Douglas Catterall. Community without Borders: Scots Migrants and the Changing Face of Power in the Dutch Republic, C. 1600-1700.

(Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, 86.) Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2002. xv + 411 pp. index, map. bibl. $126. ISBN: 90-04-12077-7.

Douglas Catterall takes what would seem to be a rather narrow topic, Scots migration to Rotterdam in the seventeenth century, to press a very broad and important point: migrant communities were integral to the formation of early modern societies. He demonstrates quite clearly that the small Scots community (only about two percent of a population of 51,000 in the 1690s) managed to put itself at the center of public discourse and social life in Rotterdam. More importantly for those whose interests range beyond Rotterdam, this book is a model for examining the dialectic between enduring migrant communities and their host environments.

The first four chapters offer an overview of Scots migration to Rotterdam and the Dutch Republic as well as an analysis of the economic strategies, social connections, and cultural adaptations that made survival possible. According to Catterall, both male and female migrants were opportunistic in manipulating local institutions for their own purposes, associative in developing networks of social capital, and combative in defending their honor from slights or insults. The Scots migrant community was not a sequestered inward-looking subculture, but Scots participated in most all aspects of Rotterdam society and contributed to its evolution. Drawing from notarial records, consistory notes, and a variety of legal sources, Catterall provides in these four chapters a useful reconstruction of the migrant world from the journey across the north Atlantic to eventual integration into Dutch society.

The last three substantive chapters are more specifically thematic, arguing that Scots were active agents in the development of a "culture of mediation" that was itself central to the emergence of a public sphere in Rotterdam. Catterall claims that Rotterdam underwent a "quiet juridical revolution" from a legal culture that regarded conflict as either a crime or a sin to one in which conflict was an opportunity for mediation. To support this view, Catterall draws attention to the function of minor courts of arbitration, especially the vredemakerskamer (peacemakers' chamber) and the Waterrecht (Marine Court). In addition, he notes that the number of cases in the officer's roll (minor criminal cases) declined dramatically in the late 1670s. Unfortunately, there are no extant records for the vredemakerskamer or the Waterrecht, and without a quantitative survey of criminal cases over the course of the seventeenth century, it is very difficult to substantiate that a major transition in the approach to conflict took place. The primary forum for Scots to resolve disputes was before the session of the Scots Reformed Church. Catterall argues that Scots willingly brought grievances to the session in order to air their points of view until around 1665 when these cases largely disappear from session record books. For Catterall, the decline in cases is indicative of the juridical shift in Rotterdam. While this interpretation is plausible, historians have interpreted similar patterns in discipline cases throughout Holland as a shift in the Reformed Church's approach to discipline rather than a social change in the resolution of conflict.

Perhaps the most valuable section in these three chapters is Catterall's creative and nuanced treatment of the methods that local authorities used to keep the peace and defuse violence. In general, the ruling elite avoided harsh repressive tactics by approaching popular violence as a social malady to be managed rather than as an evil to be eliminated. Consequently, the Rotterdam city government managed violence by distributing policing duties to a variety of agencies and interests, by accommodating community interests, and by taking a casual attitude toward popular outbursts.

On balance, Doug Catterall has produced an important book that connects the small, daily life of an early modern mercantile city to the broader world of migration systems in the north Atlantic. Historians of early modern Europe should hope for similar studies that bring the local and the particular into a more international framework.

CHARLES H. PARKER

Saint Louis University 

St. Louis, Missouri