4 - The Struggle for a Continent, 1744–1763

Summary

This chapter focuses on the struggle between Britain and France for imperial dominance in North America. In this period, the French and English colonies in North America were constantly at war, officially in the War of the Austrian Succession (1744-48) and the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), and unofficially in guerilla warfare on the frontiers of settlement. The British and their colonists in New England captured Louisbourg in 1745, prompting France to launch a massive and ultimately disastrous campaign led by the Duc d’Anville to recapture Louisbourg, which was returned to France in by the peace treaty of 1748. The British founded Halifax in 1749 to counter Louisbourg’s influence, but successive governors in Nova Scotia had difficulty reconciling Acadians and Indigenous peoples to their regime. Ultimately, the Acadians were expelled by British authorities (1755-62) and Indigenous peoples were brutally suppressed. The British captured Louisbourg in 1758, Quebec in 1759, and Montreal in 1760. By the Treaty of Paris in 1763, France ceded most of its North American empire to the British, who were already undertaking a major project of mapping the territories they claimed and planting Protestant colonists from German states and New England in Nova Scotia.