American History Hit - New Amsterdam

Episode Date: March 6, 2023

Before New York was New York, it was New Amsterdam. Dutch colonists arrived on the East Coast in the early 17th century, creating the New Netherlands. At its heart was a settlement on the tip of the island of Manhattan, centred on the fur trade. Russell Shorto tells Don how New Amsterdam became integral to all trade between Europe and the New World, becoming a version of the multicultural melting pot that is the (renamed) city today.Produced by Benjie Guy. Mixed by Joseph Knight. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It's 1653, and we are on the island of Manhattan. In the midst of the first Anglo-Dutch War,

workmen are building a wall on the north side of the Dutch colonial settlement, New Amsterdam, to keep out potential invaders from their neighboring English colonies. While the Dutch would lose that war, fought in the end entirely at sea, they would keep New Amsterdam for the time being, turning it into a thriving, multicultural, multilingual center of trade in the new world. And so it would remain. Seized by the British just over a decade later and renamed in honor of the King of England's brother. New York is one of the most visited cities on the globe and home to people from all over the world. And where the Dutch influence is felt to this day. That wall, now called Wall Street, is the center of the world's most famous financial trading district. The Dutch would like that. Hello, everyone. I'm Don Wilden, your host of American History Hit. Thanks for joining us. Those who call themselves New Yorkers, I am proud of one, typically do so with a certain level of ignorance about what made New York what it truly is.

There's a skewed understanding of the city's heritage. New York was an English colony, this is true, named for James Duke of York. But at first, it wasn't at all. At first, it was a hunting and fishing grounds for indigenous peoples, of course, for thousands of years. But then it became a Dutch claim, then a Dutch business venture, then an official colony and municipality. It was New Amsterdam in New Netherland from the arrival of Henry Hudson in 1609 to its capitulation to the British in 1664. But that brief slice of time,

55 years of Dutch governance would leave an indelible stamp on the city for the next 350. And not just in street or place names, although three of the five New York City boroughs are still derived from the original Dutch, but rather in the real culture, its DNA as a human settlement

right up until the present. It's a story as complex as the great metropolis itself, and the book, Island at the center of the world, went far in correcting these misunderstood origins. And today we're lucky enough to have its author, Russell Shorto, to guide us through this early New York. Sorry, New Amsterdam history. Hello, Russell, and welcome to American History Hit. Hi, Don. Very happy to be with you. It feels like I already know you. I've been listening to your audiobook for the last week. You're one of those rare authors with the vocal chops to read your own writing.

A warm, even tone, my compliments. Only I had you said it 1.5 times, so your pitch is much higher. I do that, too, to get quicker through the books, right? Our conversation today obviously won't cover the whole half century of Dutch settlement, but let me start with this simple question. Through the 1600s, the English would dominate the eastern seaboard, Jamestown, Williamsburg, and Virginia, New England under the Puritans, Pennsylvania and the Quakers later on, but how is it that New Amsterdam exists for almost 60 years in their midst?

It's a big question. The English and the Dutch in Europe had rival empires, and they were pursuing colonies around the world in the 1600s. The Dutch were ahead for much of that time. You know, the so-called Dutch Golden Age extends through much of the 17th century. the English were playing catch-up, and the English founded the colonies in Virginia, and they had their colonies in New England, and they were really distinct from one another, and that was because the New England colonies were founded by Puritans, who were really the enemies of the Stuart Kings, who were in power by the end. They very much wanted autonomy from England. So then finally, the stewards have to come in and try to get them under control. Meanwhile, the Dutch found this colony called New Netherland, as you said, with its capital of New Amsterdam at the tip of the island

of Manhattan. For a long time, they're going about their affairs, and the colonies were very much aware of one another, communicated with one another, traded with one another. The English colonies became aware that the Dutch were very good at shipping so that the English in Virginia and New England would send goods to New York Harbor, what became New York Harbor, to have them ship them to Europe, So they were doing business. There was always friction, but they were very much aware of one another. And then later in the life of the colony, the English say, wait a second, we have to reorganize things in North America and try to get this under control. From the beginning, the Dutch were very serious about this settlement, although it was primarily a business venture for a long time until it became something more.

