Tour of the inner city, starting at the John Adams Institute – Amsterdam’s American cultural center -, making our way through the famous canal zone, lined with hundreds of 17th century merchant’s houses.
Kind of walking seminar with pictures, on the embarrassment of riches, covering the Golden Afe, that is much of the 17th century. Featuring the emergence of the VOC, the United East India Company, the world’s first multinational company, with the right to found colonies and wage wars, and the world’s first company to issue stocks, so everyone could share in the wealth.

American historian Russell Shorto, who founded the John Adams Institue while living in Amsterdam, considers Amsterdam the cradle of democracy, brought to the United Kingdom as well as to the United States…

As an offshoot of the VOC, in 1625 the WIC was founded – the West India Company, that took over Brazil and the Antilles from the Portuguese (where the VOC took over Ceylon and Formosa) to take a share in the sugar trade and diamond trade, but eventually resorted to slave trade.
The John Adams Institute is actually located in the WIC’s former headquarters, the courtyard adorned with a statue of Peter Stuyvesant, last governor of New Amsterdam, present-day New York, capital of New Netherland. So that is the tour’s starting point.