice, through extensive transatlantic networks, and for more than four decades, the Atlantic Patriots formed the first phase in the Age of Revolution.