Britain’s Wilderness Frontier

How and with what prospect of success do empires manage their distant lands? In times of relative calm and security these questions hardly arise: in the early eighteenth-century British governments treated their colonies, and their frontiers, with ‘salutary neglect’.

By 1748, matters were dramatically different in North America. Settler intrusion into Native American lands, apparently unfettered by provincial governments and encouraged by speculators, alongside perceived French advances, threatened to engulf the whole region in a disastrous war. Quarrelsome colonies proved unable to co-operate in self-defence, forcing ministers to centralise control of Indian and military policy. This programme, undertaken with inadequate resources and in the face of conflicting priorities, undermined colonial autonomy and provoked resistance and resentment.

When London attempted to draw a continuous peacetime boundary between settled areas and Indian lands, the resentment became a major cause of the American Revolution. In Britain’s Wilderness Frontier, historian John Oliphant tells the story of how it all fell apart.