New Netherland

A Dutch colony that lasted forty years and set the character of the city it founded for the next four centuries. The Dutch West India Company established trading posts on the Hudson from the 1620s, with New Amsterdam at the tip of Manhattan and Fort Orange at what became Albany, and it recruited settlers from anywhere rather than from one nation or church - a visiting Jesuit reported eighteen languages spoken in a town of a few hundred people in 1643. Jews expelled from Dutch Brazil were admitted in 1654 over the director-general's objection, because the company's shareholders included some. That commercial indifference to origin is the colony's real legacy. England seized it without a shot in 1664 and traded Suriname for it at Breda, keeping the Dutch land patents, the religious mixture and the trading character. Dutch place names survive across the region - Brooklyn, Harlem, the Bronx, Yonkers - and Dutch was still spoken in parts of the Hudson valley into the nineteenth century. Wall Street follows the line of a defensive wall. Santa Claus arrived through the same channel. The colony's territory covered parts of modern New York, New Jersey, Delaware and Connecticut. New Amsterdam had around fifteen hundred inhabitants when it was surrendered. Its charter of liberties and the petition against expelling Jews are early documents of religious tolerance in North America. Coleslaw, cookie and boss are Dutch words that entered American English there. The flag of New York City still uses the Dutch colours, and its seal carries a beaver for the trade the colony was founded on.

• Existed: 1624 CE – present
• Type: Entity