American Colonies: The Settling of North America

by Alan Taylor

In preparing for negotiations, the British considered keeping most of the French West Indies and returning Canada. Although much smaller, the sugar islands were far more lucrative. But the influential British West Indian lobby did not want to weaken its advantageous position within the empire by accepting new competition from the more productive plantations on Guadeloupe and Martinique.

In surprising ways, the peace benefited the war’s losers more than the British victors. Generating scant revenue, Louisiana, New France, and Florida had drained the French and Spanish of funds and soldiers, all better spent and employed on more valuable colonies in the Caribbean. While losing little of real (immediate) value, the French and the Spanish recovered their most valuable losses: Guadeloupe, Martinique, Cuba, and access to the Newfoundland fisheries.

Learning from defeat, they rebuilt and reformed their armies and navies. In the next conflict with Britain, the French and the Spanish would be far leaner and meaner adversaries. And in the next war, the British could not count on assistance from any European allies, for all concluded that Great Britain had grown too rich and too powerful. The British had replaced the French as the expansionist power considered most dangerous to the rest of Europe.

The natives also felt a new commonality as Indians, above and beyond their traditional tribal and village identities. This Pan-Indian sensibility emerged from the teaching of a new set of religious prophets, led by a Lenni Lenape named Neolin.

The conquest of Canada deprived the mainland colonists and the British of a common enemy that had united them in the past. Victory invited the British to redefine the empire and to increase the colonists’ burdens. But victory also emboldened the colonists to defy British demands because they no longer needed protection against the French.

Impressed by the apparent prosperity of the free colonists, British concluded that they could pay higher taxes to support the empire that benefited them so greatly. This seemed only fair to the British, who had spent so much blood and treasure making the continent safe for the prospering colonists. After all, British taxpayers were already paying far heavier taxes than were the colonists: in 1763 imperial taxation averaged twenty-six shillings per person in Britain, where most subjects were struggling, compared with only one shilling per person in the colonies, where most free people were prospering.

Victory had not come cheap, doubling the British debt from a prewar £73 million to a postwar £137 million. Interest payments on that debt consumed more than 60 percent of Great Britain’s annual budgets during the mid-1760s.

Before the Seven Years War, the British posted only a few hundred troops in North America. In 1763, however, the crown decided to maintain ten thousand men in the colonies, primarily in Canada and the Great Lakes country. With the British people already taxed to the limit, Parliament hoped to pay for the new army by levying new taxes on the colonists.

Adams and other free colonists began to see that their good fortune as middling property-holders was unusual within the empire. Inequality and dependence were the norm in the British empire (and the rest of the world). The colonial nightmare scenario of common white people dominated by landlords and factory owners was all too real in Great Britain.

Instead of national independence, the colonists had wanted to preserve their privileged position within the empire as virtually untaxed beneficiaries of imperial trade and protection.

They resisted the new taxes in the hope that the British would back down, preserving their loose relationship with the mother country. But, of course, the British would not back down, which brought on a long and bloody war that no one really wanted.

When the civil war within the empire erupted in 1775, the less populous and more marginal colonies to the north—Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Quebec—remained loyal, for they depended upon British protection and markets. Similarly, to the south, the West Indian sugar planters felt too inhibited by their slave majority and too reliant upon the British market for sugar to consider rebellion.

At first, the Russians marketed their furs in western Europe, but in 1689 they opened an even more lucrative trade with China, via the Siberian border town of Kaikhta, where the Russians obtained, in return, Chinese porcelains, teas, and silks.

Like the French and the English, leading Russians longed to believe that they could easily establish an American empire by appearing before the Indians as kinder and gentler colonizers.

From a contact population of about 20,000, the Aleut dwindled to only 2,000 by 1800.

Russian Alaska remained the most marginal colonial venture in North America. Kodiak lay 2,700 miles east—by foggy, stormy subarctic waters—of Siberia and about 9,000 miles from the imperial capital of St. Petersburg.

In 1768, Alta California hosted at least ninety languages, drawn from seven different language families.

By the 1760s, political and technological developments rendered the Pacific significantly more accessible to British (and French) ships. New and more precise instruments—quadrant, sextant, and chronometer—enabled mariners to ascertain their longitude in distant oceans, solving the most important and persistent difficulty in navigation.

For example, men and women ate different foods and ate apart from one another. Only men could eat pig and only chiefs could eat dog.

The well-fed natives also had the leisure time to compete violently for prestige. The victors in their endemic warfare collected numerous slaves and the skulls of the dead for prominent display in their villages. In the late eighteenth century, European visitors calculated that at least a fifth of the raincoast inhabitants were slaves.

Endowed with new weapons, the Hawaiian chiefs escalated their wars to an unprecedented scale of death and destruction. During the 1780s and 1790s, Chief Kamehameha of Hawaii won the local arms race to become the dominant chief in the islands.

During the late 1780s, Kamehameha forcibly united his home island, Hawaii. In 1795 he invaded and conquered, in quick succession, the islands of Maui, Molokai, and Oahu and their satellite islands, Lanai and Kahoolawe.