What was the pivot moment when they decided that this is actually a serious settlement and they were going to go for the long haul? I think people tend to look at the Dutch and say, oh, it was a business settlement in English as if it wasn't. The English were very much in New England trying to make it a business as well. The Dutch, it was the West India Company that found it, and they sent settlers there. I'd say very early on, the settlers there began to feel that they wanted to be more than just an outpost of a business venture, that they wanted all the rights and privileges of any Dutch province in the home country. I'd say one tipping point comes in 1640 when they succeeded in breaking down the West India Company monopoly on trade, which had never worked

to begin with. Effectively, they were smuggling. They were sending shipping things out on their own, furs and other products. And finally, the West India Company decides this isn't working, so they opened it up. And from that moment, you had Dutch trading companies in Amsterdam. The owner would send one of his sons to New Amsterdam to open a branch office. So then it really becomes something else with this deeper connection to the home country. It's such a mixed bag. You know, it's so interesting. You have Columbus, you know, is a genuine sailing for the Spanish. Henry Hudson is an Englishman sailing for the Dutch. And it's kind of the way it goes in those days with those mariners. But it kind of reflects the intermixed quality of this whole eastern seaboard at the time. Your book is primarily

about the island of Manhattan. And of course, these are lands first populated by indigenous tribes, the Lenin Lenape. Am I getting that pronunciation correct? Yeah, Lanapé, people say. The Dutch were good with their relations with the Native Americans, correct? Yes and no. I certainly think their relations were better than the English relations were with Native Americans. They understood that they were here to do business with them. You know, initially, the idea was to trade with natives for furs that then they would ship to Europe, and that was because especially beavers were very prized because underneath the fur, if you treated it, there was the layer of felt. And felt was very thin, but also very warm, which people didn't have central eating, so that was valued.

That's the way they operated, and that's what they were there for. And they themselves were never fur trappers. So they were there to do business with them. You know, you look at the records and you try to see, okay, who was at fault first? Did an Indian fire on the Dutch, or did the Dutch fire? Indian, but there are a number of instances where things blow up into a battle or a war. And then there's a treaty in negotiations, and then they start over again. The settlement of New Amsterdam has so much to do with what was transpiring back in Europe,

obviously. Throughout the 1500s, into the 1600s, you have the 80 years war being fought between the Netherlands and Spain, which has struggled for independence, but also a conflict between the rising forces of Protestantism and the authoritarian centralized powers aligned with the papacy. all this is finally settled, more or less, by 1648 with the peace of Westphalia. And this is the backdrop for what is known as the Dutch Golden Age. How is it that the Netherlands thrived in the midst of all that strife? What was their secret formula?

Yeah, it's remarkable that this tiny country, which wasn't even, you know, by some estimates, a country in its own right, until, as you say, 1648, they start their rise around 1600. And it is unprecedented in world history, really. So between about 1600 and 1672 is where I put the boundaries of the Dutch Golden Age. And a number of factors, one has to do with land and the relationship to land. In most of Europe, you had the feudal system, which was an economic system and a social system so that a knight, a nobleman, had control of a certain amount of land. And he had a relationship with the king and with the church and all the people under him who worked that land, he had a relationship with, and that was a long-lasting system, and it was a very fixed system. So if you were a peasant

working the land, if you were a carpenter who worked for him or a lawyer or whatever your trade was, for the most part, your children and grandchildren were going to occupy that same rung. In the Dutch provinces, you didn't have that system because, you know, the Dutch have a saying, God made the earth, but the Dutch made Holland, meaning that they literally reclaimed land from the sea. About half of the land there is man-made. And so this relationship to the land in the water and constantly managing, building dams and dikes, reclaiming land, gave them this land, which then did not belong to the church, didn't belong to a nobleman.

So it got divided up among people in the community who then farmed it. They raised cattle. They sold butter. So they became entrepreneurs. And that developed, I think, a kind of mindset that set them apart so that they didn't have that fixed mentality. I was a peasant so much. I'll be peasants. It allowed them to look for opportunities.

