“Each and Every One Must Refrain from Adulterous Intercourse”: The Dutch West India Company and Marriage

Dutch marriage law demanded that the officials responsible for registering engagements and solemnizing marriages acquire a great deal of information about the couples that appeared before them – about, for example, prior marital status, age, and parental consent to the marriage.  It also demanded that proof of the death of a spouse be provided before a widow or widower could remarry.  The early modern Dutch world was, therefore, a place in which the regulation of marriage required extensive and concrete knowledge about the people involved, but it was also a place in which immigration to and within the Dutch Republic and emigration to the Atlantic world and Asia were making it increasingly difficult to secure the type of information demanded by these marriage laws. 

            By situating cases of bigamy, adultery, and concubinage in New Netherland within the context of this demanding marriage regulation, this paper argues that New Netherland was actually one of the most well regulated parts of the early modern Dutch world.  It also suggests that the West India Company developed sophisticated tools for inquiring about and communicating information about marital status over long distances, which upset traditional understandings of the Company as being focused on trade to the exclusion of moral concerns.  This paper uses the archives of the West India Company and the colony of New Netherland, but, by focusing on marriage and sex, areas which have received little attention from historians of the Dutch, it exposes New Netherland’s particularly orderly character.