“Conversing with Each Other, Among Other Things of the Sale of Houses”:  Buying and Selling Real Property in New Amsterdam
Adriana E. van Zwieten, Ph.D.

As I did in New York City last October, I want to thank the Hendricks Manuscript Award Committee for selecting my dissertation for the 2001 award. I would also like to express my sincere appreciation to Dr. Andrew Hendricks for establishing this prize to advance the study of New Netherland history.

It is an honor to have this opportunity to share some of my research, which explores the institution of real property in seventeenth-century New Amsterdam. About a year ago, when I defended my dissertation at Temple University, one of the examining committee members was in the midst of buying a house near Philadelphia. She remarked on the similarities between her modern real estate transaction and the much older conveyances found in my research. The committee agreed that many procedures used to transfer property in the Dutch colony bore striking resemblance to modern practices.

Sitting there that day, discussing real estate in New Amsterdam, I was reminded of a 1663 court case involving Andries Jochemsen, who had been accused of unlawful tapping—or serving liquor—when, in fact, he and his friends had merely “sat together conversing with each other, among other things of the sale of houses.” Unfortunately, the details of their conversation were not recorded, but today I would like to share with you a discussion of the Dutch traditions of land ownership and transfer that helped shape the institution of real property in New Netherland.

“Property,” wrote the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, “means that something is called ours.” In this deceptively simple definition, he included immovable property—houses, land, and all things “attached to the earth or fixed to houses.” Ownership, according to Grotius, was acquired by the consent of the former owner, either as a gift or inheritance, or more commonly, by a direct contract of sale or exchange.

It is this latter form—transfer by sale or exchange—that I will focus on today.

Read more of the article here