NEWCOMERS

Defying labels in the New World.

Mikhail, author of the Ottoman Empire history God’s Shadow (2020), offers a nuanced portrait of a notable couple whose boundary-breaking lives in 17th-century New York elude pat categorization. Amid encounters with the legal system and gossip about their pasts, Grietje and Anthony Jansen van Salee transformed themselves from outsiders to “landed elite.” Long-term residents and “defenders” of Dutch colonial holdings, they should be counted among “the true founders of New York,” the Yale University historian writes in a book that dives deep into 400-year-old documents. A widower in her 20s, Grietje was a maid and sex worker. Anthony might have been born in Spain and enslaved by a Dutch sailor who took him captive in North Africa. Thus was he “perceived” as Muslim; though almost certainly false, this led to malicious accusations informed by widespread anti-Islam bigotry. They joined “countless socially and economically precarious couples” who left Amsterdam in search of “upward mobility” in North America. To neighbors with whom they argued, Grietje and Anthony were viewed through prevailing stereotypes of “Islam and female sexuality: infidel and whore.” After Dutch officials eventually banished them from Manhattan, the couple was among the first nonindigenous settlers on Long Island. There, as they “helped to capture Native land,” Anthony became the contractual “master” of men forced into “bondage akin to indentured servitude.” Mikhail is duly transparent about his findings, allowing that some facts are forever unknowable. He divides the action into four sections, which, along with maps, illustrations, and a couple of unremarkable contemporary photos, bulks up a short book. His stalwart archival work points out the shortcomings of histories that overlook “the hustlers, sexually open, racially ambiguous, and otherwise in-between figures.”

Mining centuries-old records for fascinating details about diversity and subjugation in Dutch colonial North America.