Mercantalism

The Spanish, the Dutch, the French, and the English all practiced mercantilism. A term meaning that the world’s wealth was finite and that only one nation could grow rich if another one failed. A nation had to extract more gold from a foreign land and export as little as possible to other nations. But there were significant differences that existed in the colonies established in the New World by the Spanish, the Dutch, the …

…permanent trading posts which were established on the Hudson, Delaware and Connecticut Rivers. The Dutch West India Company established those posts and encouraged and welcomed all kinds of people for example, Germans, the Swedish and Finland, to go to the colony to settle, which in part made this colony very ethnically diverse. Unlike the British or Spanish colonies where the majority of the population was white, the colony of New Amsterdam was small but diverse.