BAlthough sometimes viewed as declining, the United States remains the world’s largest economy. New York is a symbol of this, both for the migrants, who have flocked there over the past two centuries, and for its most bitter opponents.
The Statue of Liberty, the Twin Towers and the Wall Street Stock Exchange (the New York Stock Exchange) had in common their location at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, which was the cradle of Dutch and then English colonization, before independence from the United States in 1776.
A brand of cigarettes has the name of Peter Stuyvesant (1610 or 1612- 1672) written on its packets as “the man who founded New York”.
However, he was neither at the origin of the city nor a tobacco planter. But its history is linked to that of New York and to the colonial rivalries between the English and the Dutch who set out to conquer the North American continent in the 17th century.e century.
Sent by the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the English explorer Henry Hudson made a stopover in 1609 on the island of Manhattan, where the navigator Verrazanno, Florentine in the service of the king of France François Iis, had already passed in 1524.
Then, in 1613, the Dutchman Adriaen Block created a first colony in the south of the island. In 1626, Peter Minuit, also in the service of the VOC, bought the Indian island for 60 florins, built a fort there and founded the colony of New Amsterdam.
IN 1647 IN MANHATTAN
In 1647 Peter Stuyvesant arrived in Manhattan as general manager of the Dutch possessions stretching from Delaware to the Connecticut River, after having been commercial agent of the Dutch West India Company and governor of the island of Curaçao, where he had fought the Spaniards.
In Manhattan, he reorganized the colony, reinforced its defenses with a wall at the current location of Wall Street, and seized New Sweden, a Swedish colony located south of the Dutch settlements.
But he has to face the English claims. Since the arrival in 1620, near present-day Boston, of English colonists embarked on the Mayflower, the English founded their own colonies, New England.
The Anglo-Dutch wars in Europe find their extension across the Atlantic.
Despite the Treaty of Hardford (1650) which established a border between the two colonies, British troops commanded by the Duke of York, brother of King Charles II, attacked the Dutch possessions and, in 1664, Stuyvesant was forced to cede New Amsterdam to the English, who renamed it New York in honor of their leader. Peter Stuyvesant will end his life in Manhattan, where he had bought land.
During the Dutch period, the colony exported furs, timber and tobacco, which would assume increasing importance with the expansion of plantations in the English colonies of Virginia, Maryland and Carolina.
The port of New York also became a major exporter of flour in the 18th century.e century. At the end of the XIXe century, more than two thirds of American imports and a quarter of exports passed through the port of New York, which had become the most important in the world, and the city was the first industrial city of the country.
The New York flag still testifies to its origins today, as it depicts beavers, emblems of the West India Company, a settler, an Indian, a mill and barrels of flour …
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