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Welcome to the Quillette podcast, hosted on alternate weeks by me, Jonathan Kay, and by Iona Italia.

Quillette is where Freethought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas

and fearless commentary. You are about to hear a free preview of this week's episode. To hear the

full episode, and to get access to all our podcasts and articles,

visit us at quillette.com and click the subscribe button. And today we're going to be talking

about the Big Apple, back before anyone called it that. We're going back to the year 1664,

when New York was controlled by the Dutch,

and was still known as New Netherland. At the time, the community didn't extend much beyond

the very southern tip of what we now call Manhattan, and numbered only a few thousand people,

even if you included all the scattered villages and farms that existed along

the shores of modern Brooklyn, Queens, and surrounding areas of Long Island.

But in the world of 17th century geopolitics and commerce, New Netherland punched well above

its weight, as it was a bustling multicultural trade hub populated by not only Dutchmen, but also Englishmen,

Jews, emancipated black yeoman, immigrants from all over Western Europe, and enslaved peoples

captured from Spanish ships. From the English point of view, it was also an aberration,

because it separated England's Massachusetts colony in the northeast and England's

...