Question

What role did ordinary British colonists play in the Seven Years War, and what effect did the war have on the people of the colonies?

Answer 1

The war was fought mainly around the boundaries between New France and the British colonies, from Virginia to Nova Scotia. The Ohio Country (sometimes referred to by the French as the Ohio Territory or Ohio Valley) was the name used in the 18th century for the regions of North America west of the Appalachian Mountains and in the upper Ohio River region south of Lake Erie. The territory encompassed approximately the Ohio, eastern Indiana, western Pennsylvania, and northwestern West Virginia states of today. The issue of settlement in the region is considered a primary cause of the French and Indian Wars and a later factor contributing to the American Revolutionary War.

With the European invasion, Great Britain and France claimed the region, both sending merchants into the area to trade with the Indians of the Ohio Country. The area was deemed central to the ambitions of both countries in North America for further expansion and development. At the same time, by right of conquest, the Iroquois claimed the region. An important part of the outbreak of the French and Indian War in the 1750s was the rivalry between the two European nations, the Iroquois, and the Ohio natives for control of the region.

The war began to turn for the British in 1758, owing in large part to the efforts of William Pitt, a very popular parliamentarian. Pitt promised vast amounts of money and wealth to fight the despised Catholic French, and Great Britain spent part of the money on bounties paid in the colonies to new young recruits, helping the British forces to improve. The Iroquois, Delaware and Shawnee signed the Easton Treaty in 1758, aligning themselves with the British in exchange for some contested land between Pennsylvania and Virginia. Between 1758 and 1760, the British military successfully penetrated the heartland of New France, with Quebec falling in 1759 and Montreal finally falling in September 1760

Following the treaty, King George III signed the 1763 Royal Proclamation which temporarily blocked the western expansion of the colonists and reserved western land for American Indian use.
The declaration concerned less with protecting or maintaining the rights of the American Indians to their territory; rather, it granted the British Crown a monopoly over all possible acquisitions of territory from American Indians.
Although Britain gained the territory of New France and French Canada, both France and Britain suffered financially from the war, with significant long-term implications. The war almost doubled Britain's national debt, which it chose to pay off by imposing new taxes on its colonies; the colonists' opposition to those taxes would finally culminate in the American Revolutionary War.