And that's what they did. And in the rest of Europe then, especially if you look at England, the English were always bitter toward the Dutch. And they said, well, they care about nothing about money. Well, everybody cared about money. But they were open about it. And they succeeded. We really want to grasp this idea of the unique quality of Dutch culture because it really does come through the ages into creating, certainly the colony of New Amsterdam, but even beyond,

I think was really the general theme of your book, that even beyond to modern day New York, I dare say, this same sensibility is felt in the culture. Is that true? Yeah, I think so. So I just gave a too quick background to the development of Dutch capitalism, because at the same time, they're founding this colony, they are developing the building blocks of what would later become capitalism, the concept of shares of stock and ownership in companies of corporation, multinational corporations. They also pioneered the notion of tolerance, which sounds like a very bland thing. But at the time, intolerance was official policy in England, in France, in Spain. It was common sense that if we're going to get ahead in this dark, dangerous world, we all have

to be on the same page. And that meant particularly when it came to religion. So you had a state religion, and if people were out of line, if their beliefs didn't accord, you declared them to be witches, you were intolerant. The Dutch had this official policy of toleration, and that came with them to the New World, and that made it so that the Dutch colony had, at one point in 1643, it was said that there were 18 languages being spoken in New Amsterdam, when there were only about 500 people there at the time. So, as I'd like to say, New York was New York, even before it was New York, And I just heard a really interesting talk. Someone who is the head of a center for endangered languages was studying and saying, well,

that estimate of 18 languages only applied really to the white people's languages. It didn't account for the African languages. There were three or four African languages spoken or Native American languages. There were probably four or five Native American languages spoken in the region. So it was a very diverse place, and it had this mentality of entrepreneurship. And those two things are kind of a rest of. for New York City. It sounds similar, though, of course, there's major differences to Florence in the Renaissance, these more forward-thinking places, more tolerant places. There are many

aspects of that to do with Florence. And Venice, the Republic of Venice. Yeah, make for these more advanced societies that are also progressive and very prosperous. It doesn't seem to be coincidental. They all go hand in hand. Yeah, but I would put a caveat there that it wasn't the case that all of Dutch society was this way. As with American society now, for example, you had two wings, two factions, and they were always at war with each other. So that throughout the 17th century, you have the so-called liberals and the so-called conservatives, both of whom had this religious support to their way of thinking. And they each had a religious leader whose writings they look to for guidance. And in the case of New Netherland in the colony, I think whenever

things were relatively good, they could feel more open, more progressive, more inviting of others and say, look, this is good for trade and so on. And when there was a greater sense of danger, then they would tend to constrict and say, no, we have to keep out foreigners and that sort of thing. Peter Stuyvesant, the longest serving director of the colony, famously tried to block Jews from settling and other groups, too. Okay, so let's talk about the colony itself. Once things really get going here, you can kind of break it down like U.S. presidents. There's these administrations of these directors who are put in charge by the West Indies Company. And then they sort of run the show, both as businessmen, but then also as governors. There are seven of them,

roughly speaking, I believe, but we're only going to speak of a few of them. And of course, most famously, we have to start with Peter Minuit, who is in 1626, the Director General. He decides to make a deal with the Native peoples for control over the island of Manhattan. How much of the buying of Manhattan from the Native Americans is a real story, or is that just apocryphal? Wow. How much time do we have? About two minutes. Yeah, yeah. That is a very worthwhile story to try to get your head around. There was certainly a deed at some point for the, quote, purchase. At the same time, the Dutch understood that the Native Americans did not see land in the way they did. They didn't see it as an outright, buyable thing. But for their purposes, they wanted to have a deed.

That deed has been lost. We don't have it. What we have is a real. We have. record of an official some weeks or months later in the Netherlands saying, ah, we've gotten word that our people have bought the island of Manhattan for the value of 60 guilders, which then in the 19th century, a translator translated that into $24, hence the famous, or the infamous purchasing the island of Manhattan for $24, which isn't true. It was never seen, both sides understood. This wasn't seen by the Native Americans as a purchase. It was more like entering into a defense. We're saying, for the value of these goods, we'll give you blankets and knives and pots and kettles and things. And they are meant as a token to seal a deal of alliance between us so that if

you're attacked, we'll help. If we're attacked, you'll help us. Nevertheless, even though the Dutch understood that's the way the Native Americans saw it, over time, you're going to revert to your own understanding. And so people later simply said, this is my land. What are you doing here? so inevitably over time you get that friction and we know where that leads. It's fascinating. At the end of your book, you talk about the emergence in very recent times of new translations of those Dutch records that because of the shortness of the time span, 55 years, a long time ago, and then the dominance of the English governance, those records were left fallow, I guess, on a shelf in Albany.

