The Treaty of Paris of 1763 marked the British triumph at the end of the French and Indian War (1754-63)—known in Europe as the Seven Years’ War. On almost all fronts the armies and navies of Great Britain had beaten the forces of France and Spain. The Anglo-American conquest of Canada was a part of this worldwide victory. The accession of George III in 1760 and a war-weary nation led to the fall of the administration of William Pitt in 1761 and the rise of the king’s close friend and adviser John Stuart, earl of Bute as chief minister in 1762. With almost ?135 million in national debt, Bute and the king wanted to end the war as quickly as possible. In the negotiations in Paris the British agreed to return some of their conquests to their enemies. Although there was a debate in Britain concerning whether to keep Canada or the revenue-producing French West Indies, ultimately, the British government decided that retaining Canada would secure the borders of the British North American colonies. This decision also meant that the British would control the Ohio Valley and all the territory between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. The only remnants of the French North American empire after the treaty were the right to continue to fish on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and possession of the small islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In exchange for Canada the British returned Guadeloupe, Martinique, and St. Lucia to France. The British, however, made other territorial gains: In the West Indies, the French ceded the islands of Grenada, Saint Vincent, Dominica, and Tobago; in the Mediterranean the British were returned Minorca, which the French had captured early in the war; in Africa, the British kept Senegal; and in India, although the French held on to some outposts, the British clearly gained the upper hand in terms of possessions and influence on the native states. The Spanish, who had entered the war late, were also involved in the treaty. In exchange for Havana and Manila, which the British had captured, Spain gave the British Florida. France ceded Louisiana to Spain to compensate for Spanish losses in the war and to keep the territory out of British hands. The British were also allowed to maintain a presence on the Central American coast of Honduras. Little territory changed hands in Europe, but the French did agree to withdraw armies from the German states.
With so much territory exchanged, the treaty set a number of people in motion. The Spanish and many of their Indian allies evacuated Florida. The Acadians—French-speaking settlers of what is now the Maritime Provinces of Canada and who had been exiled from their settlements at the beginning of the war—continued their wanderings but began to gravitate toward the area around New Orleans to ultimately form the people today known as the Cajuns. Many Native Americans also started to migrate along the Ohio River valley, across the Mississippi, and even on the Great Plains. And British North Americans were on the move— to the land left vacant by the Acadians, to the backcountry along and across the Appalachians, and to the new British colonies of East and West Florida.
Despite the gains in the treaty, many, including Pitt, believed that Great Britain had ceded too much to its enemies and that the treaty contained the makings of another war. Such predictions, of course, turned out to be correct in a number of ways. First, the treaty had a profound influence on Native Americans in North America and quickly led to Pontiac’s War (1763-64) west of the Appalachians. Generous terms to the French Canadians, the difficulties of dealing with Indians in the West, and new taxation policies and imperial regulations all contributed to the resistance movement (1764-75) of British colonial Americans and the Revolutionary War (1775-83). And the success of the Revolutionary War was underwritten by France and Spain eager for revenge in the wake of their concessions in 1763.
Further reading: Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (New York: Vintage, 2000); Colin G. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
World History
