In 1664, Great Britain captured New Amsterdam, leading to the Second Anglo-Dutch War. Britain suffered mightily in that war and lost Suriname to the Dutch. At the Treaty of Breda in 1667, the Dutch decided to keep that sugar colony and let Britain hold on to New York. 
The Dutch briefly recaptured New York in 1673 and then lost it again. But the Dutch had decided in 1667 that Suriname was a more valuable prize than the fur trading port town in New Netherland. Sugar made fortunes then. New York's greatness was a century and a half to come.
I begin my Early American History class with this little example bc it illustrates the changing locus of power in the Atlantic World from the 17th to 19th centuries. In the 1660s, North American colonies were of less value than sugar plantations in the Caribbean & South America.
The bigger lesson is that nobody can see the future. The Dutch and British would both build enormously successful empires that would last centuries. But few could have imagined in the mid-17th a future so dominated by a new nation whose wealth grew from that North American port.
At the same time, this example illustrates how much more valuable the southern colonies were within North America - esp. South Carolina and its rice plantations. And, of course, the Atlantic slave trade, which sent over 12.5 million enslaved Africans to this Hemisphere.
In fact, the vast majority of people who crossed the Atlantic until the 19th century came over in a state of unfreedom. In addition to enslaved Africans were indentured servants from the British Isles and Palatine German redemptioners landing in Philadelphia.
In the 19th century, the City of New York emerged as the entrepot between outgoing trade to Europe and the arrival of millions of immigrants, first from Britain, Germany and Ireland, then from Italy and Eastern Europe, and then from the Caribbean and from East and South Asia.
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