and demanding, even across the Atlantic. It conscripted its subjects and taxed them heavily.
Moreover, it was a Catholic state which did not practice toleration, as thousands of Huguenot
immigrants in the British colonies could testify.
The American colonies had played little part in the war against France during the reign of
William III and Queen Anne. But since then the French military presence in North America had
grown far more formidable. When war with Spain, quickly followed by war with France, broke
out in 1740 (the War of the Austrian Succession, as Europe called it), the colonies were in the
forefront of the action in North America. Not only did Oglethorpe's Georgians invade Spanish
Florida but colonial militias, with Massachusetts and New York supplying most of the
manpower, took the offensive against France and succeeded in capturing Louisburg. New
England and New York were disgusted when the British agreed, at the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle
in 1748, to hand the fortress back. Nor was colonial opinion impressed by British strategy and
grip during the first phases of the world war which Colonel Washington inadvertently started.
The British effort in North America was ill provided and ineffective, marked by many reverses.
With William Pitt in power from 1758 things changed totally. He had close ties with London
mercantile interests and he switched the war from a Continental one in Europe to an imperial one
all over the world. He amassed big fleets and raised effective armies, he picked able commanders
like General James Wolfe, and he enthused public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic. His
armies not only pushed north up the Hudson and down the St Lawrence, but along the Ohio and
the Allegheny too. Suddenly, with the fall of Quebec in 1759, French power in North America
began to collapse like a house of cards. The Peace of Paris, 1763, confirmed it.
The treaty was one of the greatest territorial carve-ups in history. It says a lot for the
continuing ignorance of European powers like Britain and France, and their inability to grasp the
coming importance of continental North America, that they spent most of the peace process
haggling over the Caribbean sugar-islands, which made quick returns in ready cash. Thanks to its
command of the sea, Britain used the war to seize St Vincent, the Grenadines, Tobago,
Dominica, St Lucia, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. The British sugar lobby, fearing
overproduction, objected to keeping them all, so Britain graciously handed back Guadeloupe,
Martinique, and St Lucia. In return, the French made no difficulty about surrendering the whole
of Canada, Nova Scotia, and their claims to the Ohio Valley-'Snow for Sugar,' as the deal was
called. Moreover, Britain, which now had no fear of a Spain evidently in irreversible military
decline, was quite happy to hand Spain back its other conquests, Cuba and Manila. As part of a
separate deal France gave Spain all of Louisiana to compensate it for losses in Florida to Britain.
Thus more American territory changed hands in this settlement than in any other international
treaty, before or since. The net result was to knock France out of the American hemisphere, in
which retained only three small Caribbean islands, two in the fisheries, and negligible chunk of
Guyana. This was a momentous geopolitical shift, huge relief to British global strategists,
because it made Britain the master of North America, no longer challenged there by the most
formidable military power in Europe. The hold Spain had on the lower Mississippi was rightly
regarded as feeble, to be loosened whenever Britain saw fit. Suddenly, in the mid-1760s, Britain
had emerged as proprietor of the largest empire the world had seen since Roman times-larger,
indeed, in terms of territorial extent and global compass.
Did this rapid expansion bring a rush of blood to the heads of the British elite? One can put it
that way. Certainly, over the next two decades, the characteristic British virtues of caution,
pragmatism, practical common sense and moderation seemed to desert the island race, or at any