Who ruled New York?

New York stands where the Hudson River meets one of the finest natural harbours on the Atlantic coast, spread across Manhattan, Long Island, Staten Island and a corner of the mainland. A deep, sheltered anchorage and a river reaching far inland made it a trading post first and a world city later. Two things define its history: commerce, which drew merchants and capital from the Dutch era onward, and immigration, which turned a colonial town into the largest city in the United States.

The islands and shores of the harbour were part of Lenapehoking, the homeland of the Lenape, who fished, farmed and moved seasonally between village sites. Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed into the harbour in 1524, and Henry Hudson explored the river that bears his name in 1609 for the Dutch East India Company. In 1624 the Dutch West India Company landed settlers on what is now Governors Island, and soon afterwards built Fort Amsterdam at the southern tip of Manhattan. The town around it, New Amsterdam, became the capital of New Netherland, a fur-trading colony of the Dutch Republic. Enslaved Africans were brought in from the 1620s and did much of the early building work.

An English fleet took the town without a fight in 1664, and it was renamed New York after the Duke of York, the future James II. The Dutch recaptured it in 1673 and called it New Orange, but returned it the following year, so English rule began some decades before the map's 1715 snapshot suggests. Under the British Empire it grew into a busy port, and in 1735 the trial of the printer John Peter Zenger became an early landmark for press freedom in the colonies.

During the American Revolution, British forces defeated George Washington in the Battle of Long Island in August 1776 and held the city until November 1783, using it as their main base; a great fire in September 1776 burned much of lower Manhattan. After independence New York served as the national capital, and Washington was inaugurated as the first president at Federal Hall in 1789. Alexander Hamilton, Treasury secretary and a New Yorker, helped make the city the country's financial centre.

The Commissioners' Plan of 1811 laid a street grid over the whole of Manhattan, and the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 linked the port to the Great Lakes and the farmlands of the Midwest. Irish and German immigrants arrived in huge numbers from the 1840s, followed by Italians, Jews from eastern Europe and many others; from 1892 most passed through Ellis Island. Overcrowded tenements, the Draft Riots of 1863 and machine politics were the darker side of this growth. In 1898 Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island were consolidated into a single city of more than three million people.

Skyscrapers, the subway (opened in 1904) and the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s made New York the emblem of modern America. The Great Depression hit hard, but public works under Mayor Fiorello La Guardia built bridges, parks and highways. After World War II the city became home to the United Nations. Industrial decline and the flight of the middle classes to the suburbs brought a fiscal crisis in 1975, when the city came close to bankruptcy, before finance and services drove a long recovery. On 11 September 2001 hijacked airliners destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center, killing nearly 2,800 people in the city. New York today has more than eight million residents and is a leading global centre of finance, media and culture.