I’ve done a couple of posts about community on the Web, and the sort of personality or sense of place that can grow up around a site. Today I have a few observations about some slightly older subject matter.

Lately I have been reading an interesting book on the early Dutch settlement of New Netherlands, The Island at the Center of the World.

The author makes a poetic and compelling case that the Dutch influence on the place that was to become New York City is much greater than it’s been given credit for. Past accounts–and let’s remember that here as everywhere, history is written by the victors–portrayed the Dutch colony here as a kind of barely-relevant footnote, a tiny trading post easily overrun by the British so that the real history of the colony could begin.

But New York ended up as a different place than the rest of the British colonies, always diverse and with relatively (and “relative” is a relative term, of course) little strife among the many groups that made up, and make up, its polity. Through the course of the city’s history, the people of New York have proved difficult to distract from their collective goal, making money.

New Amsterdam was a strange place for the time, with free and slave blacks, Englishmen, Dutchmen, Indians, and all sorts of other people meeting for the shared purpose of commerce, probably in one of the colony’s taverns. Nobody really cared about others’ personal lives, religion or ideology. This doesn’t sound entirely unfamiliar to this New Yorker.

There are countless other factors influencing the development of New York, such as the city’s near-perfect natural harbor, but I think it is at least possible that the influence of the Dutch settlers remains part of the city’s practical nature and general tolerance. Despite dismissive popular accounts, maybe there is something essential to the city that the Dutch left for us. For some reason I’d like to think that the city’s origins somehow still influence it.

Full disclosure: I am of Dutch descent. My first ancestor on these shores, Jan Gerretje van Dorlandt, arrived in New Amsterdam in 1652.