Chapter One ends with Hodges asking whether or not the English had captured a "slave society" with their 1664 conquest of New Netherland. The initial black inhabitants of the colony, while surely laborers, occupied an ambiguous status, and by the 1640s and 1650s some moderate numbers were free and even owned land (pp. 13-15). Hodges argues at the start of the chapter that "How that initial generation gave way to a slave society is the terrible history of the period of Dutch control" (p. 8). But by the end of the chapter this judgment is modified: "By current definitions, New Netherland was not a slave society because slavery was an important part of the political economy but not the sole form of labor" (p. 31). Hodges appears equivocal here, which may stem from a lack of reliable demographic information. The number of blacks in the Dutch colony, and especially the ratio of free to slave, remains unclear, and Hodges offers no direct commentary on the limitations of the surviving sources. For instance, he discusses a 1664 tax list for the city of New Amsterdam with 254 taxpayers that seems to include an "African" population of 375 (p. 31). Might this constitute an urban slave society? I wonder if Hodges defers too much to Ira Berlin's influential recent formulation of the fundamentally economic distinction between "slave societies" and "societies with slaves."[3] Perhaps the regional case explored here calls for a revised sense of categorization