Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 by Prof. John H. Elliott FBA

Author:Prof. John H. Elliott FBA
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2010-08-20T09:11:00+00:00

The Indians did their best to resist these encroachments and fought back with all the legal weapons at their disposal where they could.57 The legal rights they enjoyed, even if increasingly infringed, continued throughout the eighteenth century to maintain what amounted to internal frontiers in Spanish America. British America, too, had its frontiers, but these were primarily external, and under the pressure of a rapidly expanding settler population they were being relentlessly eroded.

Moving frontiers

As each new generation of settlers outnumbered the generation that preceded it and immigrants swarmed into the mainland colonies of British North America, the frontiers of settlement were constantly being pushed forward in the search for new land. But what constituted a frontier?58 Even in the Europe of the later seventeenth century, the concept of territorial demarcation through precisely defined linear boundaries was not yet fully established.59 Boundary lines in the Americas were correspondingly more obscure. Frontiers, whether between Europeans and Indians or between the colonial settlements of rival European states, were little more than ill-defined zones of interaction and conflict on contested ground.60 The assertions made on paper by mapmakers caught up in the work of imaginary colonization at the behest of European ministers were unlikely to bear much relation to American realities.61 These were determined by the colonists themselves, as they surged outwards from the old areas of settlement until checked by some geographical barrier, or by the presence of unsubmissive Indians or rival Europeans.

The most formidable physical barrier to the westward expansion of the British colonies was the Allegheny Mountains, and it was only in the middle years of the eighteenth century, with the founding in 1747 of the Ohio Company of Virginia, that a serious attempt would be made to embark on projects for the settlement of the vast and unknown regions beyond the Alleghenies.62 This was `Indian Country', and no European colonial society on the North American continent could hope to exercise any form of control over the interior unless it drew on the support and co-operation of powerful groups among the competing Indian peoples who inhabited it.63

The prize had for long been the fur trade of the Great Lakes region. Conflict over the control of this trade had pitted the Iroquois against Algonquian-speaking peoples and the French against the English, with corresponding combinations and permutations of political alliances. During the first half of the eighteenth century the French sought to hem in the English colonies along the Atlantic seaboard, while forming a chain of trading settlements that would link Canada to their newly established colony of Louisiana at the mouth of the Mississippi. In the central decades of the eighteenth century, as the demand for agricultural land among the English colonists became greater than the demand for fur and hides,64 the frontiersmen had to contend not only with the physical barrier of the Alleghenies, but also with the alliance system put in place by the French. Westward expansion from the Middle Colonies could only be achieved by military victory over France and its Indian allies.

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