The most successful city in the world is named after Britain’s most abject failure as a monarch. By the time he was overthrown after three short years on the throne, James II, previously the Duke of York, was a symbol of intolerance, trying to impose Roman Catholicism by decree against the popular wishes of a largely Protestant nation. In Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events that Created New York and Shaped America, Russell Shorto shows how New York ironically represented everything that James II opposed: a merger of Englishmen who were not so very zealous in their religion and the Dutch who valued tolerance positively for the wealth and social stability it generated.

　　New York was originally New Amsterdam, a colony established in 1624 by the Dutch West India Company. As Shorto shows, New Amsterdam was a classic entrepôt, a trading port that brought in goods for import and export. And like entrepots the world over, it attracted traders of various nationalities, ethnicities, and religions. It contained Walloons and English as well as Dutch, Africans, and Native Americans;Jews and Catholics as well as Protestants. A Jesuit priest counted 15 different languages spoken among its 1,500 inhabitants.

　　New Amsterdam proved Montesquieu’s thesis that commercial spirit brought with it tolerance and social peace. Peter Stuyvesant, the irascible representative of the West India Company and effective governor of the colony, was not a naturally tolerant man. He tried to throw out Lutherans and Jews, but they successfully appealed to the West India Company back home. As an economist would note, religious discrimination is bad for business, and the company, therefore, prevented their agent from indulging in his taste for bigotry. While there was slavery, as there had been in most places and times across human history, slaves could petition for freedom, which was frequently granted. Mixed race marriage occurred with some frequency.

　　The downfall of New Amsterdam had its seeds in the Restoration of the Stuarts to the throne of England. Charles II and his brother James looked across the Atlantic and saw that the colonies represented two of their greatest challenges. The Dutch were in New York “flaunting” their “commercial superiority,” and the Puritans who controlled New England were a vestige of the forces that had proved fatal to their father and destabilizing to Britain.

　　It is largely forgotten that for these dual reasons, the Stuarts sent a strong naval force to the colonies. Richard Nicolls, as a supporter who had shared their exile, had instructions not only to take New Amsterdam but also to bring the Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay colony to heal. Shorto is excellent at describing how different that colony was from New Amsterdam. It was far less commercially successful, with more rustic homes compared to the opulent abodes of New Amsterdam that were even beginning to rival those in their home country. It was also far less religiously tolerant. While the Massachusetts Bay colonists had left England to practice their religion in peace, they did not welcome those who wanted to use their land to practice any religion other than their own. Shorto acutely observes that while the Native Americans were divided into tribes, an impartial observer might have said the same of the colonies. The Anglican tobacco farmers of Virginia, the Puritan residents of Boston, and the merchants of New Amsterdam all differed in dress, sensibility, and habits of life.

　　The core of Shorto’s book focuses on Nicolls’ successful acquisition of New Amsterdam for Britain in 1664. (Nicolls was far less successful with the colonists in Boston, who refused to hand over one of the regicides of Charles I and generally ignored Nicolls’ suggestions of greater cooperation.) Shorto explores in detail the question of how Nicolls persuaded the Dutch to give up sovereignty by permitting them to retain their property. A commercially minded deal was the key to keeping this commercially minded city on its continued upward trajectory.

　　For Shorto, the successful negotiationwas a result ofa combination of Enlightenment ideals and Dutch culture. He believes that the negotiations over New York resulted in something akin to a merger, rather than a hostile takeover, because they took place in the dawn of the age of reason. Nicolls recognized that most of the value of the entrepot would be lost if he had to risk its destruction by bombardment and so offered very favorable terms.

　　America is a mixture of the unyielding principle that can seem almost theological and a more pragmatic sensibility that is generated in part by enthusiasm for innovation and wealth.

　　Shorto also focuses on the negotiations in New Amsterdam that took place between Stuyvesant as representative to the East Indian company and the city council of New Amsterdam, representing the burghers who lived there. Here he argues that those negotiations helped lead to peaceful resolution, because of the characteristic Dutch openness to negotiation that derived from keys aspects of their national experience. Much of the Netherlands was under constant threat from the sea. As a result, the Dutch had to agree to special and differential taxes to keep up the infrastructure that kept the dry land (“the polder”) from the sea. “The polder model is the Dutch term for their characteristic approach to problem-solving; sitting down and talking, talking, talking, talking, until everyone feels that they have gotten at least some of what they wanted.” That willingness to talk it out, according to Shorto, saved New Amsterdam.

