The French and Indian War was the first in a series of wars between England and France which was largely fought in North America from 1754-1763. In 1756, the conflict had erupted into an international war referred to as the Seven Years’ War and thus came to be regarded as the North American theater of that war. In the early half of the eighteenth century, the British colonies began to flourish and became more thickly populated. Both countries had merchants engaged in lucrative fur trading with the Native Americans, but by the 1750s, the English wanted bigger fish to fry. They set their sights on the fertile lands west of the Appalachian Mountains, with an eye towards converting this untamed wilderness into profitable farms. However, England’s master plan had one itty-bitty glitch; France had already claimed all of the lands touching the Mississippi and St. Lawrence Rivers, including the Great Lakes and the Ohio River valley.

After a series of territorial negotiations ended in stalemate, France set up a series of forts to defend against a potential British attack, which notably included forts at Crown Point on Lake Champlain and on the Wabash, Ohio, Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. Meanwhile, the British began building their own forts at Oswego and Halifax, and brazenly issued lands in the Ohio Valley to the Ohio Company for traders to set up camps in the area. Tensions between the two nations continued to mount and finally erupted into war in 1754, when George Washington led a small brigade of Virginia militiamen into the Ohio Country to drive the French out of the region and claim it for Britain.

It seemed that France would prevail over England for the first two years of the war, due in no small part to France’s strong Native American allies. However, the tide began to turn in 1757, after English Prime Minister William Pitt decided that the best way for England to gain supremacy over France in Europe was to defeat the French in the colonial world. Pitt subsequently devoted tremendous resources towards supporting the British troops in the New World. His efforts were not in vain: British soldiers captured Fort Duquesne later that year and in 1759, the English captured both Fort Niagara and Quebec, France’s major city in the New World. Montreal fell the following year, which effectively left England in control of France’s territories in North America.

The French and Indian War spread into Europe, Africa, and Asia, and fighting between the two countries continued for another three years until both sides signed the Treaty of Paris in 1763. In effect, France lost almost all of its colonies in North America to the English, including most of Canada and the land between the East Coast and the Mississippi River. Even though this conflict is largely overlooked in American history classes, this international conflict actually acted as a major catalyst for the Revolutionary War.

Even though Britain had won a substantial victory over its sworn enemy, the long war had nearly doubled Britain’s national debt. Desperate to pay down some of Britain’s expenses, the Crown attempted to impose a series of punishing new taxes on the colonies. The colonists’ resentment at these steep tax hikes gradually ripened into righteous indignation, thereby sowing the seeds for America’s secession from Great Britain in 1776.

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