Hello and welcome to a history of the United States.

Episode 152, the Treaty of Paris, 1763. It's now been a full

10 years since George Washington stumbled onto the world stage. How on earth do we make sense of everything

that's happened since? Iroquois influence over the Indians of the Ohio Valley started to decline.

This helped lead to the British and French.

Wait, sorry, got my notes mixed up there.

Wrong treaty of Paris. Let's try that again.

... Hello and welcome to a history of the United States, episode 152, the Treaty of Paris, 1783. It's now been a full 20 years since

Bristons settled in to rule over her newly acquired North American colonies. How on earth do we make

sense of everything that's happened since? When I first started this series of episodes on the War of American

Independence, I made the point that I believed American independence was inevitable. It's something I

believed when I started this podcast six years ago, and it's something I still believe now,

and I hope I've been able to persuade you of this over our time together.

The main reason, which I've said so often that I'm sure you know where I'm going with this,

is the lessons from the glorious revolution about parliamentary sovereignty.

Did parliamentary sovereignty mean that land-owning men had a right to participate in their government, no taxation without representation, or that the English

and later British Parliament at Westminster had the sovereignty to do whatever it wanted in areas

under British dominion. The answer to that question really depended on whether or not the person

answering it was from the home island or from the colonies, though neither

Brit nor American was aware of that.

The American colonies were largely left to their own devices throughout the first half of the

18th century, and the budding aristocracy of Virginia and Massachusetts had no reason to question

...