GO rD hIll
Tra GeDY: The UNIT eD
sT aTes Is CreaTeD
With the dominance of British power on a world scale, the European
struggle for hegemony in the Americas was nearing its end. Subsequent-
ly, the 18th and 19th centuries were to be a period of wars for indepen-
dence that would force the European states out of the Americas. Fore-
most among these wars was the independence struggle that would lead
to the birth of the United States.
Emerging from the ‘Great War for Empire’, Britain found itself victori-
ous but also heavily in debt. To defray the cost of maintaining and defend-
ing the colonies, Britain substantially changed its colonial policies. Large
portions of the financial costs of the colonies were placed directly on the
colonies themselves through a series of taxes. The imposition of the taxes
incited the settlers to demand taxes be imposed only with their consent.
In fact, the question of taxes was part of a wider debate about who should
control and profit from colonialism, the colonies or the colonial centres.
By 1775, settler protests and revolts had culminated in a general war
for independence that continued until 1783, when the British capitulated
and ceded large portions of its territories along the Atlantic.
That the British colonial forces did not lose more territory can be
attributed much to the participation of numerous First Nations on the
side of the British; the Royal Proclamation was thus a strategy to damp-
en Native resistance to British colonialism (as in the eruption of King
George’s War in 1744 when Micmacs allied themselves with the French
and, following the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, continued fighting
the British, who then concluded a treaty of “Peace and Friendship” with
the Micmacs), as well as a method of forming military alliances with First
Nations, if not at least their neutrality in European conflicts.
As in previous European struggles, Indigenous peoples were used as
expendable troops, and the extensive militarization further consolidated
settler control,
The end of the war saw thousands of Whites, United Empire
Loyalists, flock to Nova Scotia. They came in such numbers and
spread so widely over the Maritime region that it was considered