And only in recent times where they really fully translated and thus these truer stories are emerging. I got into this story because I came into contact with Charles Gering, who started translating the official Dutch records of the colony, 12,000 pages of material in 1974. Charlie is still at it. He's in Albany, New York, the State Library. And that is a fascinating story in its own right, which I tried to tell in the book, too, that there were a number of attempts in American history to get going and translating this. One of the translators in the 19th century, he wasn't a very good translator. And beyond that, his eyes were going bad, and he was putting Belladonna in them, which at the time was thought to help your eyesight. In fact, Beladonna makes you go blind. But the

important thing is that this has been underway for a long time. Every couple of years, the New Netherland Research Center in Albany, which is affiliated with the New Netherland Institute, puts out a new volume of translations. And every couple of years, we are deeper in our understanding of the colony. I'll be back with more. Russell Shorter after this break. Let's focus on two individuals who come along in the latter years of the colony and whose lives and fortunes intersect to shape the fates and fortune of the Dutch experience. Adrian van der Dundk and Petrus Stuyvesen. A lot of your book follows their stories. Van der Dundk arrives in America first. Ends up being the namesake, interestingly,

of Yonkers, more than a moment. He's a trained lawyer hired to manage the huge estate belonging to a patroon named Help Me With This pronunciation, Killian Van. Killion van Rensselaer. Rensselaer, yes, all the way up river. And he works the job as a shoot. Scout, shout. How do you say it? Schout.

I'm sorry, I'm terrible with the Dutch. My wife is fluent. She's going to hate me. He works as a scout until he engages with the director general at the time, Willem Kieft. Tell me about Van der Dundonk, quite a bold individual. I see myself as a storyteller. I tell nonfiction stories about the past.

And I, when I first encountered this material, as I said, and spent time, just immerse I'm nursing myself in these records. I spent a lot of time with them and was frustrated for a lot of that time because you're just swimming in it. You know, the records of history, it's just stuff. It's just he stole my pig and he stole my wife. And, you know, it's like, what do you do with this? Slowly, I came upon these two figures later in the life of the colony, Adrian van der Donk and

Peter Stuyvesant. And I realized the conflict between them. I mean, story is conflict. It's basically two people in conflict. And that's what I need. Once I have that, then I can pull back to flesh out what the island of Manhattan looked like, what the extent of the colony was, what were the larger geopolitical implications of all of this. And I can add that as the backdrop. But I want that central story.

And so to me, this story between Vanderdunk and Stuyvesant was the spine. And in terms of what they represented, Vanderdunk was trained as a lawyer at Leiden University. a very humanistic education. And Stuyvesant was the son of a stern Calvinist minister. Even their geography in the Netherlands, Stuyvesant was from up north where the people are more kind of severe, and Vanderdonk was from the south where people have a looser personality. So the clash between them,

Stuyvesant representing the West India Company and its interests, and Vanderdonk representing the populace, he becomes elected as president of the commonality, as they called it. And so the head of an opposition party. To me, that's a fascinating way to explore how they thought it should evolve in its future. It's almost their allegorical figures of the entire conflict within Dutch culture. Van derog takes over as managing the state essentially up near Albany. But he's got big ambitions.

He runs into conflict with the director general at the time, William Kieft, who was of that other ilk. He was a hardcore military-minded man. But Van der Dock works for him. He gets him through a bloody war with the Native Americans, and he's a guide and an interpreter. And as a favor for this service, Keeft grants him a swath of land north of Manhattan, where he builds a sawmill on a river, the sawmill river, that today pours into the Hudson at a place called Yonkers. Why Yonkers?

What's that name come from? He had a title, it was an unofficial Dutch title, the Yankir, which is like the young lord or the young squire. He was known as that as the squire of this land he was given. and over time, the Yonkers land is how it kind of got corrupted and then became Yonkers. Fascinating. The warring with the locals, not to mention lousy relationships with his own people, gets Kieft recalled, and he's replaced by an even tougher guy named Peter Stuyvesant, who takes over in 1647, and we're off. Give me the bio on Stuyvesant. Where'd he come from?

