“We’re Americans, with a capital A! You know what that means? Do you? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse.” – Pvt. John Winger
The French and Indian War was the World War II of its day.* That is a story in itself, with desperate moments, dramatic reversals, blockades, invasions, counter-invasions, and all manner of derring-do. It included not only a full blown European war, but a global naval contest that saw battles on land and sea in East Asia, South Asia, West Africa, the Caribbean, and, pertinently, North America. It was also a colossal, almost unimaginable, success for the British Empire, the capstone to a century and a half of (mostly) maritime wars (mostly) against the Dutch, Spanish, and French.
(*In European history it is unimaginatively known as the “Seven Years War”. French and Indian sounds cooler.)
Starting in roughly 1600 and culminating at the end of the war in 1763, England/Britain had gone from a second tier regional player to a globe spanning superpower unprecedented in history. It was a hell of a rise, one founded upon a powerful geographic advantage: Britain is an island and this was a historical period when naval capability and technology were ascendant.{1} While the great kingdoms and powerful empires of Africa, Asia, and Europe maintained large and ruinously expensive armies, the British Empire could skimp on its army to put more men and money into its navy and merchant marine, growing ever wealthier as global trade, especially across the Atlantic, expanded rapidly.{2}
When wars came around, the extra income all those ships had earned meant that Britain could spend and borrow freely to augment its small regular army by subsidizing allies and hiring auxiliaries. Meanwhile, the big navy could guard the home islands while still having enough strength to offer battle and escort transports anywhere in the world. It was a fearsome combination; and though the British didn’t always win big, they usually came out ahead. Over time, smaller victories stacked up to bigger victories, each one starting Britain that much stronger in the next conflict, most importantly in the coastal North American colonies.
What is today the US East Coast had been the clearance rack discovery of early European colonialism. The Spanish had landed in Central and South America and found gold, silver, and vulnerable empires that had been hoarding both into cities, treasuries, and other easy to plunder concentrations.* Afterward, Spain forced enslaved Indigenous in what is now Mexico and Peru to mine so much silver that two centuries later the newly risen Qing Dynasty in China was awash in it while silver coins known as “Spanish dollars” were the most common hard currency in the otherwise cash poor North American colonies.
(*Silver and gold, neighbors on the Periodic Table, don’t have any intrinsic value as money but have long been used as currency because of three shared physical traits: 1) they’re easy to shape and separate from other metals at relatively low heat; 2) they’re highly resistant to corrosion; and 3) oooh, shiny.)
What commercial wealth North America did possess was located far into the interior, where European fashion for fur made the pelts of some of the most prolific animals on the continent worth a fortune. But it was the French who were making that fortune, sailing from the east into the St. Lawrence and thence the Great Lakes, or from the south into the Mississippi and all the waterways that feed it. At the start, even the Dutch had been ahead, claiming the Hudson, the only east coast river that stays navigable deep into the mountains.
The thin ribbon of land running east of the Appalachians wasn’t without its attractions: plenty of good harbors, preposterously rich fishing, and more lumber than any living Englishman had ever seen at home. But it had no easy access to the interior and couldn’t produce the kind of income that got cash hungry Europeans all hot and bothered. So it was left to a motley and disorganized collection of disreputable profiteers (Virginia), Protestant religious nuts (Massachusetts & Connecticut), Quaker religious nuts (Pennsylvania), Catholic religious nuts (Maryland), Dutch war criminals (New York), Dutch and Swedish war criminals (Delaware & New Jersey), bitter hillbilly rivals (New Hampshire & eventually Vermont), free thinkers and Indigenous (Rhode Island), evil aristocratic slaveholders (North & South Carolina), and weirdo idealists (Georgia), plus lots of African kidnapping victims (up and down the coast, but highly concentrated in the South).
For the first few generations, these colonies had been tiny outposts of a few thousand people, isolated from each other, clinging to the sea, eking out a living either by shipping food and supplies to the Caribbean (New England) or by growing slave tobacco for British consumption (the Chesapeake). As disease, war, and agriculture tied ever more Indian land into the trade network, the British drove off the other Europeans and established English speaking authority up and down the coast. Those embers kindled until, starting around 1700, the population boomed and a vibrant domestic economy developed alongside.
Americans, consumers from the beginning, built themselves nice houses and filled them with nice things (almost all of which were imported from Britain).{3} They had big families and big kids – well nourished Americans were notably taller than underfed Britons – and so many immigrants poured in from all over northwest Europe that by 1750 the population was an intermixed 1.5 million, less than half of whom were of English descent.{4}
Neither cold and rocky Canada nor swampy and malarial Florida could keep up with that juggernaut. There were less than a hundred thousand French speakers in Canada, fewer than fifty thousand Spanish speakers in Florida, and many of both were unaccompanied males who were there to make money and go home. Sitting in the goldilocks zone between them, the sex crazed British colonies added another million people in the twenty years from the start of the French and Indian War to the Revolution. Colonials became parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents to children who often didn’t follow their customs or even speak their language, changing religions, moving away, and frequently marrying between families that would have hated each other back in the old country.{5} This was the great melting pot starting to bubble, the world shaking magic that turns people from anywhere into Americans.
When European wars spilled into North America in the 1600s, the numbers had been puny. A few dozen could be a significant force and armies of over a thousand were rare; the Puritans who massacred the Pequots in 1637 numbered about 500 and that included almost every man in the colony. But as the 1700s got going, and what would become the United States grew and grew, the numbers got bigger. In 1710, a force of 1,000 colonials backed up British regulars in a successful assault on French Acadia (renaming the area Nova Scotia after it was over).{6}* By the French and Indian War in the 1750s, the colonies would put (conservatively) 16,000 men in the field to fight for the king in Canada and elsewhere. Whole campaigns were conducted by American troops under British command, with pay and supplies furnished by colonial governments with colonial taxes.{7}
(*The British eventually expelled most of the Acadians; some of the survivors relocated from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi, becoming the earliest Cajuns and thus shaming Britain through monumentally superior cuisine ever since. Geaux Tigers!)
After everything was settled, all of North America east of the Mississippi came under George 3’s reign; British succession to the fabulously wealthy Mughal Empire in India was assured; and the Royal Navy was the undisputed heavyweight champion of the ocean, a title it would successfully defend until 1941. This was conquest to compare with Alexander and Temujin, shortly thereafter inspiring the famous line, “this vast empire, upon which the sun never sets”.{8}
And what was the American reward for giving their all in this planet spanning victory? A grumpy king and an ungrateful elite who felt strapped for cash despite being the richest motherfuckers on Earth.
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Section 2
{1 – Steele, The English Atlantic, esp. p39-40, 92, 261-273}
{2 – Black, Crisis of Empire, p49-57}
{3 – Black, p26-27}
{4 – Bowen, Perceptions from the Periphery, p290; in Negotiated Empires, ed. Daniels & Kennedy}
{5 – Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, p75}
{6 – Peckham, The Colonial Wars, p66-71}
{7 – Anderson, A People’s Army, p59-60 puts 16,000 as the minimum reasonable estimate with 20,000 as an upper bound}
{8 – Carp, Defiance of the Patriots, p22}