ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a group of individuals who left their homeland and, consequently, had to negotiate multiple political and cultural boundaries to achieve success, namely, Scots who settled or were active in Rotterdam between 1630 and 1660. It demonstrates that the institutional reach of European Scots enclaves had an important offshore impact. The chapter underscores the capacity of the port city or town to organize the Atlantic World. It covers the Caribbean seems to have been the more open of the two regions for Scots from Rotterdam, with 'ownership' of the islands of St Kitts and Martinique remaining in flux through the middle decades of the seventeenth century. Like the Anglo-Dutch-Scots network that requested the right to settle in Virginia in 1655, the activities described are not the stuff of the great colonial dramas more typical of planting and pioneering.
