Boston was settled in 1630 by Puritan Englishmen of the Massachusetts Bay Company, who, for religious reasons, put the Atlantic Ocean between themselves and the Church of England. Ostensibly founded for commercial reasons, the Massachusetts Bay Company, under its governor, John Winthrop (1588-1649), brought its charter--which it regarded as authorization to set up a self-governing settlement in the New England wilderness--along to the New World. The new town was named for Boston in Lincolnshire, the former home of many of the immigrants.

Through necessity rather than choice, New Englanders turned to the sea for a livelihood and became shipbuilders, merchants, seamen, and fishermen because there was little else to do. The Shawmut Peninsula, upon which Boston was settled, was an ideal setting for a seaport. It was described in 1634 by William Wood in his New England Prospects as "fittest for such as can Trade into England, for such commodities as the Country wants, being the chiefe place for shipping and Merchandize." With the triumph of the Puritan Party in England in 1648, people moved freely between New England and the homeland, and close ties of family and trade linked Boston and London. By the end of the 17th century, Boston's fleet of seagoing vessels was exceeded only by those of London and Bristol in the English-speaking world. Boston held its place as the largest town in British North America until the middle of the 18th century, when it fell behind the faster growing ports of Philadelphia and New York City.

During its first 50 years Boston was a homogeneous, self-governing Puritan community in which the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Company ruled as they saw fit. The three Puritan churches, established on the congregational principle, accounted for almost all the organized religion in Boston. Religious dissidents were banished, and some Quakers who persisted in returning were hanged for their pains. Although the increasing prosperity of the colonial merchants made London quite aware of Massachusetts Bay, steps to assert royal authority there were taken only near the end of Charles II's reign, in the 1680s. The company's charter was declared null and void in 1684. In 1686, with the arrival of Sir Edmund Andros as the first royal governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, the authority of the crown was established in Boston itself. With this change, the Church of England first came to the town, and the Puritan isolation was over. Although the Congregational clergy, particularly the voluble father-son combination of Increase (1639-1723) and Cotton (1663-1728) Mather, still made themselves heard, the lines of authority had altered.

Boston never proved wholly docile. When word of the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688 reached them, the citizens on April 18, 1689, dumped Andros out of office and imprisoned him. The memory of the autonomous first half-century lingered. As London endeavoured to enforce navigation laws and gain revenue from the Boston trade at the expense of the colonies, the aggrieved inhabitants indulged in what they felt to be justified resistance against unlawful authority. After passage of the Stamp Act by Parliament in 1765, disaffection grew, and the governor's house was stormed and gutted, an act that destroyed many irreplaceable records of the colony's history. The Boston Massacre of 1770, in which British troops fired on a crowd of civilian hecklers and killed several persons, and the Boston Tea Party of 1773, in which colonists disguised as Indians dumped three shiploads of tea into Boston Harbor, were key incidents in measuring popular sentiment prior to the Revolution.

With the confrontations and exchange of shots at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, the die was cast. When George Washington's army besieged the British in Boston during the following winter, normal life in the town was suspended. On March 17, 1776, impelled by Washington's artillery positioned on Dorchester Heights, British troops and officials left. They were accompanied by loyal supporters of the crown, including a number of the principal merchants. A constitution was framed in 1780, and John Hancock was elected the first governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

New men risen from obscurity by way of political or military service or ventures at sea during the Revolution quickly filled the places left vacant by departed Loyalists. Independence gravely imperilled Boston's maritime trade, for, at the close of the Revolution, Boston merchants automatically became foreigners in the ports of the British Empire. Thus, survival depended on finding new channels of trade. The crisis was solved by sending ships to distant and hitherto unfamiliar ports. The development of the China trade and other new routes, such as those to India, raised Boston to greater prosperity than ever before.

Throughout the first half of the 19th century, maritime commerce produced substantial fortunes, which were supplemented by others achieved in mercantile and manufacturing pursuits without recourse to the sea. Bostonians in the 1810s began to establish textile mills, first at Waltham in 1813 and then in new towns along the Merrimack River, where waterpower was plentiful. The advent of railroads in the 1830s brought these once-distant towns suddenly closer. The burgeoning of Boston's population was due not only to maritime commerce and manufacturing but also to the unanticipated arrival of immigrants from Europe in such numbers that the city grew more than 20-fold during the 19th century. By 1822 the traditional form of government, in which a board of selectmen administered the decisions reached by the vote of all citizens at an annual town meeting, had become unmanageable, and a city charter was obtained from the legislature.

