Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [47]
Stuyvesant did address one of the greatest concerns of the bakers, and of everyone else in the colony: the steady inflation of wampum, New Netherland’s principal currency. Too much of it, Stuyvesant observed, wasn’t the genuine article—“unpierced and only half-finished, made of stone, bone, glas, shells, horn, nay even of wood, and broken.” As always, bad money drove out the good, and people were complaining that “they cannot go to market and buy any commodities, not even a little white bread or a mug of beer, from the traders, bakers and tapsters.” At the same time, the quantity of wampum in circulation was rising sharply. The New England colonies had recently demonetized wampum, started to coin their own money, and begun to dump huge quantities of wampum, good and bad, on their Dutch neighbors. Wages and prices in New Amsterdam soared, and it was getting hard for anyone to make a living in the fur trade.
Stuyvesant responded by ordering that all wampum used as money must henceforth be strung (“upon a wire, as hitherto it has usually been done”) and that its value would be fixed at the rate of six white or three black beads per stiver for high-quality “merchantable” or “trade” wampum and eight white or four black beads per stiver for inferior wampum. Shopkeepers and tradesmen who refused to accept the poorer grade, if properly strung, faced stiff fines. Stuyvesant also pleaded with the company to ship over enough hard coinage to serve the colony’s needs or let it mint coins of its own, as the English had done. Neither he nor the company considered demonetizing wampum, however, and it remained legal tender.
But Stuyvesant’s most far-reaching suggestion for New Amsterdam’s economic revitalization came in response to events unfolding on the international scene. In 1648 the Dutch finally won their long struggle for independence—a boon for the nation’s private merchants but a disaster for the West India Company, which had always depended on war with Spain to justify its existence and generate income. Soon after Stuyvesant arrived in New Amsterdam, the company’s prospects looked grimmer than ever. By 1649 it couldn’t afford to launch a single ship for the defense of Brazil, and the price of its shares on the Amsterdam Exchange had sunk to an all-time low.
As Brazil slipped from its grasp, the company instigated a momentous revolution in the Atlantic slave trade. During the 1630s and 1640s it had imported nearly thirty thousand slaves from Africa to work the Brazilian sugar plantations. The increasing precariousness of those markets prompted the company to direct its attention elsewhere—above all to the British and French West Indies, where white indentured servants had been producing tobacco on myriad small holdings. On one island after another, company agents as well as independent Dutch merchants not only convinced the planters to adopt slave labor but loaned them money and equipment to make the switch to sugar, several times more profitable than tobacco. By the early 1650s sugar was well on its way to becoming the principal crop of the Caribbean, large plantations were emerging as the basic unit of production, and the company was funneling tens of thousands of African slaves every year into the region. (On Barbados, richest of the new sugar colonies, the black population soared from a few thousand to better than thirty-two thousand by the 1670s.) Dutch slavers had even started probing