Your challenge, have the Dutch regain control of what used to be New Netherlands. Your Constraints no ASB and has to happen before 1776.
Very difficult because it's not enough just to have somebody beat Great Britain, you need that somebody to not be France, or else the French will just take over Great Britain's American territories themselves.
For a start, you probably need there to be no United Kingdom of Great Britain (and yes, that is the actual name of that nation, as specified in the English and Scottish acts that formed it; "Kingdom of Great Britain" is a historians' invention). Since an invasion of a united Great Britain is very difficult indeed (as has been discussed very often indeed), this probably requires there to be no personal union between England and Scotland, which in turn requires a PoD in Elizabethan times or earlier. If Scotland and England remain separate and at some point France invades England with Scottish help, that would break English power and, potentially, permit the Dutch to keep their North American possessions. But even then, that runs the risk of France being so powerful that it can simply take anything possessed by the Netherlands at will.
The essential problem is that the Netherlands were a small nation trying to compete with larger and more populous rivals with no major technological difference (as there was such a difference between the United Kingdom and India, or France and Indochina/Vietnam, et cetera). Because of that, it's extremely difficult to construct a timeline where they're not doomed.
I get what you say in the second part, I don't think that a victorious France would be able to take all of the British territory that early, take some of it yes, but the major centers would be too much for France to bother with, instead of England taking control of one major city (maybe two depending on how you define major city) of potentially hostile people, France would be trying to take several
Not immediately, of course, I agree; it would take a while for France to establish control. But if France and Scotland have successfully partitioned the Kingdom of England (that is to say, England and Wales) between them, France is in a much stronger strategic position, and still has all the advantages over the Netherlands that England, the United Kingdom and France had IOTL. Once the Kingdom of France has recovered from its conquest of England it will be able to seize any Dutch possessions in North America with impunity—and the Dutch hold on those territories won't be as strong as the English/British hold on them was IOTL, because the Dutch will be ruling a hostile population of English people.
I get what your saying now, the question would then be can the Dutch take enough advantage of France's recovery time to become a strong enough navel power to deter France from wanting a war with them.
{edit} Yes, that is what I'm saying. And I would say that the answer to that question is a resounding "no".
How could that possibly happen when France is several times the size of the Netherlands, in both land area and population? Even if the Dutch had ten-thousand ships, that would do nothing to stop the French from marching through their country and laying waste to it, thus forcing them to surrender all their colonies for fear of national destruction. That's the enormous advantage against France that Great Britain had and the Netherlands never did: the English Channel. If the Dutch want to prevent that, they need to either be France's allies or aligned with forces capable of being a serious threat to France. In the absence of England/the UK, there's no country that is capable of being a serious threat to France on land and also has sufficient naval strength to prevent France from taking whatever it wants in North America. (Unless, of course, Spain remains one of the greatest powers of Europe… but in that case the Netherlands might not even be independent.) Thus I conclude that, in a scenario with a broken England, the Netherlands must be allied to France if they want to keep their possessions in North America.
Because they had no claim to it, if it was that simple it would have happened before Napoleon did it, and controlling a hostile population in Europe is different than controlling a hostile population in the Americas, Africa, or Asia
Claims are useful but avarice is more. It is unlikely that the rest of Europe would permit a total French conquest of the Netherlands out of the blue, yes, but piece-by-piece territorial losses are perfectly possible. France did that to the Rhineland IOTL, with great success, and what's now Alsace-Lorraine used to be part of the Holy Roman Empire before France conquered it. If (let's say) France, Prussia and Austria decided that they could all do with some new land, the Netherlands would be doomed. Therefore, Europe, not the Americas, must always be the Netherlands' first priority, because for them, unlike for France, territorial loss is always a possibility. Look what happened to Poland: in war after war, hostile powers ganged up on it and took what they pleased, until eventually it was completely partitioned and there was no Polish state left. Look at Saxony, which was reduced to a fraction of its former power by massive territorial losses to Prussia. That's what could happen to even fairly major powers in that era, because they weren't true great powers like France, Austria and England. The Netherlands could have suffered the same fate if they weren't careful enough in Europe.
The best example, in fact, comes from OTL. IOTL, the 'Southern Netherlands' used to be part of the Netherlands, but France invaded to support revolutionaries there, thus splitting off roughly half of the Netherlands and forming what is now called Belgium. That's an enormous territorial loss: half the country. That sort of territorial loss only needs to happen once more for the Netherlands to stop existing.
The point is that the Netherlands can't realistically win a war with France without foreign intervention, because no matter what happens at sea the most important conflict is on land, in Europe. Wars happened all the time in that era, and if the Netherlands are at war with France at any time in this scenario then they will lose their North American possessions, so if the Netherlands are to avoid losing their North American colonies they need to be avoid entering any war on the opposite side to France.
I know this is derailing the thread, but this document (purporting to be a transcription of the relevant Union with Scotland Act) explicitly calls the result "one Kingdom by the name of Great Britain" and while it does frequently use the phrase "united Kingdom", it is invariably with a lowercase U. I am inclined to interpret this to mean that "united" is a mere descriptor, not part of the official name; do you disagree?For a start, you probably need there to be no United Kingdom of Great Britain (and yes, that is the actual name of that nation, as specified in the English and Scottish acts that formed it; "Kingdom of Great Britain" is a historians' invention).