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The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America Paperback – April 12, 2005

by Russell Shorto (Author)

4.6 1,897 ratings

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In a riveting, groundbreaking narrative, Russell Shorto tells the story of New Netherland, the Dutch colony which pre-dated the Pilgrims and established ideals of tolerance and individual rights that shaped American history.

"Astonishing . . . A book that will permanently alter the way we regard our collective past." --The New York Times

When the British wrested New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664, the truth about its thriving, polyglot society began to disappear into myths about an island purchased for 24 dollars and a cartoonish peg-legged governor. But the story of the Dutch colony of New Netherland was merely lost, not destroyed: 12,000 pages of its records–recently declared a national treasure–are now being translated. Russell Shorto draws on this remarkable archive in The Island at the Center of the World, which has been hailed by The New York Times as “a book that will permanently alter the way we regard our collective past.”

The Dutch colony pre-dated the “original” thirteen colonies, yet it seems strikingly familiar. Its capital was cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic, and its citizens valued free trade, individual rights, and religious freedom. Their champion was a progressive, young lawyer named Adriaen van der Donck, who emerges in these pages as a forgotten American patriot and whose political vision brought him into conflict with Peter Stuyvesant, the autocratic director of the Dutch colony. The struggle between these two strong-willed men laid the foundation for New York City and helped shape American culture. The Island at the Center of the World uncovers a lost world and offers a surprising new perspective on our own.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Astonishing . . . A book that will permanently alter the way we regard our collective past." --The New York Times

“A tour de force. . . . The dramatic story of New York’s origins is splendidly told. . . . A masterpiece of storytelling and first-rate intellectual history.” --The Wall Street Journal

“As readable as a finely written novel. . . . social history in the Barbara Tuchman tradition.” --San Jose Mercury News

“Literary alchemy. . . . Shorto’s exhaustively researched and highly readable book is a stirring re-examination. . . . Brilliant and magisterial narrative history” —Chicago Tribune

“Masterly . . . A new foundation myth . . .Shorto writes at all times with passion, verve, nuance and considerable humor.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Rattlingly well told–a terrific popular history about a past that beautifully illuminates the present.” —The Sunday Times [London]

“A dramatic, kaleidoscopic and, on the whole, quite wonderful book. . . . This is one of those rare books in the picked-over field of colonial history, a whole new picture, a thrown-open window. . . . [A] full-blooded resurrection of an unfamiliar American patriot.” –The New York Observer

“Deserves to be a bestseller . . .narratively irresistible, intellectually provocative, historically invaluable” –The Guardian

“A spry, informative history. . . . Shorto supplies lucid, comprehensive contexts in which to see the colony’s promise and turmoil. . . . [D]elivers the goods with clarity, color and zest.” –The Seattle Times

“As Russell Shorto demonstrates in this mesmerizing volume, the story we don’t know is even more fascinating than the one we do . . .Historians must now seriously rethink what they previously understand about New York’s origins . . .” –The New York Post

“Russell Shorto fires a powerful salvo on the war of words over America’s origins . . . he mounts a convincing case [that], in Shorto’s words, ‘Manhattan is where America began.’ Readers . . find themselves absorbed in what can only be described as a plot, revolving around two strong men with conflicting visions of the future of Dutch North America.” –America: The National Catholic Weekly

“Fascinating. . . . A richly nuanced portrait set against events on the world stage.” --Time Out New York

“Shorto brings this . . . deeply influential chapter in the city’s history to vivid, breathtaking life [with] a talent for enlivening meticulous research and painting on a broad canvas. . . . In elegant, erudite prose, he manages to capture the lives of disparate historical characters, from kings to prostitutes.” –Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Remarkable. . . . [C]ompulsively interesting. . . . . Shorto argues that during the brief decades of its Dutch colonial existence Manhattan had already found, once and for all, its tumultuously eclectic soul.” –New Statesman

“Shorto delineates the characters in this nonfiction drama convincingly and compellingly.” –Fort Worth Star-Telegram

“[An] absorbing, sensual, sometimes bawdy narrative featuring whores, pirates, explorers and scholars. With clarity and panache, Shorto briskly conveys the complex history of the age of exploration.” –Times Literary Supplement

