Abstract

“Mercifully interpose, O Lord, on behalf of the people of Britain, and all the rest of Europe: still the rage of war among the nations, and put a stop to the effusion of Christian blood”

- Reverend William Currie, Philadelphia, 1748.

Historians of British America’s role in the global wars of the mid-eighteenth century have traditionally portrayed an insular society, primarily concerned with the expansion of faith and trade in the American backcountry, which saw in the wider world nothing much more complex than a Manichean struggle between Protestant and Catholic interests, preceding an imminent apocalypse. Their horizons were actually much broader and their world-view vastly more sophisticated. Failure to take this into account has significantly distorted colonial American history in the period immediately prior to the Revolution.