The unlikely tale of how New Amsterdam became New York

Telegraph

15-03-2025

In 1664, New Amsterdam, Russell Shorto writes in Taking Manhattan, was 'a young city perched on the edge of a wilderness.' The Dutch, under Peter Stuyvesant, had created a flourishing, unusually 'tolerant' outpost on the tip of modern-day Manhattan, home to diverse nationalities and faiths. Following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the English began to look to their territories in America which had been left untended like 'weeds'. And there were those who began to turn a covetous eye to the increasingly prosperous colony of New Netherland.
A mission emerged to 'solve the puzzle of North America'. Richard Nicolls, a childhood companion of Charles II and his brother James, was sent to lead it. He was tasked with two aims: to rein in the wayward Puritans who were disavowing the monarchy in the English colony of Massachusetts, and to take over the Dutch island of Manhattan. Since communication across the Atlantic was unreliable and slow, how this would be accomplished was left to Nicolls's own 'skill and dexterity'.
Taking Manhattan builds on Shorto's 2004 book, The Island at the Centre of the World, which told the story of how the Dutch colony was founded. Shorto continues that story here, centring on the bloodless handover of Manhattan to the English and on Nicolls, a 'highly influential' figure whose legacy has been 'seriously neglected'. Handled differently, the colony might have been taken by force, and the Dutch influence – the trade networks and skilled population: what Shorto rather cheesily calls the island's 'secret sauce' – could have been lost. Instead, Nicolls sought out local leaders like the governor of Connecticut, to better understand the people involved and how to exert pressure through bargaining. Together with Stuyvesant, Nicolls drew up an agreement which, as Shorto explains it, reads more like a business transaction than a treaty.
For Shorto, this forgotten moment in American history is important for the light it sheds on two guiding questions: why 'New York mesmerise[s] people from all over the world' and what this special quality tells us about American identity. 'Consider,' Shorto writes, that '40 per cent of Americans alive today are Americans because New York Harbour beckoned their ancestors.' Unpicking the story of the city's origin might reveal the identities and ideas fomented there: through the course of this book, Shorto wonders about American freedom, the benefits of immigration to the young city, the tolerance of difference this required its people's essential spirit of enterprise.
One of the most captivating aspects of Taking Manhattan is how it reflects the city's diverse population by telling stories of many different lives: freed slaves; farmers; traders; politicians; soldiers; men and women; English, Dutch and Native Americans. These stories sit side by side and are often told in a dramatic present tense. But there are problems here, too. Shorto writes that we shouldn't judge the past by our own standards: for example, the 'toleration' and 'freedom' apparently inherited from the Dutch are challenging to understand alongside their colonial land grabbing and slave trading. But making historical figures into characters asks us to imagine their emotions, and it's hard not to fill these gaps with our own modern judgments and understandings.
Shorto's own biases are not difficult to detect. He relishes the romance of the Royalist cause going back to the English Civil War – the subject of a lengthy and not always abundantly relevant digression – and sees the Puritan population in America and in England as tyrannical hypocrites. The considerable moral failings of fledgling capitalism are explored but handled with more circumspection: as New Amsterdam became New York, a ship arrived with hundreds of slaves aboard – the first of its kind – and began a thriving trade through the city. This enterprise was initiated by the Dutch but completed by the English.
In today's America, Shorto sees a 'religious tribalism' that has overemphasised the nation's Christian origins; Taking Manhattan seeks to counter that narrative, with the Dutch's 'secular pluralism' enthusiastically lauded. While this is an informative and thought-provoking history, in places it shades towards romance and vilification. It sets out to trace the origins of New York's 'mesmerising' virtues and finds them in the pragmatism of the Dutch.