“Shorto’s book makes a convincing case that the Dutch did not merely influence the relatively open, tolerant and multicultural society that became the United States; they made the first and most significant contribution.” –American History

“Shorto’s prose is deliciously rich and witty, and the story he tells–drawing heavily on sources that have only recently come to light–brings one surprise after another. His rediscovery of Adriaen van der Donck, Peter Stuyvesant’s nemesis, is fascinating.” –Edward G. Burrows, coauthor of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History

“A landmark work . . .Shorto paints the emotions and attitudes of his characters with a sure hand, and bestows on each a believable, living presence.” –The Times (London)

“A triumph of scholarship and a rollicking narrative . . . an exciting drama about the roots of America’s freedoms.” –Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

From the Back Cover

When the British wrested New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664, the truth about its thriving, polyglot society began to disappear into myths about an island purchased for 24 dollars and a cartoonish peg-legged governor. But the story of the Dutch colony of New Netherland was merely lost, not destroyed: 12,000 pages of its records-recently declared a national treasure-are now being translated. Drawing on this remarkable archive, Russell Shorto has created a gripping narrative-a story of global sweep centered on a wilderness called Manhattan-that transforms our understanding of early America.
The Dutch colony pre-dated the "original" thirteen colonies, yet it seems strikingly familiar. Its capital was cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic, and its citizens valued free trade, individual rights, and religious freedom. Their champion was a progressive, young lawyer named Adriaen van der Donck, who emerges in these pages as a forgotten American patriot and whose political vision brought him into conflict with Peter Stuyvesant, the autocratic director of the Dutch colony. The struggle between these two strong-willed men laid the foundation for New York City and helped shape American culture. The Island at the Center of the World uncovers a lost world and offers a surprising new perspective on our own.

About the Author

Russell Shorto is the author of five books and is a contributing writer at the The New York Times Magazine. His books have been published in fourteen languages and have won numerous awards. From 2008 to 2013, he was the director of the John Adams Institute in Amsterdam.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

THE MEASURE OF THINGS

On a late summer's day in the year 1608, a gentleman of London made his way across that city. He was a man of ambition, intellect, arrogance, and drive--in short, a man of his age. Like our own, his was an era of expanding horizons and a rapidly shrinking world, in which the pursuit of individual dreams led to new discoveries, which in turn led to newer and bigger dreams. His complicated personality--including periodic fits of brooding passivity that all but incapacitated him--was built around an impressive self-confidence, and at this moment he was almost certainly convinced that the meeting he was headed toward would be of historic importance.

He walked west, in the direction of St. Paul's Cathedral, which then, as now, dominated the skyline. But the structure in the distance was not the St. Paul's of today, the serene, imperial building that signifies order and human reason, with the spirit of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment shining from its proud dome. His St. Paul's had a hunkering tower in place of a dome (the steeple that had originally risen from the tower had been struck by lightning almost half a century before and hadn't been replaced); it was a dark, medieval church, which suited the medieval market town that London still was in the early seventeenth century. The streets through which he walked were narrow, shadowy, claustrophobic, sloping toward central sewer ditches. The houses that lined them were built of timber and walled with wattle and daub--it was a city made chiefly of wood.

Since we know his destination and have some notion of the whereabouts of his house, it is possible to trace a likely route that Henry Hudson, ship's captain, would have taken on that summer day, on his way to meet with the directors of the Muscovy Company, funders of voyages of exploration and discovery. The widest thoroughfare from Tower Street Ward toward Cordwainer Street Ward was Tower Street. He would have passed first through a neighborhood that, despite being within sight of the scaffold and gallows of the Tower itself, was an area of relatively new, "divers fair and large houses," as John Stow, a contemporary chronicler, described, several of them owned by prominent noblemen.

