The City That Said Yes

How a City of Dutch Traders Became a Modern Metropolis

There’s a trope that “New York is not America.” It’s an international city whose cosmopolitanism is out of step with national values—or it’s an island of progressive provincialism sitting against the current of the mainstream. It’s an economic bubble with extreme class disparities, a chaotic crossroads of culture and commerce. It’s elitist, self-obsessed, bigger than everything else. Maybe it’s all these things at once—but why?

If New York really is different from the rest of America, we can blame the Dutch for that.

Russell Shorto’s forthcoming Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America recounts the exciting but under-discussed forty years from when the Dutch “took” Manhattan from the native population in 1624 until the English took New Amsterdam from them in 1664. Shorto delves into this underappreciated period to show not only how the curious mix of Dutch ideas and English culture combined to create New York, but how it laid the groundwork for American pluralism and capitalism.

By 1664, Dutch New Amsterdam was a city of 1,500 people, only half of whom were ethnically Dutch. New Amsterdam represented all walks of life: sailors and soldiers, bakers and brewers, thieves and whores—but also people from all over Europe, Jews and every flavor of Christian, enslaved Africans and freed slaves. Women in the Dutch colony enjoyed “unusual latitude.” While Puritans in England’s colonies to the north were persecuting their neighbors as witches, the Dutch colony was a respite of diversity and tolerance in an age of intolerance.

Shorto puts this history into a global context, while contextualizing the misunderstood history of relations between Native Americans and colonists. This is not a history of Great Men and Noble Savages, but one of everyday people: “all were caught up in the consequences” of colonization and “joined in a network of desires,” and “All wanted to protect their families and their honor.” He shows that history is far more complex—and richer—than the whitewashed version we receive in grade school, and that our understanding of the past can be clear-eyed without being moralistic.

For instance, Shorto dispels the age-old myth that the Dutch “bought” Manhattan for $24 worth of trinkets. At the time the Dutch arrived, the native Lenape greatly outnumbered the Dutch settlers but entered into a ceremonial pact in which they granted the settlers permission to use tribal territory. While the Lenape didn’t see it as a giveaway—they continued to live on Manhattan Island and elsewhere in the broader New Netherland colony—the Dutch used the pact to justify a claim of ownership under European legal traditions, leveraging it against rival colonial powers.

As the English saw it, this was a provocation. New Netherland sat in the middle of what they claimed as their New World empire. Indeed, as Shorto explains, the reason that “Dutch” is often used as a pejorative in English—e.g., going Dutch, Dutch courage, Dutch comfort—stems from this period of intense rivalry. While the Dutch were enjoying a thriving Golden Age of trade and finance, the English were struggling to hold together their own country through decades of religious wars.

The Dutch Republic, declared on land reclaimed from the North Sea, birthed a nation of entrepreneurs instead of aristocrats—and they went out to conquer the world’s trade. This openness to other cultures and peoples cultivated a sense of tolerance that, while not absolute, was certainly far ahead of the rest of Europe—and they exported it to the New World. In 1640, the Dutch West India Company, which effectively ruled the republic’s American colonies, relinquished its trade monopoly in New Amsterdam. The result was that Manhattan’s inhabitants could trade freely with the world and engage in entrepreneurial economic activity, including investing in shipping voyages as early venture capitalists.

Multiethnic and polyglot, the businessmen of New Amsterdam wanted an “efficient system, freedom from constraints, and taxes as low as possible.” They also wanted self-government. Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch governor, would spend his career there working “to professionalize New Amsterdam as a city of commerce” and to actualize “Manhattan as a global center.” It was not a stretch when one visitor proclaimed: “All the people here are traders.”

When the English, under Richard Nicolls, sailed into the harbor in 1664, “New York was New York even before it was New York.” While the English needed New Netherland to control the North American continent, they didn’t understand how such a diverse place could be so successful—more so than any of their colonies. So when King Charles II took the throne, he dispatched Nicolls to subjugate the Dutch colony, to understand it, and to make it English. And so, though he arrived with a squadron of warships, his intent was not to destroy the colony, but to engage with it on the terms it understood best: trade.

The Englishman, whose entire life had been spent fighting in civil wars of religion, came to “abhor extremism and to value reason.” In the Dutch colony, he found a people “grounded on common sense and business.” Peter Stuyvesant, who had worked for so many years to create this special place, likewise wanted to preserve it and avoid bloodshed. After intense diplomacy that nearly came to blows, he surrendered the colony to the English, with important provisions: Nicolls would allow the inhabitants of New Amsterdam to continue practicing their way of life and their way of business, under a liberal bill of rights with access to the rising British Empire. This was perhaps the most important merger and acquisition in New York’s history—one that the people of New Amsterdam helped broker.

It would not all be smooth sailing. Nicolls would serve as governor during the turbulent years of the Second Anglo-Dutch War. He succeeded in securing New York’s special status within the empire as a free trading port, and he established a one-hundred-year peace with the native populations in the lower Hudson Valley. Unfortunately, he also laid the groundwork for slavery, legalizing what had been an informal practice during the Dutch years. By 1730, 42% of New York families owned slaves, and the state would be slow to abolish slavery as its economy became more and more entwined with the cotton trade. Still, the city became a refuge for freed slaves and a hotbed of abolitionism.

New Amsterdam would not get to keep its Dutch names—Nicolls named the colony and city after his childhood friend and benefactor, the future King James II, the Duke of York. The Dutch town of Beverwijck would be named after another of James’s titles, the Duke of Albany. And Nicolls would have called the territory west of the Hudson River, which he’d hoped to retain and exploit for the city’s growth, “Albania”—except James gave it to his friend, the governor of Jersey. As a result, New York and New Jersey would compete and fight over ports and transit for centuries, including today’s spat about congestion pricing into Manhattan.

There is more to the story, but of course New York would go on to become a modern metropolis, the quintessential American city in the eyes of the world—even if Americans never saw it that way. New York exported its unique culture to other places, prompting Shorto to ask, “isn’t the combination of pluralism and capitalism the glue that holds all modern cities together?” Shorto evokes the “unspoken creed of densely packed urban dwellers,” the idea that:

we will give each other space and respect; that, even though I may not understand your language or your way of looking at things or particularly care about your culture, I’ll make room for you, and maybe something new will come of our being here together.

All good history imparts valuable wisdom on those in the present—and Shorto’s book is no exception. The lesson for New York, and all cities really, is that this blending of people, this “churn of ideas,” is what makes a city work. When we stop saying “yes” to people, when we stop building housing and start saying “no” to new ideas, we break our cities. Fixing our cities in our time, then, means channeling the Dutch spirit that reclaimed land from the sea for a free and prosperous people. All we’ve got to do is say: I’ll make room for you.

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Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America by Russell Shorto will be published tomorrow, March 4, 2025.

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