In late 1659, the Dutch West India Company’s Amsterdam Chamber began an “experiment” intended to bring a regularized slave trade to New Amsterdam. With Curaçao as a reliable source of enslaved Africans, the Amsterdam Chamber opened the slave trade to independent investors and merchants, following a collaborative model between a state-sponsored corporation and private investors used elsewhere in the seventeenth-century Dutch Atlantic world. A variety of commercial actors responded to the experiment, devising speculative strategies to incorporate enslaved people into their commercial portfolios. This essay tracks the strategies conceived by New Amsterdam merchants, local wic representatives, and some independent Amsterdam investors, and reveals the experiment’s uneven progression, modulated by changing regional conditions and regular adjustments and reversals by the Amsterdam Chamber. This article adds a new dimension to studies of the early North American regional slave trade, typically seen from an English perspective, by appreciating Dutch New Amsterdam’s legacy.

1659年末，荷兰西印度公司的阿姆斯特丹商会开始了一项“实验”，旨在将正规的奴隶贸易带到新阿姆斯特丹。由于库拉索岛是非洲人被奴役的可靠来源，阿姆斯特丹商会遵循了国有企业与私人投资者在十七世纪荷兰大西洋世界其他地方使用的合作模式，向独立投资者和商人开放了奴隶贸易。许多商业参与者对该实验做出了响应，他们制定了投机策略，将奴役者纳入他们的商业投资组合中。本文通过跟踪新阿姆斯特丹商人所设想的战略，当地WIC代表以及阿姆斯特丹的一些独立投资者，并揭示了该实验的不均衡进展，该变化是由不断变化的地区条件以及阿姆斯特丹商会的定期调整和逆转所调节的。本文通过欣赏荷兰新阿姆斯特丹的遗产，为北美地区早期奴隶贸易的研究增加了新的视角（通常从英语角度看）。