The Delaware Colony, officially known as the three "Lower Counties on the Delaware", was a semiautonomous region of the proprietary Province of Pennsylvania and a de facto British colony in North America.
The three lower counties on the Delaware River were governed as part of the Province of Pennsylvania from 1682 until 1701, when the lower counties petitioned for and were granted an independent colonial legislature; the two colonies shared the same governor until 1776. The English colonists who settled in Delaware were mainly Quakers. In the first half of the 18th century, New Castle and Philadelphia became the primary ports of entry to the new world for a quarter of a million Protestant immigrants from Northern Ireland, referred to as "Scotch-Irish" in America and "Ulster Scots" in Northern Ireland. Delaware had no established religion at this time.