At the 2020 AHA Meeting in New York, a roundtable of established scholars considered the state of the field in Dutch Atlantic History. This roundtable of emerging scholars builds on those conversations by exploring the future of the field. Bringing together historians from Europe and North America, it will foster a transatlantic dialogue about the early modern Dutch Atlantic and center the latest research. Amanda Faulkner examines migration and mobility of Black people in the seventeenth-century Dutch Atlantic. She argues that African and African-descended migrants used the notarial office as a space in which to assert their personhood, create families, and shape political and social identities. Through her research of the Coymans asiento, Ramona Negrón shows how Dutch entrepreneurs, often limited by chartered companies and institutions in their home states, exploited the empires of others. Elizabeth Hines also highlights the porousness of national or imperial boundaries and forces a rethinking of how to define empires and colonial projects. Her paper shows that Dutch merchants provided financial support to both English royals and parliament during the English Civil War. BJ Lillis similarly integrates historiographies of Dutch and English empire in his examination of the manor as an influential legal and economic institution across the early modern Atlantic world. Finally, Sophie Rose traces how the regulation of mobility into, out of, and on Curaçao changed during the era of Atlantic Revolutions. In doing so, she highlights both the connections to Curaçao and the wider Atlantic world and the connections, ruptures, and continuities between the “early modern” Dutch Atlantic and that of the nineteenth century.

Taken together, these papers highlight mobility and inter-imperial connections in the early modern Dutch Atlantic. Incorporating the approaches of these scholars will provide a roadmap for future of scholarship on the Dutch Atlantic and demonstrate why the Netherlands and its empire are important for understanding the wider Atlantic World.