The Island At The Center Of The World by Russell Shorto

From The Week of October 15, 2012 Though we cannot recognize all the ways in which its influence manifests upon us and our society, the past is always with us. It lives in our language and our culture, in our institutions and in our customs, the seeds of another time flowering through our present. This is why we study history, why it is more than dates and times, battles and fetishes, because to understand them is to understand how we are like them. It is to comprehend the unbroken chain of cultural and biological genetics that have been handed down to us across countless generations. We do not invent things or generate ideas in a vacuum. They emanate from our training and our society, from our experiences and our backgrounds, all of which falls under the banner of history. To understand it is to understand ourselves and this is what Mr. Shorto endeavors to do in his exhaustive chronicle of an unfairly forgotten American colony.

Before the English and the French, before the Boston Tea party and the American Revolution, there existed, on an island we now call Manhattan, the headquarters for a colony named New Netherland. The result of Dutch efforts to find a route to Asia not already claimed by the Spaniards or the Portuguese, it was Holland's western-most colony, an ambitious, and even at-times prosperous, stab at empire that claimed a considerable portion of what is now New York's coastline. Established in 1614, it was governed by several iron-fisted Dutchmen whose heavy-handed policies drove their own colonists, who then enjoyed more rights than most European subjects, to discord and rebellion, disharmonies which went a long way to preventing the colony from flourishing and becoming a desirable destination. However, what the Dutch did not themselves ruin by dispute the English finished with war, deploying a measure of their increasing navel power to capture the colony and bring it under the banner of Britannia.

However, though New Netherland persisted but for some 50 years, its presence left enduring marks on the island which would one day be the beating heart of business and commerce in the human world. Its physical layout and even some of its legal codes were adopted there by the British, ensuring that more than the Dutch names for streets and neighborhoods would survive into the 21st century. Its people endured on the land they'd chosen, carving out lives expanded by their descendents, leaving a legacy that would long outlive the names of the men who fought over and shaped the forgotten colony of New Netherland.

As much a tale of archaeological history as colonial, The Island At The Center of The World is an engaging, if overly exhaustive, examination of a brief but fascinating period of pre-American history. Mr. Shorto, a historian, capitalizes on the somewhat recent discovery, and ongoing translation of, Dutch histories of the colony previously ignored. From these documents spill a treasure trove of information about the colony's leaders and the political rivalries in which they disastrously embroiled themselves in the years prior to the English conquest of what would come to be called New York. To the author's credit, New Netherland's strong, formerly neglected characters are fully realized here, their actions held up against the backdrop of the three Anglo-Dutch wars which saw the colony traded back and forth before being firmly settled in the English camp, ironic given that the English crown itself would soon be worn by Dutchmen.

This is an interesting chronicle, full of personalities and difficult deeds. However, while Mr. Shorto does yeoman's work in reviving the importance of the Dutch history of early America, he does less than a stellar job grounding these deeds in a coherent chronology. The importance of rivalry and dispute are elevated well above dates and times, leaving the colony's 50 years to blur together in a seething mass of discord and trailblazing. That said, this shortcoming does little to diminish the degree to which he has brought New Netherland into focus, all while popularizing the astonishing efforts of the dedicated souls who work, even now, to complete the difficult translation of 400-year-old records.

Verbose but valuable... The united States is a nation of inputs, blood and power, culture and custom, poured into it from the immigrants who swim for its shores. It should then come as little surprise to find that one of its first colony's was a microcosm of what was to come. (3/5 Stars)