This study compares the ways that slavery shaped the elite cultures of colonial Massachusetts and New York by examining the social and kinship networks that intertwined enslavers with those they enslaved. It is anchored around three main family groups: the Stuyvesants, Bayards, and Livingstons. Although most works concerning these families remain largely rooted in colonial New York, this study seeks to follow these families' wider diasporic networks, especially their connections to the elites of colonial Massachusetts. As such, this dissertation is comparative as well as Atlantic in focus. The comparative aspect flows out of its central focus on elite families and thus necessitates the shedding of modern boundary lines between colonies, allowing the porous nature of elite slave contacts to emerge and resurrecting a very different early modern landscape. Instead of focusing on the small individual slaveholdings of most northern elites, it highlights slaveholding across family units, which offers a more comprehensive view of the cultural impact of slavery. Even as slavery disrupted the personal and family lives of enslaved Africans and Indians, it created a common slave culture and knit together Dutch merchant families with New England's ministerial elite, cementing Atlantic alliances that crossed contested colonial lines. Although this project is racial and gendered at its heart, it seeks to question the "natural communities" that have been constructed in scholarly works. Thus, instead of solely excavating 0 the lives of the enslaved, it emphasizes the effects that their lives had on the worldview of those who held them in bondage. Rather than addressing the experiences of enslaved African and Indians separately, it analyzes them as overlapping experiences. It examines the development of a mistress culture among elite northern women and revises the prevailing scholarly image of the overwhelmed Northern goodwife, whose husband bequeathed her a large number of enslaved men and women. It explores the ways in which the religious experience of elite families was interconnected and profoundly shaped by the culture of slavery and the development of systems of reciprocity and gift exchange between elites based on slavery. 1