The Dutch port built on a drained marsh below sea level — which ringed itself with planned canals around 1600, became one of the world's richest and most important trading cities during the seventeenth-century Golden Age, hosted the first modern stock exchange and the home base of the Dutch East India Company, drew refugees with its relative tolerance and funded the painters of the age, and rested its fortune partly on colonial conquest and the Atlantic slave trade.
Amsterdam sits below the level of the sea that made it rich. Its people drained a swamp, drove the water back with dams and dikes, and around 1600 dug a planned ring of canals that is still the city's emblem. In the century that followed, this engineered port became the wealthiest trading city on earth. It became home to what is often called the first modern stock exchange, housed the Dutch East India Company — among the first global joint-stock corporations — and drew Jews and dissenters fleeing persecution while its merchants paid for Rembrandt. That same fortune was built in part on armed empire and the buying and selling of enslaved people. The splendor and the shame were made by the same hands.