1624
Richelieu Becomes Chief Minister
Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal Richelieu, thirty-nine years old and implacable, was named to the inner council of Louis XIII. He would spend the next eighteen years breaking the Huguenots, taming the nobility, raising taxes, and dragging reluctant France into the Thirty Years' War on the Protestant side, all in service of a ruthless vision of French greatness.
Dutch Establish New Amsterdam
The Dutch West India Company landed thirty families at the southern tip of Manhattan and began laying out a trading post called New Amsterdam. Within two years Peter Minuit would trade sixty guilders of goods for the island with Lenape leaders who thought they were granting use, not ownership. The confusion over land and sovereignty would haunt the continent.
Dutch Establish Fort Zeelandia on Taiwan
The Dutch East India Company built a sandstone fortress on a sandy peninsula off the southwest coast of Taiwan, naming it Fort Zeelandia. From this humid outpost they taxed the deer-hide trade, proselytized among indigenous villages, and tried to wedge themselves between Ming China and Tokugawa Japan. The fortress would stand for thirty-eight years.
Virginia Becomes a Royal Colony
Disillusioned by famine, massacre, and mismanagement, James I revoked the Virginia Company's charter and placed the colony under direct royal rule. The pattern, a private colonial venture absorbed by the Crown once it became valuable or troublesome, would be repeated across the empire for two centuries. Virginia's tobacco economy, however, only grew more profitable under the king's own administration.