Hello and welcome to a history of the United States.

Episode 122.

The Treaty of Paris, 1763. I'd like to begin this week with a quick mention that A History of the United States, Volume 2, the Colonial Period, is now out.

It's available on Amazon, so if you'd like to buy that and help sort the show

where you can do. But back to the show, it's now been a full 10 years since George Washington

stumbled onto the world stage. And how on earth do we make sense of everything that's

happened since? Iroquois influence over the Indians in the Ohio

Valley started to decline. This helped lead to the British and French, both wanting the

territory. Scirmishes on the frontier worked their way to London and Paris, with Britain and France both starting to prepare for war.

They formed alliances with Prussia and Austria, respectively, in the diplomatic revolution of 1756.

Austria wanted to reclaim Silesia from Prussia, so Prussia launched a pre-entive invasion of Saxony.

Suddenly, the world was at war.

The British made a complete mess of things in America.

There was the disaster at Monongahela in 1755, which saw the death of Commander-in-Chief Braddock, who was then

replaced by Lord Lowndon. There was the disaster at Oswego in 1756 and the Fort William Henry

Massacre in 1757. This was accompanied by political instability in Westminster, including a three-month

period in 1757 where there was no real government at all. Then, finally, the Pitt Newcastle

Ministry was formed. Pitt changed the course of the war in North America. Rather than focusing

on centralisation efforts across the North American colonies and trying to create a vice-reality,

the British pivoted to a more decentralized approach, providing subsidies to the colonies and actually respecting provincial troops,

rather than making them all subordinate to redcoats.

This was the turning point in the war.

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