On his left then came the dominating church of St. Dunstan in the East, and a reminder of his heritage. The Muscovy Company had not only funded at least two of Henry Hudson's previous sea voyages; going back through its history of half a century, it contained several Hudsons on its rolls. Among its charter members in 1555 was another Henry Hudson, who rose from a humble "skinner," or tanner, to become a wealthy member of society and an alderman of the City of London, and who may have been the explorer's grandfather. So our Henry Hudson was presumably born to the sea and to the company both, and inside the church he was now passing, his Muscovy Company namesake lay, beneath a gilded alabaster stone inscribed:

Here lyeth Henry Heardsons corps,

Within this Tombe of Stone:

His Soule (through faith in Christ's death,)

to God in Heaven is gone.

Whiles that he lived an Alderman,

And Skinner was his state:

To Vertue bare hee all his love,

To vice he bare his hate.

If in his walk the seaman chose to detour down the hill past the church, he would have come to the open expanse of the Thames, where the view west downriver was dominated by the span of London Bridge with its twenty stone arches, houses perched precariously along both sides of its course. Directly across the river, beckoning lowly and enticingly, lay Southwark, a wild outland and thus also the entertainment district, with brothels tucked into its alleys and, visible from here, the "bear bayting" arena, which provided one of the most popular distractions for the masses. Beyond it stood the rounded wooden structure of the Globe Theater in its original incarnation. Indeed, somewhere over on the Southwark side at this very moment, amid the tradesmen, whores, "sturdye Beggers," and "Common Players in Enterludes" that populated the borough, Shakespeare himself--at forty-four a near-exact contemporary of Hudson, then at the height of his powers and fame as the leading dramatist of the day--was likely going about his business, sleeping off a night of sack at the Mermaid with his actor friends Richard Burbage and John Heminge, maybe, or brooding over the foolscap sheets of Coriolanus, which was written about this time and which, coming on the heels of the great tragedies, may have felt a bit hollow.

Tower Street became Little Eastcheap, which in turn merged into Candlewick and then Budge Row. Hudson's business lay here, in an imposing building called Muscovy House, home of the Muscovy Company. The medieval look of the London of 1608 belied the fact that England's rise to global empire was under way, and one of the forces behind that rise lay through these doors. From the bravado of its formal name--the "Merchants Adventurers of England for the Discovery of Lands, Territories, Iles, Dominions, and Seigniories Unknown"--one might be excused for thinking it had been founded out of sheer, unstoppable exuberance. The original band of merchants and aristocrats who had formed it more than half a century earlier included many of the most distinguished men in London in the middle of the sixteenth century--the Lord High Treasurer, the Steward of the Queen's Household, the Keeper of the Privy Seal, the Lord High Admiral--as well as sundry other knights and gentlemen. But while global exploration, the great intellectual and business opportunity of the day, had brought them all together, no one considered the undertaking a swashbuckling adventure. It was desperation that drove them toward new horizons. The England of the 1540s had been a backwater, economically depressed, inward-looking, deep in the shadows of the great maritime empires of Spain and Portugal. Wool was the country's chief commodity, but English traders had been blocked from access to major European markets for more than a century. Economic stagnation was bound up with intellectual stagnation: while the Renaissance was in full flower on the Continent, English interest in the wider world was slim, and the few long voyages of exploration England had mounted were mostly led by foreigners, such as the Venetian John Cabot (ne Giovanni Cabotto). When it came to sea voyages, the English declined.

History traditionally links the rise of England in the period with the elevation of Queen Elizabeth to the throne in 1558. But one could trace it to 1547, when an intellectually voracious twenty-year-old named John Dee did something countless students since have done: spent his summer abroad and returned flush with new knowledge and insights. After an academic career at Cambridge in which he proved to be something of a mathematical genius, Dee traveled to the University of Louvain in what is today Belgium. The rich summer sun of the Brabant region might have been revelation enough, but Dee soon found himself in a lecture hall gazing at an object that was, to him, transcendent. The teacher was Gemma Frisius, a Flemish mathematician and charter of the heavens, and what Dee saw was a map astonishing in its level of detail, in the new lands it portrayed, even in its lettering. The Low Countries, he discovered, were miles ahead of his island in new learning.

