Toronto, Canada's largest city, was founded as the Town of York and capital of Upper Canada in 1793 after the Mississaugas sold the land to the British in the Toronto Purchase. For over 12,000 years, Indigenous People have lived in the Toronto area. The ancestors of the Huron-Wendat were the first known groups to establish agricultural villages in the area about 1,600 years ago.

In the 17th century, the Toronto Carrying-Place Trail along the Humber River became a strategic site for controlling the fur trade farther north. The Seneca people established a village of about 2,000 people known as Teiaiagon along the trail. The French set up trading posts in the area, including Fort Rouillé in 1751, which they abandoned as the British conquered French North America in the Seven Years' War.

In the 1790s the British began to settle Toronto and built the garrison which became Fort York at the entrance to Toronto Harbour. The Americans attacked the village and garrison during the War of 1812. In the decades after the war, tensions between the colony's conservative elite, the Family Compact and the democratic Reformers grew and culminated in the Rebellions of 1837-1838.

After the failed rebellion, the Orange Order, a conservative Protestant fraternal organization, became the dominant power in local politics in a city intensely dedicated to Britishness. However, the city was not exclusively British. Many Irish Catholics settled in the city following the Great Irish Famine. The city was also a terminus of the Underground Railroad. Thousands of Black Americans who escaped slavery settled in Toronto before the American Civil War.

In the second half of the 19th century, Toronto grew into an important regional centre, linked to the rest of Ontario by a growing railway network and American and British markets by its port. By 1914, the city's financial sector, profiting from a mining boom in northern Ontario, was competing nationally with Montreal, while American corporations were increasingly choosing Toronto for branch offices.

World War I and World War II tremendously impacted the city, with tens of thousands of residents volunteering to fight and participating locally in a "total war" effort.

After World War II, another major influx of immigrants came to the region. The Province of Ontario formed a regional government, Metropolitan Toronto, encompassing Toronto and its suburbs in 1954. The Governments invested heavily in infrastructure facilitating a boom in population and industry. In the second half of the 20th century, Toronto surpassed Montreal as Canada's largest city and became the economic capital of Canada and one of the most multicultural cities in the world. In 1998, the Province of Ontario amalgamated the metropolitan governments and its suburbs into one unified municipality.

Etymology

"Toronto" was originally used on maps dating to the late 17th and early 18th century to refer to Lake Simcoe and the portage route to it. Eventually, the name was brought down to the mouth of the Humber River, which is where the present City of Toronto is situated. The bay serves as the end of the Toronto Carrying-Place Trail portage route from Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay.

The word is likely derived from the Mohawk word Tkaronto, meaning "where there are trees standing in the water", which originally referred to The Narrows, near present-day Orillia. People who had lived there prior to the Mohawk drove stakes into the water to create fishing weirs. French maps from the 1680s to 1760s identify present-day Lake Simcoe as "Lac de Taronto". The spelling changed to "Toronto" during the 18th century. As the portage route grew in use, the name became more widely used and was eventually attached to a French trading fort just inland from Lake Ontario on the Humber.

Confusion about the name of location may also be attributed to the succession of First Nations peoples who lived in the area, including the Neutral, Seneca, Mohawk, Cayuga and Wendat nations.See R. F. Williamson, ed., Toronto: An Illustrated History of its First 12,000 Years (Toronto: James Lorimer, 2008), ch. 2, with reference to the Mantle Site It has also been speculated that the name origin is the Seneca word Giyando, meaning "on the other side", which was the place where the Humber River narrows at the foot of the pass to the village of Teiaiagon.

From August 1793 to March 1834, the settlement was known as "York", sharing the same name as the county it was situated in. The settlement was renamed when Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe called for the town to be named after the Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany. To differentiate from York in England and New York, the town was informally known as "Little York". In 1804, settler Angus MacDonald petitioned the Parliament of Upper Canada to restore the original name of the area, but this was rejected. The town changed its name back to "Toronto" when it was incorporated into a city.

Early history Lithic and Archaic periods (9,000 BCE to 1000 BCE)

Toronto remained under glacial ice throughout the Last Glacial Period, with the glacial ice retreating from the area during the Late Glacial warming period approximately 13,000 BCE. Following the Last Glacial Period, Toronto's waterfront shifted with the growth, and later contraction of glacial Lake Iroquois. The area saw its first human settlers around 9000 BCE to 8,500 BCE. These settlers traversed large distances in family-sized bands, sustaining themselves on caribou, mammoths, mastodons, and smaller animals in the tundra and Boreal forest. Many of their archaeological remains lie in present-day Lake Ontario, with the historic coastline of Lake Iroquois situated south of Toronto during this period.

As the climate warmed in 6,000 BCE, the environment of Toronto shifted from subarctic to a temperate continental climate. The Toronto waterfront also changed dramatically during this period, with erosion from the Scarborough Bluffs accumulating, and rising water levels from Lake Ontario creating a peninsula that would later become the Toronto Islands.

