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Long Island, Staten Island, Harlem, Yonkers, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Wall Street in New York City, NY, are just a few names that remind us of the city's original name, Nieuw Amsterdam. The territory claimed in 1609 by English explorer Henry Hudson on behalf of Dutch East India Company merchants, and lost to the English some 60 years later, has a turbulent history full of rivalry, betrayal, disaster, and wars, many, many wars. Early American History | New Amsterdam |1| The Perfect Island | 1:10:36 Defragged History | 19.4K subscribers | 75,649 views | Premiered March 6, 2025

On February 27,* 1623, the Dutch East India Company beheaded twenty who had been waterboarded into confessing to a terrorist plot. As in modern times, this scenario originated with resource competition in the Muslim world … in this case, competition for spice, in Indonesia. European colonialism had pitted the Dutch East India Company against its British counterpart on the archipelago, both scrabbling after the lucrative trade in cloves and pepper, with garnishes of nutmeg, cinnamon, mace, and ginger. The two rival powers had, as we lay our story, recently come to a tense truce, dividing the commerce between them —...