How'd he end up in America? He came from Friesland, that Dutch province, and he was a West India company man. Like today, you know, you have officials of people who grow up in Shell or you'd pick the corporation, and he worked his way up. The Dutch system, their political system, was a very loose confederation. It was kind of like the confederation of states before they formed the Constitution in the U.S. So the states, in this case, the provinces, had the power. And so in order to do overseas operations like this colonizing, they relied on these multinational corporations, which had their own. military. So Stuyvesant, before coming to what became New York, is in the Caribbean taking part in battles against the Spanish. Remember all this time they're fighting this war of independence

against Spain. And that's where he gets his leg shot off on the island of St. Martin. You can just imagine how tough these people were. He gets his leg shot off below the knee in the Caribbean. Usually you would die from something like that. At the very least, you would be brought back home. And you'd be kind of put out to pasture. You could just retire. He goes back home. The woman who actually nurses him back to health becomes his wife. And he puts in for another position.

And he wants to be the leader of this outpost based on Manhattan. So he then becomes the one replacing Kieft. And he comes there with his wooden leg, stumping, you know, onto the wharf and into the town and ready to, you know, make this place into something. Is his primary goal to make it a more profitable business? I mean, this is the question. Or is he interested in developing a community and governing a place? That's such a good question. And that's what a colleague of mine at the New Netherland Institute named Dennis Micah is writing a book now about New Amsterdam as a commercial city, the traders there, to what extent they and Stuyvesant as the leader, were seeing themselves within this system under the West India Company

and to what extent they were in it for their own goods and in it for their own sake as an entity. its own right. And I think Dennis is concluding that Stuyvesant made a shift from early on seeing himself in his battles with Vanderdunk as representative of the West India Company. Here's the way we want to do it. I have to make sure the company earns a profit. To realizing over time all these back and forth, these letters with the directors of the company, none of them have ever come here. They don't understand the situation they're in, nor do they really understand the promise that this new continent holds, these other independent business leaders here with him, however, do see that. So he comes to see himself as one of them, but also as a mediator. He's trying to stitch this whole

system together and really take, as I said, these building blocks of what we would call capitalism and make them work in a new way in this new landscape and in this city of New Amsterdam. It's such an archetypal story. You have the hardcore right wing, if you like, of Stuyveson, versus van der Donk and his crowd pushing a more liberal philosophy of this community, more representative, a greater voice of the people and so forth. It is, as you said, reflective of what's happening back in the homeland. I guess no surprise there. But it's really a matter of who's going to win this push-pull that's going to define this colony in the end. In 1648, there's a representative council elected in the colony called the board of nine. And Adrian van der Donk is one of them. And a year later, he's called home to the Hague, which is the capital of the Netherlands at the time, to testify how the colony is being run. This becomes a long passage in his life. He ends up writing an important document. Yeah, he becomes, as I said, a spokesman for the populace over against Stuyvesant and his rule. So this is the backstory to what I was just talking about, where Stuyvesant comes to realize that his larger duty in a way is to the development of this community, this community of

New Netherland, of this colony. And I think that Vanderdonk was trying to, trying in this appeal that he makes before the governing body in the home country, he was trying to get them to see, look at this. I mean, he writes this very moving document, the remonstrance of New Netherland, which then he turns into a book that he has published. And that book is how a lot of people first hear of a place called Manhattan. And he's basically making this appeal saying, look, you don't understand how big this land is and how much promise there is in it. Yes, we're there right now trading for furs, but there's much more here. And he actually says, look, if you don't really fully support this to the extent that we need, the English are to the north of us and to the

south of us, they're going to take it, and it will all happen. Everything I'm talking about will happen, but it will happen under the English. So he's remarkably prescient in understanding the history that's going to come. They were, of course, very aware of the ambitions of the English. And yet Stuyveson has a very strong relationship with John Winthrop up there in Boston. There's two John Winthrop. He had a good relationship with John Winthrop in Massachusetts, the head of that colony. And then his son becomes the head of the Connecticut colony, the governor. And the Netherlands had this relative tolerance compared to other European places. Stuyvesant, I think, didn't buy into that. I mean, he clearly admired the New England colonies because they were pure. And at one point,

