New Netherland
Nieuw Nederland ( 
) (German Neu-Niederlande) was a Dutch colony existing from 1624 to 1667 on the east coast of North America, now the east coast of the United States.
The Dutch West India Company (WIC), which founded and administered the settlement, claimed an area that stretched from Newport Bay in the east to the Delaware River in the west and the St. Lawrence River in the north and included areas of the present-day U.S. states of Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. The main areas of settlement were on Manhattan and Long Island and along the Hudson, Delaware, and Connecticut rivers. The administrative seat was Nieuw Amsterdam, later New York.
The most important exports of the colony, which boomed rapidly under its last director, Petrus Stuyvesant, were furs and tobacco grown on the fertile soils. In 1664, shortly before the beginning of the second Anglo-Dutch naval war, Nieuw Amsterdam was conquered by the British. In the Peace of Breda, the Netherlands ceded the colony to England in 1667. After a brief reconquest of Nieuw Amsterdam, the area finally fell to the British Crown in the Peace of Westminster in 1674.
Nicolaes Visscher's 1656 map Novi Belgii Novæque Angliæ, here in a 1685 version, is the best known contemporary illustration of Nieuw Nederlands. It was frequently reprinted and was long considered the best map of the Dutch colony. After the capture of Nieuw Nederlands by the British, it was even used to draw the border between New York and New Jersey. Nova Belgica or Novum Belgium was the Latin name of the colony, corresponding to the Latin name for Netherlands: Belgii.
See also
- List of governors of Nieuw Nederland
