Amsterdam, Shorto - B

                                               The subtitle is 'The History of the World's Most Liberal City'.   Shorto traces the city's openness and willingness to accept new ideas, and its commitment to equality and individual freedom to two sources. First, it always was and still is a trading city filled with people from the four corners of the known world.  Port cities chock full of  foreigners doing business with locals are historically open minded places. Second, it never had a medieval top-down structure.  The land was mostly reclaimed, and consequently, was broadly owned.  Living on a floodplain requires strong individuals capable of cooperation with their neighbors.  Of equal importance to those traditions is its escape from Spanish domination and Catholicism, an event celebrated as the Alteration and traced back to May, 1578.  The next step in the city's forward trend was the prosperity brought on by the success of the Dutch East India Company.  It was the world's first for-profit permanent entity, an extraordinarily successful business, and one that led to Amsterdam's per-capita income to be four times that of Paris.  The public ownership of its stock allowed for that stock to be sold, exchanged, even shorted in the world's first stock exchange. Amsterdam was always open to new people; it had a vibrant Jewish section, and welcomed the Hugenots when they were expelled from France and the Catholics forced out of Germany and England. We sometimes forget it was from Amsterdam that the Pilgrims sailed, after fleeing religious persecution in England. Shorto has also written a book about Manhattan and clearly believes that much of New York's inheritance is traced to the Dutch.  As Amsterdam marched through time, it became the home of worker's rights, women's rights,  homosexual's rights  - a place where those on the outside were afforded respect and choice. There were  two reviews of this book in the NYTimes. The staff reporter was complimentary, and an outside historian posited that the author had lost his way as he finished the book.  As I thought that his foundation in the 16th and 17th centuries was much stronger than his observations of Amsterdam more recently,  I think I prefer the first half of his book and consider the rest a bit forced.