Dee spent long candle-lit nights poring over Frisius's maps with a Flemish scholar named Gerhard Kremer. Kremer, an engraver by training, had, under the academic pen name of Mercator, begun to make a name for himself ten years earlier by creating a map of Palestine that rendered the Holy Land with greater accuracy than had ever been achieved. Mercator was a genuine Renaissance man--a master cartographer, an engineer of telescopes, sextants, surveying equipment, and other highly sensitive measuring devices, the author of a gospel concordance, promoter of the new italic typeface that made map print more legible--and in him Dee found a soul mate. In 1569, Mercator would publish the map that would give him his immortality, which rendered latitude and longitude as straight lines, the meridians of longitude evenly spaced and the distance between the parallels of latitude increasing in size as one approached the poles. It would solve a cumbersome problem of navigating at sea because with it sailors could plot and follow a straight course rather than have to constantly recalculate their position. (The Mercator projection is still a feature of navigational maps, although, even at that time, some mariners were as confused as later generations of schoolchildren would be by the distortions in size it caused.)

In a nice foreshadowing of the complicated intermingling between the Low Countries and the British Isles that would shape the next century, when Dee returned to London he brought with him maps, measuring instruments, and globes, created by Mercator and Frisius, that would help spark England's rise to global prominence. What Dee's English colleagues found most intriguing about the maps and globes was an area most people would ignore: the top, the Arctic Circle. Frisius's map, oriented as if looking down from the north star, showed a distinct open channel cutting across the Arctic, which was self-confidently labeled in Latin Fretum trium fratrum. The sight of the boldly indicated Strait of the Three Brothers must have made Dee's English friends gasp. The Holy Grail for all learned and adventuresome minds was the discovery of a short passage to the riches of Asia. Finding it would repay investors many times over; for the English, it would vault their economy out of the Middle Ages and into the European vanguard. The legend of the Strait of the Three Brothers was confused even at that time, but it appears to have been based on the adventures of the Corte Real brothers, Portuguese mariners who explored the area around Newfoundland at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and who, in the minds of some, sighted, or perhaps even sailed, the fabled passage to Asia before two of them vanished into Arctic oblivion. (Ironically, the Spanish also had a theory about this mythical strait, only they called it the Englishmen's Strait.) Now there it was on Frisius's map, thanks apparently to Frisius's contacts with Portuguese mariners. It was on Mercator's globe as well, labeled simply fretum arcticum, arctic strait. As with most people in any endeavor, seeing the thing in print, seeing its coasts and coves delicately but decisively rendered, confirmed its reality.

Fate, it seemed, had brought together the men, the means, and the time. The solution to England's twin crises of economy and spirit was out there. So the nation's leaders formed a business circle, chipping in twenty-five pounds per share and raising a total of six thousand pounds.

With the principals lined up and funds ready, it only remained to choose the likeliest route--either the one indicated on Frisius's map or one of several others that were now being put forth with equal confidence. The point was to find a northern passage both because such a shortcut would render obsolete the Spanish and Portuguese monopoly on the Southern Hemisphere and because any northern peoples encountered along the way would be more likely buyers for English wool. That an Arctic sea route existed was beyond anyone's doubt. The universal belief among the intelligentsia in something we know to be a physical impossibility in wooden sailing vessels rested on several arguments, such as the one put forth by the Dutch minister and geographer Peter Plancius that "near the pole the sun shines for five months continually; and although his rays are weak, yet on account of the long time they continue, they have sufficient strength to warm the ground, to render it temperate, to accommodate it for the habitation of men, and to produce grass for the nourishment of animals."

The name by which the company became known gives away what happened on the first voyage it financed. A doughty mariner named Richard Chancellor took the northeast route, and while he failed to discover a passage to the Orient, he became the first Englishman of the era to make landfall at Russia. The so-called Muscovy trade that ensued--in which the English found a ready market for their wool, and imported hemp, sperm oil, and furs from the realm of Ivan the Terrible--was so profitable that the search for a northern route to Asia was largely abandoned.

The company expanded, and the nation with it. Elizabeth ascended to the throne; Drake circumnavigated the globe; Shakespeare wrote. When, in 1588, Philip II of Spain launched an invasion fleet toward England, intending to bring the island into his empire and win its people back to Roman Catholicism, the undersized English navy shocked the world by crushing the Armada. The aftermath of the victory was one of those moments when a nation suddenly realizes it has entered a new era. Theirs wasn't a dark and chilly island after all, the English public was informed by their great poet, but a "precious stone set in the silver sea."