　　These explanations from intellectual history and cultural anthropology have some bite, but I thought Shorto may have omitted a simpler one—the agency costs of having Stuyvesant represent the interests of the far away Dutch East Asia company. Stuyvesant had himself become an exceptionally large landowner in New York, owning most of what is now the East Village in Manhattan. He stood to lose enormously from the destruction of New Amsterdam and the subsequent expulsion of the Dutch. His own son signed a petition to him urging a peaceful resolution.

　　Stuyvesant had a force of 150 ready and eager to fight with artillery from their fortified city. But given his own interests, it is not surprising that Stuyvesant, while making a show of resistance for consumption of his masters in The Hague, ultimately agreed to let Nicolls occupy the town peacefully. He got an agreement that was styled a “transfer” rather than a “surrender” and that guaranteed his and his fellow denizens what most mattered to all of them—their property and commercial rights in perpetuity. Indeed, these terms might be said to constitute the first bill of rights in America.

　　And once these rights were guaranteed, Stuyvesant lived most of the rest of his life in New York and became the progenitor of a family now numbering in the thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, including many distinguished and wealthy Americans. Nicolls, in contrast, soon left his post as Governor of New York and died without descendants in a naval engagement led by his hapless patron, the Duke of York, against the Dutch in the North Sea. A futile battle indeed, since it was the Dutch stadtholder, William of Orange, who the English would invite to replace James II in the Glorious Revolution sixteen years later.

　　As is often the case with today’s historians, Shorto’s book is weakest when it tries to be most presentist. He draws a contrast between the rigid puritanism of early Boston and the tolerant pluralism of New York and fixes them as the continuing polarities of American history. There is something to this dichotomy. America is a mixture of the unyielding principle that can seem almost theological and a more pragmatic sensibility that is generated in part by enthusiasm for innovation and wealth. But Shorto then makes the facile claim that puritanism is the bad America and the pragmatic inheritance the good. For instance, Puritanism today is the Christian Right, “defiantly moralistic,” arrayed against the tolerant forces of multiculturalism.

　　But this is beyond simplistic. Our defiantly moralistic heritage, much of it in Christian form, was behind some of the great political crusades in America, including the abolitionist movement. Tolerant New York was complacent about slavery or worse: it was the site of some of the worst riots against the Union cause in the North during the Civil War. And it is a mistake as well to identify intolerant moralism only with religion. The very term “woke” recalls the Great Awakening, where Jonathan Edwards’s famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God,” separated the wicked from the elect. The modern secular woke are no less censorious and no less certain than people can be separated into clear categories. Sadly, Shorto seems to view the contemporary world from a shallow left-liberal perspective. He certainly knows little of conservatives, misstyling the National Review as the “National Journal.”

　　It is strange that a historian who celebrates New York as an amalgam of the strong points of Dutch and English culture cannot see that America has benefited from the tension between puritan Boston and pragmatic New York. Indeed, just as Athens and Jerusalem’s contrast between faith and reason make the West the most encompassing culture of the last two millennia, so the combination of commercial and religious culture has made America a success. A nation cannot become great either on principle or on calculation alone. It must be propelled by transcendent ideals even as it is willing to engage in the messy—sometimes low—calculations to realize them.

　　Nevertheless, overall Shorto has written a fine book, which brings to vivid life a period of American history largely forgotten. He is right in his fundamental point that the Dutch, the preeminent commercial culture of their time, contributed much to America’s DNA. The Puritans came to America seeking freedom to practice their religion but did not extend that freedom to others who wanted to join them. In contrast, the Dutch came to New Amsterdam seeking to trade and—with the sad exception of slaves—extended that freedom to all who settled there. That freedom, in turn, helped secure religious freedom and even the political rights that the members of the town council exercised to help persuade Peter Stuyvesant to save the city (even if his interests meant he did not need much persuasion). New York would never be the Puritans austere city on a hill, yet it became America’s vibrant heart of capitalism.