I
n 1700 the French, Spanish, and British all competed
for the upper hand in North America. The French and
British sought access to the Ohio River, a crucial artery
with tributaries stretching north and east toward the
Great Lakes and draining south into the Mississippi River and
the Gulf of Mexico. The French signaled their determination
to control this region by founding New Orleans in 1718 and
then establishing a chain of forts south from the Gulf of Saint
Lawrence into the Ohio Valley. Together, these outposts
formed an arc that effectively hemmed in the British along
the Atlantic seaboard.
While the French forged networks on the ground, they
also asserted their position through maps. Guillaume de
L’Isle’s authoritative and comprehensive map of North
America audaciously appropriated the continental interior
for the French (page 66). The British responded with maps
that replaced the French geographical vision with an equally
strident one of their own (pages 68–71). Further west, the
Spanish began to launch expeditions north from Mexico
into the region they claimed as “New Mexico.” The Spanish
had been chastened by the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, but in the
eighteenth century they began to reclaim the Southwest and
resume their search for a river passage west to the missions
along the Pacific coast (page 88).
Spain’s territorial claims in the Southeast were
increasingly challenged by the British and French, as is shown
in Mark Catesby’s map on page 76. The entire Southeast was
in flux: the British and Spanish clashed over northern Florida,
while French traders extended their reach from the Mississippi
River east toward Georgia and the Carolinas. To a limited
degree, this imperial maneuvering placed Native Americans
in a strategic position. A booming deerskin trade in the
Southeast brought colonists into direct and sustained contact
with the Cherokee and other tribes. The map on page 72 was
designed to navigate the complex commercial networks and
rivalries which characterized that trade.
Further north, the British strengthened their alliance
with the Iroquois Confederacy in order to stave off French
encroachments. Cadwallader Colden’s map on page 78
conveys the geopolitical character of British–Iroquois
diplomacy in western New York. Meanwhile, the French
built competing alliances and trade networks with othertribes to consolidate their hold on the Ohio Valley and the
Lower Mississippi. The resulting treaties were often ignored
when tribes no longer served European purposes, as when
the South Carolina economy shifted from the deerskin
trade to the cultivation of rice. But in an era when European
powers vied for control of the continent, indigenous peoples
exercised a certain level of power.
The British quest to map its colonies in order to contain
French expansion intensified at mid-century. In 1754 the
governor of Virginia sent a young George Washington
west over the Allegheny Mountains to halt French military
incursions along the southern edge of Lake Erie. The
information gained on this mission proved crucial to British
strategy when war broke out with the French a few months
later (page 84). Lewis Evans subsequently designed a map
of the middle British colonies in order to encourage British
migration into the trans-Allegheny West and thereby repel the
French (page 86). Evans’ map was just one of several British
efforts to advance geographical knowledge of the colonies;
the most comprehensive was Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson’s
profile of Virginia (page 80). This was the first map to reveal
the entire Chesapeake river system, a geographical advantage
that helped to make tobacco the most important export of the
eighteenth century, and Virginia the largest and wealthiest of
Britain’s American colonies.
The growth of tobacco could not have occurred without
the expansion of the slave trade. Malachy Postlethwayt
designed the map on page 74 to advance the British role in
that trade and the particular interests of the new Royal
African Company. The growth of the slave population
mirrored a more general population increase throughout
the colonies. In 1713 about 360,000 European colonists
were living in North America. By the time war broke out
between the French and the British in 1755, that figure
was closer to 1.5 million, a fourfold increase in just four
decades.That population began to expand beyond the
seaboard settlements of Connecticut and Massachusetts
into Pennsylvania, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.
Similarly, by the 1730s Virginians were moving beyond the
Tidewater and the Piedmont into the western valleys.
Victory in the French and Indian War gave the British
unrivaled control over North America east of the MississippiImperialism and Independence