Formative to Classic stage (1000 BCE to 1200)

First Nations fishing camps were established around the waterways of Toronto as early as 1,000 BCE. By 500 CE, up to 500 people lived along each of the three major rivers of Toronto (Don, Humber, and Rouge River). Early on, First Nations communities had developed trails and water routes in the Toronto area. These led from northern and western Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. One trail, known as the "Toronto Passage", followed the Humber River northward as an important overland shortcut between Lake Ontario and the upper Great Lakes.

New crops, including corn, sunflowers, and tobacco, were introduced into the area from the south around 600 CE. The introduction of these crops saw large societal shifts in the area; including a change in diet, and the formation of semi-permanent villages, in order to farm these crops. Inhabitants of these semi-permanent villages moved out during parts of the year to hunt, fish, and gather other goods to supplement their farming. The earliest known Iroquoian semi-permanent settlement of this nature dates to around 900 CE. Iroquoian villages during this period were located on high, fortified grounds, with access to wetlands and waterways to facilitate hunting, fishing, trade, and military operations. Their villages typically stood in place for around 10 to 20 years, before the inhabitants relocated to a new site. Typically these villages would cycle through a number of sites but return to the same areas repeatedly. This lessened the impact on surrounding flora and fauna, allowing hunting and agriculture to be utilized in a sustainable fashion.

Post-classic stage (1200–1700)

Several Iroquoian villages dating back to the 1200s have been excavated in Toronto, including an ossuary in Scarborough. From the 1300s to the 1500s, the Iroquoian inhabitants of the area migrated north of Toronto, joining the developing Huron-Wendat Confederacy. During this period, the Huron-Wendat confederacy used Toronto as a hinterland for hunting, with the Toronto Passage continuing to see use as a north–south route. The northeast portion of Toronto also held two 14th-century Iroquoian burial mounds, known today as Taber Hill.

Although Europeans did not visit Southern Ontario in the 16th century, European goods had begun to make its way into the region as early as the late-1500s. During the 17th century, nearly half of Southern Ontario's First Nations population was wiped out from as a result of the transmission of communicable diseases between Europeans and First Nations groups. The population loss, along with the desire to secure furs for trade, saw the Haudenosaunee Confederacy to the south invade the area and attack the Huron-Wendat Confederacy.Devine, Lloyd E., Jr. On the Back of a turle: a narrative of the Huron-Wyandot people Trillium, an Imprint of The Ohio State University Press The Haudenosaunee ultimately defeated the Huron-Wendat in the mid-1600s, and the Huron-Wendat fled as refugees, were killed or were forcibly adopted into the Haudenosaunee. After the Haudenosaunee secured the region, they established several settlements on the north shore of Lake Ontario. The Seneca (one of the five Haudenosaunee nations), established two settlements in present-day Toronto, Teiaiagon, near the Humber River, and Ganatsekwyagon near the Rouge River. The two communities provided the Haudenosaunee control of the north–south passage in Toronto. Roman Catholic missionaries visited the two settlements in the 1660s and 1670s. The two Seneca settlements were abandoned by 1687.

After the Haudenosaunee left, the Mississaugas moved in and established villages in the area in the late 17th century.The Ojibwa-Iroquois War: The War the Five Nations Did Not Win. Leroy V. Eid. Ethnohistory, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Autumn 1979), Duke University Press, pp. 297–324Schmalz, Peter S., The Ojibwa of Southern Ontario. University of Toronto Press. . pp 21–22

Early European settlement (1600s–1793)

French explorers and traders

The first European to set foot on the shores of Lake Ontario in the vicinity of what is now Toronto may have been French explorer Étienne Brûlé, taking the Toronto Passage from Huronia in 1615; although the claim is disputed by several scholars, who suggest that Brûlé took a more westerly route and reached Lake Erie, as opposed to Lake Ontario. However, Europeans were active in the Toronto area by the 1660s, with missionaries visiting First Nations settlements in the area.

By the 18th century, Toronto became an important location for French fur traders, given its proximity to the Toronto Passage. In 1720, Captain Alexandre Dagneau established Fort Douville on the Humber River, near the shore of Lake Ontario. The trading post was built to divert First Nations traders from British trading posts to the south of Toronto. The success of Fort Douville prompted the British to build a larger trading post in Oswego, New York. The completion of Fort Oswego in 1726 led the French to abandon their first trading post in Toronto.

The French established another trading post in 1750 on the Humber River. It was successful enough to encourage the French to establish Fort Rouillé, at present-day Exhibition Place in 1751. After the British captured Fort Niagara in July 1759, Fort Rouillé was destroyed by its French occupants, who withdrew to Montreal. In 1760, Robert Rogers, with an armed force of two hundred men and a flotilla of fifteen whaleboats came to secure the Toronto area for the British. The Treaty of Paris of 1763 formally ended the Seven Years' War and saw New France ceded to the British. This included the Pays d'en Haut region of New France, the area containing present-day Toronto.

Influx of loyalist settlers