On August 21, 1948, New York City celebrated the 50th anniversary of the union of Brooklyn and New York. Back in 1898, the merger had seemed less like a happy marriage than a hostile takeover: While thousands of Manhattanites gathered in front of City Hall for a parade and fireworks, Brooklyn marked the occasion with a few speeches characterized, according to Francois Weil, by a “funereal melancholy.” Half a century later, however, even Brooklyn could be proud to be a part of Greater New York, now self-evidently the greatest city in the world. After World War II, when “Berlin was in ruins, London … had renounced its financial supremacy, and Paris its cultural dominance,” the future belonged to the city that had long been America’s financial, cultural, and maybe even spiritual capital.

The city celebrated with its characteristic blend of spectacle and knowhow. A telescope atop the Empire State Building was trained on a star 50 light-years away, whose visible beams had been emitted in the year 1898. The telescope transmitted the light to photoelectric cells, which sent radio waves to trigger an atomic pile, where the splitting of a uranium atom ignited an explosive charge that split a ribbon stretched across Lexington Avenue.

A city that could conceive and execute such a combination of Rube Goldberg innovation, atomic-age bravura, and vaudeville showmanship surely doesn’t need its self-esteem validated by outsiders. So it can afford to find in Mr. Weil the rare writer about New York who remains unseduced by his subject’s charms. Mr. Weil, a Parisian scholar of U.S. history whose “A History of New York” appeared in French in 2000, admits that “New York is fascinating.” But while he acknowledges the city’s “powerful magnetism,” he writes, “I have … conceived this book as an attempt to temporarily break New York’s spell.”

In his compact history, then, New York is not rapturously evoked, but dryly chronicled. He approaches the city with what seems a distinctly French suspicion, compounded of cultural hauteur and bien-pensant politics. The result is a salutary reminder of how New York appears to much of the world – American in its dynamism, but Philistine in its cult of wealth, and Babylonian in its heedless excess.

Mr. Weil’s book is not much bigger than a Frommer’s guide, and it offers a similar bird’s-eye summary of its subject. Instead of vivid personalities and anecdotes, Mr. Weil offers many almanac-style lists – of professional societies, ethnic groups, major imports and exports. His prose is liable to swerve into academic abstraction, as when he writes that the uniform grid imposed by the 1811 street plan was an attempt “to reconcile the contradictory principles of republican egalitarianism and speculative liberalism.” This sounds rather less convincing than the view of a contemporary surveyor, quoted by Mr. Weil, that “the great merit of the plan lay in the ‘ease it allows in buying, selling and making a profit’ from real estate on Manhattan.”

Indeed, buying, selling, and making a profit have been New York’s rai son d’etre from the very beginning. The first Europeans to set foot on Manhattan were Dutch sailors on a fur-trading mission, whose ship caught fire on the Hudson (then called the Mauritius) River in 1613. The New Netherland Company, chartered in 1615, was a consortium of Amsterdam merchants less interested in settling the New World than turning a quick profit. In 1626, they

established New Amsterdam on the southern tip of Manhattan, not as a colony like Massachusetts or Virginia, but as a trading post. By the time the English absorbed the town, in 1664, it still had only 1,500 inhabitants.

But the destiny of New York – as it was renamed after its new patron, the Duke of York (the future James II) – had already been set, in two major respects. First, it would be a com mercial and financial center, not an agricultural one. This specialization, which ensured that its population lagged behind Boston’s and Philadelphia’s throughout the colonial period, meant that New York was ideally placed for the 19th-century explosion of trade, industry, and finance. By the start of the Civil War, New York was the port of entry for two-thirds of the nation’s imports, as well as the hub of American banking, insurance, law, fashion, and media.

Second, it would be a cosmopolitan city. Already in 1643, Mr. Weil recounts, a visiting French Jesuit remarked that “On the isle of Manhate, and its environs, there may well be four to five hundred men of different sects and nations,” speaking “eighteen different languages.” (Mr. Weil’s reliance on the eyewitness accounts of French visitors is one of the novel features of his book.) As New York’s population grew exponentially – 220,000 in 1830, 1 million in 1860, 2.5 million in 1890, 7.5 million in 1940 – its diversity remained constant. In the mid-19th century, it was the biggest German city outside Germany, and the biggest Irish city outside Ireland. At the turn of the 20th century, Italians and Jews dominated; then blacks arriving from the South, and Puerto Ricans and others from the Caribbean; today, Latin Americans and Asians. In a nation of immigrants, New York has always been known as the city of immigrants.

Mr. Weil leads the reader through these and many other transformations, cultural, political, and economic. As he approaches the present, certain small errors and oddities become more noticeable. The TV shows of Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld are not “New York-based”; no American would think to identify Woody Allen as a “shrewd connoisseur of bars and clubs”; to say that Village bohemians in the 1920s were “in reaction against … institutions” like the Metropolitan Museum and Carnegie Hall is off the mark. These matters of tone and idiom are less obtrusive than Mr. Weil’s political slant, evident in his remarks on “the rise in social inequalities, racism, tensions between communities, and police violence encouraged by the authoritarian politics of Mayor Giuliani.” Even with these blind spots, however, Mr. Weil sees New York clearly enough to know that it remains “one of the best places from which to observe the world.”