1018  BOOK REVIEWS teenth century. But James Kelly and Martyn Powell can rest happy that they have produced a handsome, well-edited book that will be one of the cornerstones of research on early Irish clubs and societies for many years to come. Peter Clark, University of Helsinki CHRISTIAN J. KOOT. Empire at the Periphery: British Colonists, Anglo-Dutch Trade, and the Development of the British Atlantic, 1621–1713. Early American Places Series. New York: New York University Press, 2011. Pp. 312. $39.00 (cloth). Joining a growing spate of authors studying trade—licit and illicit—in the Atlantic world, Christian Koot establishes the importance of Anglo-Dutch trade in the development of the English colonies, especially Barbados, the Leeward Islands, and New York. He documents what he alternately calls “interimperial” and “cross-national” trade quite well, given the sparse, scattered, and often surreptitious nature of his sources: a combination of Dutch notarial records (Amsterdam and Rotterdam), the occasional personal journal, some mer- chant accounts (especially for New York), and official court records and correspondence from the English Caribbean and New York as well as New Netherland. Koot reveals trade relationships that bound together English and Dutch merchants and colonists even as their nations fought a series of wars for control of Atlantic trade. No longer will we be able to talk about the rise of the English plantation colonies without reference to the Dutch trade that nourished them. Nor will we be able to claim the British Atlantic was solely a British creation. At the core of the book are the Navigation Acts and the dilemmas they posed for a colonial world raised on free and easy trade relationships between English colonists and Dutch traders (quite different from Asia, incidentally). However, by the eighteenth century, British col- onists (or at least the Caribbean planters unable to compete with French sugar production) had embraced the protected trade environment the acts created. Koot traces the transition by documenting the trade, the legislation against it, and efforts to both suppress the trade and circumvent the legislation across three chronological phases (1620–59, 1660–89, 1689– 1713) in the development of the British Atlantic from “Beginnings” to “Maturity.” It is a substantial achievement. Through his close-to-the-ground study of colonial trade, Koot also attempts an argument about colonists’ economic ideology. He sees in his evidence of the changing patterns of business deals a “transition in thinking” rather than simply a response to altered conditions (12). Colonists “believed” their Dutch “ties to be valuable,” and by this he means more than in terms of “quantities of goods” (13). When colonists abandoned trading with the Dutch, it was out of choice because the “market need for interimperial trade faded” (213) rather than because the anti-Dutch wars and legislation promoted by the English government rendered such trade dangerous and costly. Koot essentially argues that the Navigation Acts primarily worked because the English colonists wanted them to. As they consolidated their position within the empire, the “shift away from Dutch markets” became “acceptable” (213). The decline of Anglo-Dutch trade coincided with the rise of colonists’ acceptance of the British Empire’s trade restrictions because the colonists had “greater control of ” their trade, which now lay “in the hands of locals” and not “metropolitan policy makers” (213). Nonetheless, Koot’s primary finding could be that colonial control was not incompatible with metropolitan imperialist aims—as long as metropolitan merchants and markets met colonial needs: “Just as colonists’ desires and needs had provided the impetus for Anglo-Dutch trade” in the 1620s, by the 1720s their “new interests . . . led to its decline. Interimperial trade did not disappear, but more than ever before British colonists now belonged to a powerful, expanding, and integrated