ABSTRACT
Amsterdam grew as a trading city, connected to the world, infected with the accents and attitudes of faraway places and stimulated by the friction between the parochial and the exotic. At a time we sometimes imagine to have been firmly fixed in place; contained within walls, and between town hall and church spire – it already occupied a position at the intersection of networks of commerce extending way out into Europe and the rest of the world. Amsterdam in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a bustling center of dealing and bargaining: prosperous, expanding rapidly, regularly bursting through and remaking its outer walls. Its streets and quays were alive with an abrasive mix of merchants and shippers, shipbuilders and fishers, bankers and middlemen, rubbing shoulders with a motley collection of economic migrants, itinerants and refugees from less hard-headedly broad-minded attitudes and mores. This was no sleepy village; the foreigner and stranger were commonplace in its streets and coffee shops. But at the same time Amsterdam was a city of citizens and of neighborhoods, inhabited by people linked by a sense of common identity and with a sense of belonging in its streets and squares.
