TAKING MANHATTAN

Making a metropolis.

Shorto, whose The 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.