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in the canal, their dickering with householders reminiscent of similar scenes in the Netherlands. Stuyvesant also established a ten-day free market, to be held every St. Bartholomew’s Day (August 24). “Corresponding to the legal Amsterdam Fair,” it would be a time when ordinary municipal regulations were suspended, prices would be subject only to the law of supply and demand, and no stranger could be arrested. In 1659, moreover, the burgomasters made the space in front of the fort available for a forty-day-long “market for fat and lean cattle” each autumn; soon the market would be housed in a new building with tiled roof, later called the Broadway Shambles. Proclamations for these events were issued in English as well as Dutch and attracted farmers and their herds from as far away as Southampton.

Stuyvesant kept close watch on retail markets too. He required all persons who kept a “private shop” in cellar or garret, or who carried “on any Trade by the small weight and measure,” to use “genuine Amsterdam ells, measures and weights” that had been inspected at the fort. He was not, on the other hand, prepared to establish price controls. When townsmen petitioned him in 1657 about the high cost of “Necessary commodities and household supplies”—charging that not only “Merchants, but also, consequently, Shop-keepers, Tradesmen, Brewers, Bakers, Tapsters and Grocers, make a difference of 30, 40 & 50 percent when they sell their wares”—he took no action. Instead, he banned “Scotch traders”—itinerant merchants from Holland or elsewhere who began visiting the colony soon after the West India Company abandoned its monopoly on trade in 1639. By selling their wares at steep discounts and paying outrageous sums for beaver pelts, these “destroyers of trade,” as Stuyvesant called them, could beggar the town’s permanent residents. He therefore prohibited anyone from doing business in New Amsterdam who had not built a “decent citizen dwelling” and lived in it for three consecutive years. The directors of the West India Company were avid supporters of free trade, however, and they overruled his ban on “Scotch traders.”

Stuyvesant was prepared to impose stricter controls on artisans than on merchants, especially in such vital local enterprises as brewing, slaughtering, and baking. In the face of repeated complaints about the supply and quality of “black” bread—a mainstay of the local diet—he established the assize of bread customary in the Netherlands, ordering bakers to produce only eight-, four-, or two-pound loaves, at fixed prices, using unadulterated wheat or rye flour “as it came from the mill.” At the same time, to stimulate domestic production, Stuyvesant handed out monopolies for the manufacture of tile, bricks, potash, salt, and other products (it isn’t clear how many such enterprises were actually launched, or how long they survived). Here again West India Company officials rejected policies they thought might discourage prospective settlers. Interference with the law of supply and demand, they explained, reduced “the expectation of gain” that “is the greatest spur to induce people to go thither.” Similarly, Stuyvesant’s monopolies seemed “very pernicious and impracticable especially in a new country, which begins only to develop, and must be peopled and made prosperous by general benefits and liberties to be granted to everybody.”

Soon, however, the burgomasters were issuing ordinances to the same effect. “All bakers, brewers, shopkeepers and merchants” should “sell their goods at reasonable prices to the people,” they announced in 1658. Porters, cartmen, tradesmen, and laborers were told what they could charge for their services; outsiders or “strangers” were forbidden to offer their wares for sale except at stated times and places.

Now it was the bakers who protested, openly defying the ordinance requiring them to sell coarse bread at fixed prices. Squeezed by the rising cost of grain, they routinely sifted their flour with bran, short-weighted loaves, and surreptitiously produced more of the higher-priced white bread and