The community first known as Middle Plantation developed on high ground between the James and York rivers. The College of William & Mary was chartered in 1693, and after fire destroyed Virginia's statehouse at Jamestown, the colonial assembly moved the capital to Middle Plantation in 1699 and renamed it Williamsburg for King William III. A planned civic landscape emerged around the Capitol, Governor's Palace, Bruton Parish Church, courthouse, college, and the long axis of Duke of Gloucester Street.

As Virginia's capital, Williamsburg concentrated government, law, print, tavern culture, education, trade, and imperial ceremony. Merchants, artisans, laborers, students, officeholders, women, free Black residents, and enslaved people lived and worked throughout the town. Slavery was embedded in households, public institutions, commerce, and law. The Capitol and courts helped create and enforce statutes governing land, taxation, religion, labor, race, and bondage across the colony, while the Governor's Palace represented royal authority.

Williamsburg became a major stage for revolutionary politics. Patrick Henry challenged imperial policy, and legislators protested taxation and restrictions imposed after the Seven Years' War. In April 1775 royal governor Lord Dunmore removed gunpowder from the public magazine, heightening confrontation. The Fifth Virginia Convention met in 1776 and instructed Virginia's delegates to seek independence, while George Mason's Declaration of Rights and a state constitution shaped the new government. Dunmore fled, and revolutionary authorities took control of the capital.

Virginia transferred its capital to Richmond in 1780, partly because Williamsburg was vulnerable to British attack and poorly situated for the expanding state. The town remained a county seat and college community but lost much of its political and commercial prominence. During the Civil War, Union and Confederate forces fought the Battle of Williamsburg nearby in 1862, and military occupation affected local buildings. Some colonial structures survived, while others disappeared, were altered, or were replaced as the town modernized.

The Reverend W. A. R. Goodwin promoted restoration of Williamsburg's colonial core and secured support from John D. Rockefeller Jr. beginning in 1926. Researchers documented buildings, archaeology, maps, records, paint, objects, and landscapes, while craftspeople revived traditional construction methods to support the ambitious preservation work. The project preserved many original structures but also relocated later buildings and reconstructed numerous lost ones, creating a powerful twentieth-century interpretation of the eighteenth-century capital. Colonial Williamsburg now presents architecture, trades, government, Indigenous diplomacy, African American life, slavery, war, and preservation itself through museums, research, archaeology, demonstrations, and living-history programs.