HOW THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION WAS CAUSED BY THE FRENCH

In the eighteenth century, the people of Britain, a small, rocky, rainy little island off the west coast of continental Europe, were basically in charge of the world.

The British Empire, which began life as a tea importing company with armed boats, had spread across the entire globe, establishing vast trade networks, inventing the international slave trade, and bringing the dubious gift of British bureaucracy to Africa, Asia, the Indian subcontinent and the Americas, known in those days as “the Colonies”.

Other Empires from Western Europe, most notably Spain and France, had imitated this pattern of aggressive expansion, and by the middle of the eighteenth century, the American continent was divided between them.

The French held the Northern section, then called New France, the Spanish held the jungly bits from Mexico down to the bottom, and the British had the middle part, which was the biggest and most densely populated.

In 1756, squabbles over dynastic succession in Austria built up quite a head of steam, and the British, whose current royal family were from Hanover, decided it was war time.

A key component of the Seven Years’ War was the battle for colonial supremacy in North America, which resulted in the French being decisively defeated.

From 1763, New France was no longer a thing, and within just a few decades, the whole area became Canada, which is why huge chunks of modern Canada still have the Queen of England on their money, but speak French. History is complicated.

Anyway, when the Seven Years’ War ended, the British decided to substantially reorganize the North American Colonies, including some pretty hefty tax increases to cover the cost of all that expensive war they’d just been doing.

Seeing their tax bill go up, but still with no direct representation in government, the American colonists began to get irritated.

In 1768, the first stirrings of revolution led to a riot in Boston Harbour, and that port remained a hotbed of revolutionary activity, culminating with the Boston Tea Party, a mass act of coordinated vandalism, in December 1773.

And this is where the British messed up. Prior to the Boston Tea Party, the majority of American colonists viewed the revolutionary Patriots as seditionists, terrorists and kooks, but England’s parliament reacted with such fury to the Tea Party, passing insanely restrictive new laws to punish and suppress the revolutionaries, that the tide of public opinion swung in the revolutionaries’ favour.

On the 4th of July 1776, a group of colonial politicians, led by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, met to draft the Declaration of Independence, and war broke out.

What the British hadn’t counted on, however, was that the French, still peeved about losing New France, had decided that supporting the revolutionaries would be a great way of getting control of America, and so they piled in to support the Patriots, helping to overwhelm the British Army and win American Independence.

It was the French who repelled the British navy at Chesapeake bay, one of the most important battles of the war, and it was the French who organized the Treaty of Paris, which brought the war to decisive an end in 1783.

With some cunning maneuvers to prevent America becoming a French colony, the former colonists declared themselves a new independent country, composed of the Thirteen Colonies still commemorated by the thirteen stripes on the American flag.

And that’s the story of how an Austrian argument led to a French war, which led to a load of tea being ruined, which led to the United States of America.

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