New York City

Under British administration, New York’s destiny as a premier global seaport solidified, though this growth was built on a dark and coercive foundation. By the early eighteenth century, the city had become a vital hub in the transatlantic triangle of trade, wealth, and human bondage. By 1730, more than forty percent of New York households enslaved Africans, making the city one of the largest centers of domestic and industrial slavery in the northern colonies. The labor of these enslaved men and women built the very docks, roads, and fortifications that secured the city's wealth, while its shipping and banking industries became deeply entwined with the slave economies of the American South. The physical memory of this era lay buried for centuries beneath the pavement of lower Manhattan until the 1990s, when the excavation of the African Burying Ground near Foley Square revealed the skeletal remains of up to twenty thousand colonial-era Africans. Despite these deep social fractures, the city was also a crucible for early concepts of American liberty. In 1735, the acquittal of printer John Peter Zenger on charges of seditious libel established a critical precedent for the freedom of the press in North America, signaling a growing restiveness under British colonial rule.

That restiveness erupted into open warfare during the American Revolution, a conflict that nearly destroyed the city. In August 1776, the fields and hills of Brooklyn became the stage for the Battle of Long Island, the largest engagement of the war. Following a series of devastating defeats, George Washington's Continental Army was forced to abandon Manhattan, leaving New York to be occupied by the British military for the remainder of the war. Under British rule, the city became a crowded, precarious sanctuary for Loyalist refugees and thousands of escaped slaves who had been promised freedom in exchange for service to the Crown. A disastrous fire in 1776 consumed a quarter of the city's buildings, including the historic Trinity Church, leaving the population to huddle in tents and ruins. When the British finally evacuated in 1783, taking thousands of Black loyalists with them to resettlement in Nova Scotia and Great Britain, they left behind a scarred, ash-ridden seaport. Yet, New York’s recovery was astonishingly swift. By January 1785, the city was named the temporary national capital of the newly independent United States, serving as the seat of government under the Articles of Confederation.

The modern metropolis that eventually emerged from these colonial and revolutionary embers was forged by a grand consolidation. In 1898, the independent cities and counties surrounding the harbor—Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island—voted to unify into a single, massive municipality. This consolidated New York City became an economic and cultural colossus, its growth accelerated by waves of immigration that made it the premier gateway to the nation. Today, the city stands as a hyper-dense, hyper-energetic global center of finance, media, and diplomacy, anchored by the skyscrapers of Wall Street and the international territory of the United Nations. Its five boroughs occupy a landscape where natural geography and human engineering have fused, from the deep glacial channels that still carry global shipping to the reclaimed shorelines of Manhattan. Centuries after the first Dutch traders set up their tents on Governors Island, the city remains defined by the same relentless, mercantile energy that first brought it into being—a monument to the transformative power of global convergence.