The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

by William Dalrymple

Instead the trail of gunpowder which ignited the next round of Anglo-French conflict began far away from India, on the frozen borderlands of America and New France – what we today call Canada – between the great lakes and the headwaters of the Ohio River. On 21 June 1752, a party of French Indians led by the French adventurer Charles Langlade, who had a Huron wife and was also influential among the Seneca, Iroquois and Micmac, led a war party of 240 warriors down Lake Huron, across Lake Erie and into the newly settled farmlands of British Ohio. Tomahawks at the ready, they fell on the British settlement of Pickawillany, achieving complete surprise. Only twenty British settlers managed to muster at the stockade.