Taking Manhattan The extraordinary events that created New York and shaped America

Historian Shorto's latest lively, well-written, and well-researched book chronicles the English conquest of New Amsterdam, on Manhattan Island, and New Netherland, a Dutch colony extending from the Delaware River north and east to the Connecticut River. Shorto deftly and vividly focuses on a conflict between Peter Stuyvesant, Dutch colonial governor of New Amsterdam, and Richard Nicolls, sent to take New Netherland by King Charles II, who was jealous of Dutch economic and colonial successes. Despite having overwhelming military force, Nicolls knew New Amsterdam was prosperous and did not want to destroy it; accordingly, he, Stuyvesant, and New Amsterdam residents negotiated a "surrender," which was really an Anglo-Dutch merger. Shorto describes how the Dutch and English poorly treated Native Americans and brought slavery to Manhattan. Shorto's meeting with Chief Vincent Mann, elected and hereditary leader of the Ramapough Lunaape, who lived on Manhattan for centuries, opens the book, and Shorto brings the period to vibrant life by portraying female Montaukett chief Quashawam, as well as many New Amsterdam residents whose lives are revealed in invaluable translations of Dutch records.

The 1664 deal that transferred power from the Dutch to the English in what is now New York City was an inventive act that would be foundational to the metropolis to come, according to historian Shorto's revelatory sequel to The Island at the Center of the World. When Richard Nicolls, the Englishman tasked with capturing New Amsterdam, came up against Peter Stuyvesant, the director-general of the Dutch enclave, the two men astonishingly disobeyed orders from their respective empires to fight and instead negotiated peacefully. Long considered merely a sign of Dutch decline, Shorto sees more to the story of the handover: the contrarian Nicolls and the abrasive Stuyvesant were not only the right men at the right time--both constitutionally suited to ignore authority--but also a kind of new man brought into being by the very empires that had molded them. Agents of imperial capitalism, they were more interested in business than war: the deal preserved and expanded the unique system of free enterprise that had been brewing on the tiny island, with unprecedented freedom of religion and property guaranteed by Nicolls for residents of the already famously business-friendly and pluralistic city. (The earlier Dutch theft of Manhattan from the Wampanoag, Shorto suggests, also presaged another uniquely American form of dealmaking--the scam.) Shorto's storytelling is wry and accomplished, transforming a campaign of letter-writing and procedural legerdemain into a brisk and amusing saga. Readers will be wowed. (Mar.)

Making a metropolis. Shorto, whoseThe Island at the Center of the World stands as one of the seminal books about early New York, returns to the subject with a masterful account of the international struggle for control of 17th-century Manhattan, a fascinating, often overlooked saga. After taking the island from Indigenous peoples in 1626--an "injustice," he notes, that resonates 400 years later--the Dutch built a polyglot commercial hub. Chapters on figures like Dorothea Angola, a Black landowner skilled at working the levers of local government, provide a sense of the settlement's varied populace. The nascent city's unforgivable "life as a slaving port" ramped up in 1659, with the arrival of a ship carrying enslaved African children. But Dutch dominion was brief, and it's the "second taking of Manhattan" that garners most of Shorto's attention. In 1664, English frigates appeared offshore, intent on seizing control. Unprepared for military battle, the Dutch surrendered after tense, vividly depicted negotiations. Named for England's Duke of York, the city eventually became the "pluralistic and capitalistic" one we know today due in part to the melding of Dutch and English practices--some of which remain shocking. The Duke of York's title, abbreviated as DY, was branded on the bodies of enslaved people, and Manhattan under English control became "a major hub of the slave trade." Never losing sight of cultural influences still felt in the 21st century, Shorto crafts a narrative packed with intrigue and fascinating subplots, reproducing pages of decoded English military cipher and sizing up the map that might've been. Under one 1660s royal decree, Connecticut was briefly "a continentwide monstrosity" that included today's New York and reached "the South Sea," as the Pacific Ocean was then called. A bracing narrative of the international standoff that birthed America's biggest city. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.