ew Netherlands--sandwiched between British New England and the British middle colonies--was disputed, occupied, and partitioned, finally formally passing to England in 1664 by a treaty known as the Articles of Capitulation, the name of the territory changing to New York.
The fact that slavery in the colonies of the New World developed as byproduct of American conditions on the ground is well-documented. As Becker says, citing the vast acreage of American plantations, "For clearing and planting so large an area much unskilled labor was essential," and the laboring class of colonists, though undoubtedly servile and numerous relative to the landowning planters, was an expense that made profitable enterprise for the planters problematic. Perhaps less well understood is evidence that the structure of slavery as an institution varied among colonies of different European origins and that the historical record of where the European provenance of slavery lies appears ambiguous in some respects. Both Stampp and Becker cite British records in Virginia noting that "a Dutch man of war[re] with 20 negars" arrived in 1619, but Becker's view is that the ship that brought African slavery to the English colonies "was probably English." What is not ambiguous is that there was a culture of servitude in the New World almost from the beginning of colonization activity; even before 1619, white indentured servants, some voluntary immigrants and some indentured because of debt, were a routine fixture of colonial life in all of the colonies. The arrival of African slaves in America had the effect of creating structures of institutional behavior that appear to have rationalized the practice on other than instrumental grounds. In any case, African slaves were imported to New York and Virginia alike during the colonial period, and both Dutch and English judicial and legislative actions had an impact on the experience of Africans, whether slave or free, in Ne...