The all-but-forgotten origins of Manhattan, told with humor and
an acute eye for primary sources. It’s good to remember, the
author suggests, that the early 17th century was the age of
Shakespeare, Descartes, Vermeer, and Bacon, a time of change and
tumult. Not the least part of that tumult was Dutch political
and legal progressivism, “their matter-of-fact acceptance of
foreignness, of religious differences, of odd sorts.” Tolerance,
in a word, though Shorto (Saints and Madmen, 1999, etc.) is
quick to point out that that meant “putting up with” rather than
celebrating diversity. By the time New Amsterdam had been
established, more as a business settlement of the West India
Company than as a colony, its babel of nationalities were
seeking balance between chaos and order, liberty and oppression.
“Pirates, prostitutes, smugglers, and business sharks held
sway,” he notes. “It was Manhattan . . . right from the start.”
Despite the tyrannical leanings of the colony’s early directors,
from Willem Kieft to Peter Stuy