Konstantin Dukhovnyy, IDC 4001H – Prof. Maciuika, 3/3/14

New Amsterdam, New York, New World, yet nothing new in the greed of the few. One of the most surprising yet understandable events that Russell Shorto’s Island at the Center of the World highlighted was how the settlement of New Amsterdam was taken by England and renamed New York. A man that so loathed what Netherlands had become, Peter Stuyvesant, was in charge of its single greatest colony within the New World, and yet was willing to fight to the death for the very people he looked down upon. The events leading to Stuyvesant handing over the island of Manhattan to a British armada of over one thousand soldiers and English citizens around the island molded one of the most important events in history.  Although the power of the Dutch empire was weakening and the West India Company wasn’t as eager to aid their colonial entrepreneurs anymore, the British would never have known if it wasn’t simply by chance. If it wasn’t for one Connecticut governor John Winthrop, son of great governor of Massachusetts, and cousin of an angry British politician and ambassador to the Netherlands, then we may never have been a British colony nor would slavery have been imprinted upon our shores.

The way we learn history in school isn’t by what events occur in the same time frame but rather thematically. To understand that when the British took Manhattan from the Netherlands, they simultaneously took a small part of West Africa that was also owned by the Dutch is very important. Every move the British made was for their future endeavors in the plantation business. New York would be the great port of the New World, and the colony within West Africa taken by the British would supply the large workforce necessary to keep the plantation running for a long time to come. The single act of this man sailing back to England to get an official charter from the King, the single act of him passing through New Amsterdam, knowing this would take him the Netherlands where he would see his cousin and politician George Downing, the single act of Peter Stuyvesant parading his friend, British Governor John Winthrop, around New Amsterdam to show him exactly how the city works and where everything is, led to not only the downfall of the Dutch in the New World, but the downfall of any hope for equality in the New World. New Amsterdam wasn’t just the port of the future, it was the city of the future. Even in its birth, New York was the epitome of equality and tolerance. Every one was given equal opportunities and equal mobility up the social ladder. Whether you were Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, White or Black, in New Amsterdam, you were equal. And it all fell because one man unknowingly blew it down, simply because he wanted an opportunity for his own people.