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.By the end of the 1760s every colony north of Delaware had also established its owncollege, but from Delaware south only William and Mary in Virginia provided highereducation for the settlers.This difference was symptomatic.On the whole, northerncolonies replicated the institutional potential of Europe.With New England setting thepace, they trained their own ministers, lawyers, physicians, and master craftsmen.Plantation societies imported them instead, even though white per capita wealth wasconsiderably higher from Maryland south.Northern provinces were already becomingmodernizing societies capable of internalizing the institutional momentum of the mothercountry.Southern provinces remained colonies, specialized producers of non-Europeancrops and importers of specialists who could provide necessary services.But all mainlandcolonies grew at a prodigious rate.In 1700 they had only 250,000 settlers and slaves.That figure topped a million in the 1740s and 2 million in the late 1760s.Among large events, both northern and southern colonies shared in the GreatAwakening and the final cycle of wars that expelled France from North America.Somehistorians like to interpret the Awakening a powerful concentration of evangelicalrevivals that swept through Britain and the colonies mostly between the mid-1730s andearly 1740s as a direct prelude to the American Revolution, but even though awakenedsettlers overwhelmingly supported independence in the 1770s, the relationship was neverthat simple or direct. Old Lights, or opponents of the revivals, would provide both theloyalists and nearly all of the most conspicuous patriots.At no point in its unfolding didthe Awakening seem to pit Britain against America.It divided both.By 1763 Britain had emerged victorious from its mid-century cycle of wars withFrance, a struggle that pulled together most of the trends toward imperial integration thathad been emerging since the 1670s.The last of these wars, what Lawrence Henry Gipsoncalled the Great War for the Empire (1754 63), marked the fourth-greatest mobilizationand the third-highest rate of fatality of any American military struggle from then to theBeneficiaries of catastrophe 199Beneficiaries of catastrophe 199present.(Only World War II, the Civil War, and the Revolutionary War mustered ahigher percentage of the population; only the Civil War and the American Revolutionkilled a larger proportion of participants.) Despite widespread friction in the first threeyears, no other event could rival that war in the intensity of cooperation it generatedbetween imperial and provincial governments.Both New Light and Old Light preacherssaw nothing less than the millennium issuing from the titanic struggle.The result wasmore prosaic but still as unique as the effort.Great Britain expelled the government ofFrance from North America and, in the Peace of Paris of 1763, asserted control over theentire continent east of the Mississippi except New Orleans, which France temporarilytransferred to Spain along with the rest of Louisiana west of the great river.The war left several ironic legacies.To North Americans who had participated, itseemed a powerful vindication of the voluntaristic institutions upon which they had reliedfor their success.To London authorities, it seemed to demonstrate the inability of NorthAmericans to meet their own defense needs even under an appalling emergency.TheBritish answer would be major imperial reforms designed to create a more authoritarianempire, capable of answering its vast obligations whether or not the settlers chose tocooperate.Neither side noticed another heritage.During the struggle the Indians throughout thenortheastern woodlands had shown a novel and intense distaste for shedding oneanother s blood.The Iroquois ideal of a league of peace among the tribes of theconfederacy seemed to be spreading throughout the region, fired by universalist religiousjustifications for resisting any further encroachments from the settlers.The Delawaresand Shawnees in the upper Ohio Valley provided most of this religious drive for Indianunity, which had a striking impact as early as Pontiac s war of resistance in 1763 4.eAs events would show, it was too little, too late.But for the next half-century, thismovement inflicted one disaster after another upon the settlers and subjected first theempire and then the United States to a rate of defense spending that would haveenormous political consequences.Considering the limited resources upon which Indianresistance could draw, it was at least as impressive as the effort toward unity undertakenby the thirteen colonies themselves after 1763.It also suggests a final paradox.WithoutIndian resistance to seal British commitment to imperial reform, there might have beenno American Revolution at all.EDITOR S NOTESa Raynal was a philosophe, much interested in the New World, and Robertson was a historian,much admired in America [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]