1763: What a Difference a Year Makes

Colin G. Calloway. The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. xvii + 219 pp. Timeline, maps, illustrations, notes, and index. $28.00.

The Scratch of a Pen represents the latest volume in Oxford University Press's Pivotal Moments in American History series and takes its name from a phrase coined by nineteenth-century historian Francis Parkman. Colin G. Calloway argues that the year 1763 should be included among other critical years such as 1492, 1776, 1863, 1917, 1945, and 1968 because so much changed with the Peace of Paris that ended the French and Indian War (or the Seven Years' War depending on one's point of view) (p.15). The series editor, David Hackett Fischer, agrees noting that "[t]his half-remembered event was a great world war, fought on four continents and three oceans around the globe. . . . The world war ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1763, and we are still living with the consequences" (p. xi). He also explains that The Scratch of a Pen "represents a new trend in historical scholarship. It links the events and contingencies of political and diplomatic history to the processes and structures of social and cultural history" (p. xi).

In actuality, this combination has comprised part of the historical discipline for some time, although not everyone has embraced it quite as emphatically as Calloway and Fischer have. Furthermore, Calloway's blend of Indian and European voices has emerged as the standard for almost all who write on the colonial era. One rarely encounters the old-school analysis of settlement that focuses only on famous white men discovering and conquering a continent; instead, scholars delight in describing the complexity of cultures and contributions that created this "new world," including Calloway himself who has written extensively on this very subject.

Interest in the French and Indian War has also increased dramatically within the past few years. One need only pick up Fred Anderson's definitive Crucible of War (2000; abridged, 2005) or any other of the myriad texts available about what some historians have begun to call the "First World War" to realize that this conflict represents the latest hot topic in American colonial studies. When public television produces a miniseries entitled The War That Made America based on this incident, scholars know that they have not only broken the barrier between academic and popular history but also that their subject has come of age.

What makes Calloway's work significant is the way he tells the story. He covers a vast amount of material in a small amount of space yet manages to maintain its complex nuances without confusing the reader or obscuring the event. He balances sweeping discussions of land transfers with individual reactions by the people who actually experienced them. He details global diplomacy and international affairs but shows how it affected particular groups—British, American, French, Spanish, Indian, and more—living throughout the continent of North America. He gives the general and the specific, the broad and the narrow, to provide a textured portrayal of one of the most momentous years in early American history.

In his introduction, Calloway offers a brief overview of the war that made 1763 so important. He explains that "British and French, Americans and Canadians, American Indians, Prussians, Austrians, Russians, Spaniards, and East Indian moguls fought the war, and conflicts had been waged on land and sea, in North America, the Caribbean Islands, West Africa, India, and continental Europe" (p. 4). Because of this war's complexity, negotiating its peace proved anything but easy. Once implemented, however, the Treaty of Paris completely reconfigured the map of North America giving Canada, the Great Lakes region, and the lower Mississippi valley to Great Britain and all lands west of the Mississippi River to Spain. Rather than dwelling on these diplomatic intrigues, though, Calloway prefers to "survey the enormous changes generated by the Peace of...