A Valley Between Worlds: Slavery, Dispossession, and the Creation of a Settler Colonial Society in the Hudson Valley, 1674-1766

Abstract

This dissertation explores the creation of a distinctive settler colonial society in the Hudson Valley through the lens of the colonial manor. The manor was a form of property that granted rights in land and limited legal jurisdiction to a lord. In practice, manorial landownership was not absolute; rights in land were shared between landlords, tenant farmers, and in colonial New York, Indigenous communities. Slavery was central to the establishment and growth of the Hudson Valley’s manors, and enslaved people probably made up between ten and thirty percent of manor populations. Manorial property relations shaped a hierarchical and unequal rural society. The dissertation places the manor in an Atlantic context, tracing connections between the Hudson Valley and New England; Chesapeake and Caribbean slave societies; and the Netherlands, Rhine Valley, and British Isles. I show that, though unique, the Hudson Valley’s manors represented a powerful vision of colonial development, defined by large estates and landlord-tenant relationships, that resonated across the Atlantic world. Both as legal entities and as places, Hudson Valley manors were profoundly shaped by the Indigenous landscapes they overlay. Elite families depended on relationships with Native nations to establish and settle manors and on Native landscapes to define their claims to land. This helped enable small Indigenous nations like the Mohican and Wappinger to remain sovereign throughout the colonial period; they lived within but were not subject to New York. The dissertation culminates with a mass tenant uprising in 1766, spearheaded by an unlikely alliance between tenant farmers and Native people. In the 1760s, some New York landlords intensified their approach to market-oriented agriculture, replacing customary lease terms with shorter leases and money rents. Tenants turned to extra-legal action even as their Wappinger allies pursued their land rights within the imperial legal system. Together, their actions reveal the contingent and contested foundations of rural capitalism on the eve of revolution.