he writes home that his colony is made of the scrapings of all nations. So he doesn't quite get this whole, look how tolerance makes us strong and all that. So he has that kind of relationship. He wants to negotiate a permanent boundary. He wants to have good relations with them. And he's aware, though, he's a very smart guy. He's very aware that the whole time they are just waiting to take over. Another dynamic here is you've got the English civil wars happening through much of this period. Life is really hard there. And people are coming over from England into New England. And then from there, they're pushing southward into the Dutch territory. So he's having to deal with that kind of incursion at the same time. It's fascinating to consider that these guys, I mean, of course,

they would be projecting their European sensibility on this new continent. I mean, this is just going to be a whole bunch of countries, just like over there in Europe. And they're all going to get along or they're going to go to war or whatever, but it's just going to be another version of Europe in the end. It wasn't any sort of homogenous idea, except maybe the English started to think that way. Well, yeah, you know, but just to that point, it's really fascinating. A side story to all this is the relations between the different New England colonies. All of the New England colonies were sort of aligned against Boston, against the Massachusetts Bay, because they were the only ones with an official charter. They wanted to see themselves as autonomous. The government in England

left them alone for a long time. They amassed all this power. So you have that kind of tension going on at the same time among the English. What happens to Van der Donk? Does he get back to the new world? He actually, you know, this is this very dramatic thing where the states general, the Dutch governing body, grants him his petition. He gets more government recognition for New Netherland. In particular, the city of New Amsterdam is granted a municipal charter. So it becomes an official Dutch city in 1653. And that's still the date that New York City considers the date of its chartering. Within a matter of days, Oliver Cromwell, the English leader at the time, declares war on the Dutch. and so the government pulls back and they decide they were going to recall Stuyvesant, but they say we rescind that order, stay in place, and they put Vanderdonk under house arrest.

Eventually, he's allowed to go back because he has his home, his family, his property, he's allowed to go back, but under the stipulation that he not participate in politics. So he goes back and he's there for a few more years, but very quiet because he's forced to be. Eventually, ironically, he dies in an attack. probably caused by trouble to the south, and then Native Americans came north and they attacked outposts, including Banderthog. What's ironic is he had developed very good relations with the Indians in his neighborhood in what's now just north of Manhattan. But anyway, he dies in this attack. We don't know that officially, we only know that shortly after that Stuyvesant refers to him in the

past tense in communication. He emerges from your story as a really good guy. You really like Van der Donk. He's a good soul. Yeah, I mean, that's how I saw him. I'm working on a book now that is kind of a follow-up, not quite a sequel, but it's back in that period. And so I'm revisiting a lot of this history. And I'm coming at it with a somewhat different view because you take in more information, more information has come out. It's like, you know, there was a period of time when there were three years in a row where people wrote biographies of Ronald Reagan. And each one, it's like, who is this guy?

I mean, there are each completely radically different portraits. It's like you add some new information and the picture changed. The whole colony, New Netherland, is all centered on the Hudson River, basically. It's really along that river. Did they have notions of expanding? Was that the idea? Actually, there were three river systems that they saw as part of their colony. The Hudson, they called the North River.

The South River was what became known as the Delaware. And then the Fresh River is the Connecticut River. I mean, that was a large swath of territory for the time. They only had about 10,000 people over an area that's now about covers five states, more or So, yes, people did see, and in fact, they were aware that the Hudson eventually goes up and almost connects with the Mohawk River Valley. And they knew that the Iroquois were arranged along there, along the Mohawk, and that that extended to a great body of water, of course, the Great Lakes. So they had this sense that the future lay to the west. So again, they foreshadowed, at least in their understanding of what could be the development that American history would take.

