The Atlantic Manor: A Comparative Perspective on Manorialism in Anglo-Dutch New York

This paper argues that manor was an influential legal and economic institution across the early modern Atlantic world, used by colonists to claim and settle land, establish and negotiate property claims, and organize agricultural production. The manor was an ambiguous, flexible form of property holding that came bundled with limited forms of jurisdiction, within which rights in land were shared between landlords, tenants holding secure leases, and Indigenous communities. Conceived as an Atlantic institution, the manor offers new points of connection between literatures on property formation, enclosure, and rural capitalism in England and the Netherlands and settler colonialism in North America, contributing to increasingly interconnected historiographies of Dutch and English empire that trace the linkages between colonial and capitalist development.

The paper opens with a brief overview of the organization and significance of the manor in early modern England and the Netherlands and its transplantation to Ireland, the Chesapeake, and New Netherland. Imperial powers used the language of feudal tenure as a vehicle to devolve sovereignty into private hands. At the same time, colonists reproduced Europe’s manors more closely than early American historians have usually imagined, writing leases that reflected norms and practices of manorial tenure with which they were familiar in Europe. The paper then turns to colonial New York, where the manor defined a distinctive political economy. As an institution, the manor shaped social and economic relationships between Dutch and English settlers and enslaved and Indigenous communities. I show that the early development of New York’s manors depended on Dutch women’s ability to command the skilled labor of enslaved men, and that on New York’s manors—as on New France’s seigneuries—Native nations continued to use, inhabit, and govern land often considered “settled.”