By the early 1600s, however, the wheel had taken another turn. The queen was dead, and the Russia trade had fallen off. Faced once again with financial crisis, the company's directors made a decision to return to their original purpose. They would resurrect the Renaissance dream, commit themselves anew to discovering a northern passage to Asia.

The man they now turned to to renew the quest is not the protagonist of this story, but the forerunner, the one who would make it possible. In the ranks of legendary explorers, Henry Hudson has been slighted: not celebrated in his time by the English public as Francis Drake or Martin Frobisher or John Cabot had been, not given nearly the amount of ink that history has devoted to Columbus or Magellan. There is a logic of personality in this: Drake had defined manhood for an era, and the Italian Cabot had a feckless charm (he was in the habit, after his celebrated return from the New World, of promising people he met in taverns that he would name islands for them), but when we come to Henry Hudson it is a dark and moody figure hovering behind the records, one seemingly more comfortable in the shadows of history. A new appreciation for the Dutch colony in North America, however, compels a reappraisal of the man whose fitful decision-making rerouted the flow of history.

Nothing is known of his early career, but the fact that he was a ship's captain indicates that he had had a lengthy one by the time we encounter him in 1608. It's reasonable to assume that he had served in the defeat of the Armada twenty years earlier, though we have no information on this. The Muscovy Company tended to start apprentices as boys and have them work through one or more aspects of the business: bureaucrat, "factor" (i.e., agent), or sailor. Thus, one Christopher Hudson, who rose to the position of governor of the company from 1601 to 1607 and whom some historians have thought was most likely Henry Hudson's uncle, had worked his way up in the sales and marketing line, serving as a company representative in Germany in his youth. Henry Hudson was in his forties when he stepped into the light of history, a seasoned mariner, a man with a strong and resourceful wife and three sons, a man born and raised not only to the sea but to the quest for a northern passage to Asia, who, weaned from infancy on the legends of his predecessors, probably couldn't help but be obsessed by it.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage (April 12, 2005)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1400078679
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1400078677
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 0.86 x 7.94 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #22,865 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Russell Shorto

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RUSSELL SHORTO's latest book is "Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom," which Gordon S. Wood calls "an engaging, readable and surprisingly complete account of the American Revolution" and "a tour de force." He is also author of the bestseller "The Island at the Center of the World" and of "Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City." His books have been published in fourteen languages. From 2008 to 2013 he was the director of the John Adams Institute in Amsterdam.

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Terence Clarke

The Island at The Center of The World,

Reviewed in the United States on September 14, 2007

Verified Purchase

We all grew up in our American history classes with the image of peg-legged old Peter Stuyvesant ruling chaotically over the short-lived Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. They were a sorry lot, these Dutch, who didn't understand what they had on Manhattan, an island that awaited the organizational verve of the English to finally get under way toward its present greatness.

Would you believe that this view of the Dutch is a lot of poppycock? According to author Russell Shorto, it is that and worse. His book THE ISLAND AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD, published by Doubleday, tells the story of the Dutch colonization of Manhattan and large portions of the land around that island in the seventeenth century. Because the actual Dutch records of that colonization have only recently been unearthed from libraries, we've more or less accepted the view of Dutch incompetence that has been foisted upon us by history. That is, by English history. As Winston Churchill famously remarked, history is written by the victors, and in this case, the English won the day when they laid a naval blockade on Manhattan in 1664 and took over the colony. According to Shorto, that triumph resulted in a very skewed and inaccurate presentation of what the Dutch achieved in Manhattan, and therefore of what American culture owes them.

The main character is, of course, Peter Stuyvesant, the man who surrendered to the English. When he arrived in New Amsterdam in 1647, the town had just a few hundred citizens and was located at the very southern tip of Manhattan Island, around the area of present-day Battery Park. It was low, rude and dirty. Stuyvesant was the representative of the Dutch West India Company, which had founded the colony. Subject to very poor leadership, the town was in need of a clear-headed, strong-minded leader, and Stuyvesant certainly was both of those. He was also a company man, and the idea of the citizens ruling themselves in any sort of way was simply beneath Stuyvesant's notice. It would be madness, the antithesis to the seventeenth century idea that God grants the right to lead only to the right sort of person and that all the rest should follow. The leveling sentiments of the American Revolution were one hundred thirty years away in the unforeseeable future.

