Free Download The Fight for North America: The History of the European Rivalries and Conflicts Before the American Revolution by Charles River Editors
English | October 27, 2025 | ISBN: N/A | ASIN: B0FXY8L2XW | 251 pages | EPUB | 31 Mb
While conflicts between settlers and natives remain well known, some of the European conflicts in North America have been overlooked, including England's competitions with Spain and the Netherlands. When the West India Company, which presided over Dutch trade in the Americas, was created in 1621, a little settlement at the tip of Manhattan began to both grow and falter. When Willem Kieft arrived as director in 1638, it was already a sort of den of iniquity, full of "mischief and perversity," where residents were given over to smoking and drinking grog and beer. Under Kieft's reign, more land was acquired mostly through bloody, all-but-exterminating wars with the Native American population, whose numbers also dwindled at the hands of European-borne diseases.
In 1652, England and the Netherlands were at war, but heavy losses on both sides hurried the prospect of peace. Nevertheless, the two countries' representatives in the New World were increasingly hostile toward each other, even though they were an ocean away from the main belligerents. The Puritans of New England were said to be intent on attacking Manhattan, so preparations were made in New Amsterdam. A wall would be erected at New Amsterdam's northern border, at a cost of 5,000 guilders, with the labor being cheaply supplied by slaves. Made of 15-foot planks, bastions, cannons, and two gates (one at the corner of present-day Wall and Pearl, the other at Wall and Broadway) the location of the wall would become not a barrier to invasion but the center of the financial world.
On September 13, 1759, a battle was fought on the Plains of Abraham outside the old city of Quebec that was one of the turning point battles in world history. Thanks to the British victory and the events that followed, Canada went from being a colony of France (New France) to being a colony of Great Britain, which permanently changed Canadian history. In many ways, the outcome of the battle brought about several American attempts to seize Canada during the Revolutionary War and War of 1812, and ultimately it ensured that when Canada became an independent country, it was part of the British Commonwealth with an Anglophone majority and a Francophone minority. Frictions over cultural and political issues between the English Canadians and the Québécois, dating back to the battle, continue to impact the state of affairs in Canada today. When the fighting ended on the European continent, the subsequent treaty forced the French to cede most of their North American possessions to the British, and it also left Britain in tough economic straits, which would set about a chain of events that brought about the American Revolution in the following decade.
While the Battle of Quebec is no longer famous among Americans, the broader conflict, known as the French and Indian War, certainly remains so. As part of the Seven Years' War, which was being fought between the British and French across the world, the French and Indian War was the last in a long series of colonial conflicts between the two world powers and forever changed the colonial map in America and elsewhere. At the end of the war, disputed North American borders were finally settled, and both empires were left reeling from the costs of war. The war would cement British power in North America, end French colonial ambition for decades, and bring about a chain reaction that led to the formation of a new nation.
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