But that was only on paper. As mentioned earlier, the Dutch had already lost control of the New Netherlands and had little hope of regaining it. “The Dutch thought, ‘If they could get it back, how long would they keep it?'” said Jan de Vries, professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Berkeley. “British troops were invading from all sides.”
Currently, the difference in value between the two islands at the center of the agreement alone is enormous. In 2022, the gross domestic product of New York County (also known as Manhattan) was $886 billion. Meanwhile, as the Times article notes, Lung has no cars, roads, high schools, or electricity during the day. (There is a Manhattan Guesthouse.) Residents make a living by harvesting nutmeg and fishing for tuna.
“It’s a subsistence economy,” Australian geologist Ian Burnett, who has written a book on the East Indies and has visited Lund several times, told me. “There’s a lot of fish, fruit and vegetables.” When the 14-year-old Lun resident quoted in the Times article was shown a photo of Manhattan on his cell phone, he didn’t like how it looked. “There’s a lot of buildings,” he said.
When English and Dutch negotiators concluded the Treaty of Breda in 1667, the differences were not so stark. Nutmeg was in high demand not only as a spice, but also (some believed) as an aphrodisiac and a cure for plague. Much of Manhattan was still forested, and there were multiple estuaries along the coastline. While Lunn had nutmeg, big businesses in Manhattan traded beaver pelts and other natural resources to Native Americans in exchange for axes, knives, kettles, scissors, glass beads, and other manufactured goods. That was it. Nutmeg hats and beaver hats were both the height of fashion in his 17th century Europe.
But there were already signs that New York was destined to be cut off from other islands far from Europe. The Dutch and then the British began making it a trading hub, and “ships sailed from Europe to ports in South America, the Caribbean, and North America, then back home,” Russell Short wrote in his 2004 book. The island at the center of the world. ” In an interview, he said of Manhattan: And it happened. ”