5 - The Revolution in British America: General Overview

Summary

Beginning in the early eighteenth century, rapid demographic and economic growth among the settler colonial population of British America drew the attention of competing European empires to the potential wealth of the continent. By the 1750s, large-scale imperial warfare had broken out, a contest for control of these future riches. Over the next six decades, this conflict would evolve into a multi-sided civil war, drawing the continent’s indigenous peoples and settler colonists into the struggle. At the revolution’s beginning, circa 1754, the resources of North America lay mainly in the hands of indigenous people, distributed across hundreds of polities, while three European empires held footholds of varying size and strength, mainly on the continent’s edges. At its end, circa 1814, a single confederated nation, created out of wars fought to control America’s resources, and led by the children of empire, was positioned to take the whole for itself. The transformation included a new form of government and political economy which concentrated power in the hands of American citizens under a constitution designed to promote endless economic growth. The revolution’s outcome set a path for the continent’s future and projected an implicit vision of a new form of global empire.