The 19th century also saw Boston assume its focal position in the religious and educational life of the new nation. The rapid and large-scale infusion of immigrant groups and the loss of dominance by the Congregational descendants of the Puritan settlers were major factors in the change. When it was built in 1799, the Church of the Holy Cross was the only Roman Catholic church in town. In 1808 its founder, Jean-Louis Lefebvre de Cheverus, a refugee from the French Revolution, was created the first bishop of Boston, and in 1875, when the see was raised to the dignity of an archdiocese, there were 28 Catholic parishes.

The religious climate of Protestant Boston also changed dramatically. The Anglican King's Chapel, whose Loyalist rector had left with the British in 1776, became Unitarian in 1787, though not until the first quarter of the 19th century did Unitarian doctrine produce permanent cleavage and splinter organizations in many Congregational churches. The creation in 1825 of the American Unitarian Association, in which William Ellery Channing (1780-1842) took the leading part, transformed into a separate denomination what had previously been the liberal wing of Congregationalism. From "Channing Unitarianism" it was only a step to the philosophy of Transcendentalism, which affected a great part of the region's artistic output and thought for much of the century; to the abolitionist movement championed by the outspoken writer and editor William Lloyd Garrison (1805-79) and others; and to liberal high-mindedness in social causes, which preoccupied many 19th-century Bostonians at a time when others were simply making money with great Yankee diligence. In the second half of the 19th century, the city was also the place where Christian Science was founded by Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910). It remains the site of The Mother Church and the headquarters of this faith, which grew into an international Christian denomination.

Educational and cultural institutions had a similarly rapid growth. Across the Charles River in New Towne, later Cambridge, a college had been founded in 1636 to provide the infant colony with religious scholars and ministers. It was named for the Charlestown minister John Harvard (1607-38), who bequeathed his library to the institution in 1638, and was the sole college in the area until the third quarter of the 19th century. Though Harvard retained the most prestigious position throughout the century, a host of other major institutions of higher learning were founded, and Boston became synonymous nationally with scholarship and cultural refinement. It became also the mecca for persons--from abroad or from the "less civilized" parts of the nation outside New England--who sought these qualities amid the bustling commercialism and rambunctious growth that characterized much of 19th-century America.

The Civil War, in which a majority of Bostonians strongly supported the Union, put an end to shipping as a major consideration in the life of Boston. Shipowners and merchants invested thenceforth in manufacturing, in railroads, and in the development of the rapidly expanding frontier. Banking and investment, with the interplay that they implied with various forms of manufacturing and of business, superseded maritime commerce as the principal occupation of Boston in the second half of the 19th century. In the early 20th century, however, the business horizons contracted. Though large sums of money continued to be invested outside of New England, fewer distant companies were controlled from Boston. The city's financial capital was still strong, but the rising strength of New York City and Chicago and of the developing states of the American West gradually reduced the proportion of capital that Boston could muster. Nevertheless, Boston's financial management firms showed a skill in investment that caused them to be well regarded in other parts of the country. This led eventually to a major growth of those Boston companies that administered mutual investment funds. Thus, the "prudent man," whether in a private trustee's office or an investment company, has survived as a Boston asset, whereas the textile mills and railroads have proved to be less permanent. The textile industry passed into crisis in the 1920s, and the industrial cities on the Merrimack River, created by Boston investment, entered on decades of hardship. In the following years some mills went out of business entirely, while others moved to the South in search of cheaper labour and raw materials.

The first half of the 20th century in Boston was a divisive and unhappy period, for, in addition to corruption in local politics, it included two world wars separated by Prohibition and the Great Depression. After World War I the increase of automobiles led more and more Bostonians to move outside the city limits, with consequent detriment to older central residential districts. Many of the defense industries that sprang up after World War II, based on the imagination of scientists from Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and other centres, were located outside the city limits.