William Burnet, Dutch-American civil servant and politician, 21st Governor of the province of New York (born 1688)

William Burnet was a British civil servant and colonial administrator who served as governor of New York and New Jersey (1720–1728) and Massachusetts and New Hampshire (1728–1729). Born into a position of privilege, Burnet was well-educated, tutored among others by Isaac Newton.

The territory which would later become the state of New York was settled by European colonists as part of the New Netherland colony under the command of the Dutch West India Company in the Seventeenth Century. These colonists were largely of Dutch, Flemish, Walloon, and German stock, but the colony soon became a "melting pot." In 1664, at the onset of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, English forces under Richard Nicolls ousted the Dutch from control of New Netherland, and the territory became part of several different English colonies. Despite one brief year when the Dutch retook the colony (1673–1674), New York would remain an English and later British possession until the American colonies declared independence in 1776.