The remarkable Margaret Hardenbroeck Philipse arrived in New Amsterdam from Holland in 1659, a brash and ambitious twenty-two-year-old bent on making her way in the New World. She promptly built an empire: Her fleet of trading ships carried furs, molasses, and slaves around the globe and her real estate holdings stretched from Albany to Barbados. Women like her were known as "she-merchants," and Margaret rose to become the wealthiest in the colony, while also raising five children and keeping a spotless linen closet.         In a bold, vivid narrative that challenges all our assumptions about colonial women, Zimmerman traces the astonishing rise of Margaret and the Philipse women who followed her, who would transform Margaret's storehouse on the banks of the Hudson into a stately mansion called Philipse Manor Hall that still stands today. In sensual, gritty detail she animates the New York frontier these four very well-off women inhabited, taking us into the birthing chambers, genteel parlors, rowdy Manhattan markets and cramped decks of transatlantic ships where they lived their everyday trials and extraordinary triumphs.        With a rich trove of unmined primary sources and a novelist’s flair for storytelling, Zimmerman gives a forgotten group of our foremothers a place at the colonial table.