In 1664, Charles II of England and his brother James, Duke of York raised a fleet to take the Dutch colony of New Netherland, then under the Directorship of Peter Stuyvesant.

In the late 18th century, colonists in New York rebelled along with the other Thirteen Colonies, and supported the American Revolutionary War that led to the founding of the United States.

In 1617, officials of the Dutch West India Company in New Netherland created a settlement at present-day Albany, and in 1624 founded New Amsterdam, on Manhattan Island.

The Dutch colony included claims to an area comprising all of the present U.S. states of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Vermont, along with inland portions of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Maine in addition to eastern Pennsylvania.

On September 24 Sir George Carteret accepted the capitulation of the garrison at Fort Orange, which he called Albany, after another of the Duke of York's titles.

The New Netherland claim included western parts of present-day Massachusetts (to an extent that varied depending on whether the reference was the States General claim of all lands as far east as Narragansett Bay or the Treaty of Hartford negotiated by the English and Dutch colonies in 1650 but not recognized by either the Dutch or English governments) putting the new province in conflict with the Massachusetts charter.

[2] Governor Edmund Andros in 1674 said "permit all persons of what religion soever, quietly to inhabit within the precincts of your jurisdiction"[9] Nonetheless, he made the Quakers of West Jersey pay toll on the Delaware, but they applied to England and were redressed.

However, in April 1689, when news arrived that King James had been overthrown in the Glorious Revolution, Bostonians overthrew their government and imprisoned Dominion Governor Edmund Andros.

[15][16][17][18] Nearly 2,800 Palatine German emigrants were transported to New York by Queen Anne's government in ten ships in 1710, the largest single group of immigrants before the Revolutionary War.

In October, at what became Federal Hall in New York, representatives of several colonies met in the Stamp Act Congress to discuss their response.

The day before, James De Lancey organized a meeting at Burns Tavern of New York merchants, where they agreed to boycott all British imports until the Stamp Act was repealed.

A leading moderate group opposing the Stamp Act were the local Sons of Liberty headed by Isaac Sears, John Lamb and Alexander McDougall.

Historian Gary B. Nash wrote of what was called the "General Terror of November 1–4":[31] But New York's plebeian element was not yet satisfied.

Some two thousand strong, they threatened the homes of suspected sympathizers of British policy, attacked the house of the famously wealthy governor Cadwallader Colden, paraded his effigy around town, and built a monstrous bonfire in the Bowling Green into which the shouting crowd hurled the governor's luxurious two sleighs and horse-drawn coach.

In New York, however, the "mob was largely made up of seamen, most of whom lacked deep community ties and felt little need to submit to the authority of the city's shorebound radical leaders."

[citation needed] In 1766, widespread tenant uprisings occurred in the countryside north of New York City centered on the Livingston estates.

In the last years of the French and Indian War London approved a policy of keeping twenty regiments in the colonies to police and defend the back country.

The De Lanceys tried to reach a compromise by passing a bill which allowed for the issuing of paper currency, of which half was for provisioning of the troops.

[39] The New York City Sons of Liberty learned of Boston's plan to stop the unloading of any tea and resolved to also follow this policy.

Since the Association had not obtained the support they had expected, the Sons of Liberty were afraid that if the tea was landed the population would demand its distribution for retail.

News of the battle of Lexington and Concord reached New York on April 23, which stunned the city since there was a widely believed rumor that Parliament was to grant the colonies self-taxation.

New York served as the launching point for the failed Invasion of Canada in 1775, the first major military operation of the newly formed Continental Army.

On July 10, 1776, the Fourth Provincial Congress changed its name to the Convention of Representatives of the State of New York, and "acts as legislature without an executive."

Under its provisions, the governor would be elected not appointed, voting restrictions were reduced, secret ballots were introduced, and civil rights were guaranteed.

David Osborn notes, The election for an open seat in the New York assembly, held on the Village Green in Eastchester, Westchester County on October 29, 1733, is one of the better known political events in colonial America.

Vernon, as part of the story of the printer John Peter Zenger, whose acquittal in a seditious libel case in 1735 is seen as a foundation of the free press in America.

An important technique that developed especially in Boston, Philadelphia and New York in the 1720s and 1730s was to mobilize public opinion by using the new availability of weekly newspapers and print shops that produced inexpensive pamphlets.

[54] The lawyers of colonial New York organized a bar association, but it fell apart in 1768 during the bitter political dispute between the factions based in the Delancey and Livingston families.

The American Revolution saw the departure of many leading lawyers who were Loyalists; their clientele was often tied to royal authority or British merchants and financiers.

As the merchant port of New York became more important, the economy expanded and diversified and the agricultural areas of Long Island and the regions further up the Hudson River developed.