It is one of the most remarkable twists of history that the Dutch make such a successful stand in North America for half a century but end up walking away. But it wasn't really like that. That's what's so fascinating about your story. Tell us about how it happened that Dutch North America folded into British holdings. How was this a unique capitulation? Yeah, I think that Stuyvesant was forced by virtue of being outmanned and outgunned and they were out of gunpowder in the fort. And, you know, when the English came in in 1664 to invade or threatening to invade, he's looking at the cards in his hand and he's trying to rearrange them and he's threatening

to counterattack and all this. I think the really vital thing is this quick negotiation that took place in a matter of a couple of days between the English under Richard Nichols and the Dutch under Stuyvesant. They met at Stuyvesant's Bowery, so-called his farm. And they hashed out these articles of transfer, which are quite remarkable. They allow everyone to keep everything they have. They allow the Dutch. I mean, I think the English on their side understood by this time.

I think Nichols understood that whatever this new thing was the Dutch were doing here, it worked. And Nichols didn't want to have to wipe the slate clean. He didn't want to have to bomb the place to ruin and start over. He wanted to keep that working. He just wanted to work under the English. And so the question of who won, I think for New York and its future, what's fascinating is that the Dutch Empire was reaching its height. The English Empire had a lot more to go. So it became then, with this takeover, a node on both of these global empires. The Dutch kept sending settlers there.

The notaries kept writing, this person is going to New Netherlands. They wouldn't call it New York. They kept up trade. And the English, of course, then it became part of the English system, too. So in terms of New York and its ultimate growth and power, it was a lucky thing to be part of both. So in a way, they surrender, but it's not really surrender. You know, I think of the Dutch is so ultimately pragmatic as a nation and reasonable as a culture. And all that goes into the decision to say, you know what, we could fight this out, but it would really not benefit us in the end, the Dutch especially, because they're going to win. How about we just find a way of, it's almost like an art of war thing. Let's win by surrendering. And in that regard, they are able to continue their

businesses hold on to property. The negotiation is very reasonable. The English say, keep it all going on. You're making lots of money. We like it. We'll just sort of lay this new template upon you. Is that kind of a fair way to look at it? I think that's pretty fair. I mean, of course, there's a lot of complexity in there once you get down into the details and the records. At one point, Nichols, once he becomes the governor of New York, he starts to go off in his own direction and all these Dutch leaders come to him and they're waving the articles of capitulation of transfer. And they're saying, look, Remember, we have these, and you agreed to this. And so he's forced to issue this new statement saying, yes, we're still abiding by it.

I think one interesting fact is that some of the early mayors of New York are Dutchmen who were prominent citizens in New Amsterdam. So that shows you that this merger took effect. And it goes on, which is what is so amazing about your book. And I really mean that. I don't use that lightly. I have been a New Yorker since I was in my 20s, decades of being here, confused as to why this city is. so unique in the story of America. I mean, a completely unique municipality. There's lots of reasons for this, of course. But at the core of the culture, your book demonstrates is a very likely

clue that is passed down through this Dutch sensibility, that tolerance, liberalism, a laissez-faire quality to the place, be who you are, expresses itself through the culture, even to this day. Yeah, I think that's true. And, you know, when you're in the records of the period, of course, it doesn't quite look like it's the 1960s and they're hippies or something. I mean, it takes on its own character in the 1600s. But I think that's exactly it. And as you say, there are a lot of other factors as well. In England, you have this shift just before the takeover. The Puritans were in power. And then the Stuart Kings came back on the throne. I think American historians have tended to have an inverted understanding of the role of English power politics in the American colonies. That is,

they have often said, well, look at New England because, you know, New England was the progenitor of America and the end of the Puritans and this is the promised land and all that. And they stood against the English kings who represented the monarchy and autocracy. Well, I tend to look at it as the Puritans were the dogmatic ones who had their very authoritarian approach to, this is the promised land and they're the chosen ones. And the stewards, relatively speaking, were promoting relative freedom of religion. They wanted to end this. They had been fighting against that kind of Puritan dogmatism.

So that's part of the mix, too, that you have this new regime in England that's coming in that wants to ally itself with what the Dutch had been doing there. And then it's popularized by Washington Irving. And it continues on as being sort of this pleasant myth of New York that folds itself even further into the story of the making of the city. It's really amazing. I mean, anybody who visits the city has to read this book. Island at the center of the world. Russell Shorto, this has been a long time coming for me, and I'm really honored to speak with you about this.

I can't wait to read your next book. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much, Don. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History, hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.