But there were a few others in New Amsterdam who viewed themselves as viable contenders to lead the colony, and one of these was Adrian Van der Donck. An educated attorney who had taken full advantage of the new liberalisms of thought offered in Dutch universities by such as Descartes, Grotius and Spinoza, he had arrived in the colony some years before. The Dutch were already known for their tolerance of modes of thought and behavior other than their own. A great trading people, a people of the sea, the Dutch had for centuries been aware of the diversity of peoples elsewhere in the world. Amsterdam itself was noted for its polyglot, diverse culture, and Van der Donck had seen all this.

Van der Donck is the second protagonist of this remarkable book, and it is the ongoing struggle between these two men that fills its pages. Van der Donck and some others plagued Stuyvesant for years by pleading the case before him, and then before the Dutch Estates General in Amsterdam, that the Dutch West India Company's rule was stifling to the citizens of the colony and, worse, lousy for business. Stuyvesant, in their view, ruled badly with an iron-hand. Commerce was stifled by his authoritarian rigidity. The rising English and Swedish power in the region, based in the sizable colonies that those two countries had established nearby, was a continuing threat. Van der Donck and his friends presented brief after brief to the Estates in an attempt to break the Dutch West India Company's autocratic hold over Manhattan and to replace it with a more republican-style government devoted to open trade.

They made remarkable progress with this idea and indeed the Dutch government had arrived at the moment of voiding the West India Company's contract in the colony. But ultimately these efforts failed because of England's Oliver Cromwell and his wish to break up the Dutch influence on the seas. It began as a trade war and then became a real one when the First Anglo-Dutch War broke out in July, 1652. Van der Donck and the Dutch West India Company suddenly changed in the eyes of the Dutch government. War made the company's seeming stability in the colony appear all-important. It also made them think that Van der Donck perhaps was not really the progressive man of brilliant ideas for commerce and governance, but rather a dangerous agent of change who could ruin The Netherlands' efforts to defend its own territory.

Stuyvesant was back in charge. Van der Donck was out in the cold.

But the long-term effects of his efforts lasted beyond the war and beyond the Dutch colony itself. They resulted in much that became very important to the development of the American colonies and, finally, the United States. "Van der Donck's dream became real in a way he never imagined," Shorto writes. "The structure he helped win for the place grounded it in Dutch tolerance and diversity, just as he hoped it would, which in turn touched off the island's rapid growth and increased the influx of settlers from around Europe, just as he predicted. What he didn't predict was that the English would appreciate this fact, and maintain the structure, and that it would support a future culture of unprecedented energy and vitality and creativity."

One of the most interesting stories in this book is that of what happened to the documents that were kept by the Dutch colony and its officers. This trove of papers that go so far in explaining the complexity of the issues of New Netherland lay unnoticed for a few hundred years in various libraries. Only in the 1970's, when the translation of the papers to English finally began, did the importance of the Dutch influence in New York begin to get truly clarified.

The last chapter of THE ISLAND AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD is a little coda in which Shorto tells of the journey of the records of the colony over two and a half centuries, in the New World and the Old, always out of the public eye.

It is a riveting small essay on great good fortune. If you do not value librarians and those who care about the written record, you should read this chapter. It will certainly set you straight because these New Netherland papers survived through swashbuckling derring-do and because of a deep concern for history on the part of a very few individuals over the centuries.

The records were neglected, subject to mould, fire, wars and general indifference. But they remain more or less intact now because of the lucky interest of the few individuals that seemed to understand what they had in hand. Without them, the records would have perished, this book wouldn't have been written and the ongoing revelations of the true importance of the Dutch Manhattan colony would have been lost to us.

For those interested in why New York is New York, and why the United States developed the way it did, those efforts - and this book - are invaluable.

Terence Clarke is a novelist, journalist and film maker who writes about the arts at [...]

