While many economies elsewhere in Europe were still feudal, the Dutch pioneered an economic system based on individual ownership of real estate. That came about because the Dutch provinces occupied a vast river delta, in which land was at or below sea level and therefore constantly under threat. People in those communities banded together to build dams and dikes and reclaim land. The new land was not owned by a king or a church. Instead, the people who had created it divided it and began buying and selling parcels. That incentivized a whole society, fueled the growth of an empire, turned the Dutch into entrepreneurs and made them the envy of other Europeans.

This new economic mind-set likewise got transferred to New Amsterdam, where everyone was a trader, an entrepreneur. The port became so efficient that even archrivals in the English colony of Virginia sent their goods to Europe via what would become the New York harbor. The nonaristocratic, egalitarian bent of the Dutch also gave society on Manhattan a uniquely upwardly mobile character, distinct from that of, say, Boston. Who you were mattered less than what you could do.

That said, it was probably a supreme stroke of luck that the English barged in one fine September day three and a half centuries ago. Had the city remained New Amsterdam, it likely would have languished. Eight years after the English takeover, the Dutch Republic suffered a devastating military defeat at the hands of France and England, which signaled the beginning of the end of its empire.

But England was on the rise. The people who took control of Manhattan realized quickly that a unique society had formed there, and kept its features in place. As part of a newly energized commercial empire that was to span the globe, New York, with its pluralistic, business-savvy and upwardly mobile society, rose to unimagined heights.

The concepts of tolerance and free trade both related to a new appreciation of the individual. New York was born alongside the world-historic force of liberalism, a philosophy that prized individual freedom above all else. What is little appreciated, though, is the grounding of individualism in collectivism. It was the Dutch agreement to work together for the common good of holding back the sea that allowed for the rise of prosperity and a society based on singular achievement.