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vmhutch

Who knew we owed the Dutch so much

Reviewed in the United States on January 28, 2015

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Oh, wonderful. This book is so beautiful written. His description of Henry Hudson's family's participation in the investment house that funded his trips, the transition to describing London, the bridge, its environs, then this: "Beyond it stood the rounded wooden structure of the Globe Theater in its original incarnation." Wow. That was so Cool. And so unexpected. I felt like I was watching some Hollywood film where you start your view from above the world and slowly you descend, London comes in view, here's where the rich people live, here's where the whores live, and oh yeah, that's where Shakespeare entertained them both.

Besides the writing style, I really enjoy the structure of the book. I've read quite a lot about the Thirty Years War, the enlightenment, the English civil war, the early settling of our nation - but never in a way that allows me to integrate the effects these events visited, collectively, on the settlement and character development of this country. Shorto ties it all together in one neat little package.

Admittedly, unless you have read about each of these events separately, it’s truly hard, for example, to appreciate just how devastating the Thirty Years War was for Europe. One interesting insight Shorto offers, however, that struck a chord in me, is that Western European civilization viewed war, in and of itself, as the natural state of being; that is, before the treaty of Westphalia and the loss of 40-45% of its population during the Thirty Years War. What a horror. A loss even greater than during WWII as a percentage of the population. After that ‘peace’ became the natural state. With war becoming the last act. Hence, Clausewitz: "War is the continuation of politics by other means".

Additionally, one can talk about the inspiration that enlightenment figures had on our founding fathers and our founding documents, but I, for one, would not have tied the Thirty Years War and the English civil war together, inextricably linked, to the birth of this nation through the Dutch or the English settlement, thereof, or for that matter the French settlement in the new world. And surprise, surprise. Who the heck would have known about the Swedes? Never had a clue. Shorto completely surprised me with their imperial foray into the new world.

Because I read history as a sequence of events, a continuum in time and space, but not in chronological order, e.g., I read about ancient Rome then jump to the history of Manhattan, I end up rendering history as linear and sequential. I rarely have the benefit of seeing it as a survey of a given time – like one experiences when in college, through discussion and careful planning on the part of a professor - I tend to lose sight of the fact that history is more like the collision of atoms in a fixed space, each crash and bang moving other objects, unpredictably, in new directions.

Well, sorry for going off the deep end.

I like this guy so much that I’m going to read his “Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason”.

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Andrew C.

Amazing history

Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2024

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From the Dutch history is not much known in the US and neither in the US books at school. The city of Leiden is probably the most important part of American history but it is a shame that nobody in the US has any knowledge about that. It is not only about the Civil War and Confederate states but goes much deeper. Americans always had a huge knowledge gap whether it was about the history of this beautiful country and how everything actually started. Where did old traditions like Thanksgiving - and so on - came from?

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George V. Neville-Neil

A good bit of history

Reviewed in the United States on August 13, 2023

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Making the argument that 17th century ideas of tolerance helped to make New York City the launching point of American multiculturalism this is an interesting book. Well researched and written for a non specialist audience it’s a good read. My only qualm is that the style changes in some odd ways throughout and I found it distracting. It’s as if the author went back to make the book appeal more to a general audience but the changes don’t blend well. If you’re interested in the early history of New York it’s a good one to read.

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GH

Interesting book

Reviewed in Canada on January 23, 2024

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Well written and interesting subject matter.

Mr. M. K. Lees

New York's history

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 13, 2024

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A fascinating introduction to New York's history, beginning as a Dutch Colony. This history had largely been forgotten but more recent research has unfolded a fascinating past. Well worth a read.

J T.

Helped me understand Dutch culture

Reviewed in Germany on July 24, 2022

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Really well written and helped me understand The Netherlands and Dutch culture.

PARAGUAS

INFORMATIVE, Great read!

Reviewed in Spain on November 29, 2018

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What's not to like?
I have the hardcover edition. I found it fascinating, and as a NYC person I understand a bit better the small world I live in... HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

DL

Tres bon livre

Reviewed in France on July 8, 2014

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Expédition rapide. Un excellent livre pour ceux qui aiment l'histoire et celle de Manhattan en particulier. Une plongée dans l'histoire de cette ville étonnante.

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