Abstract

This essay addresses an existing historiographical paradox, explaining why British commanders—who in their correspondence typically dismissed American provincial soldiers as disputatious amateurs—consistently pressed colonial assemblies for extensive numbers of these troops during the Seven Years’ War. Previous scholarship has shown that provincials mutinied more frequently, earned greater pay, and usually served in auxiliary roles while on campaigns—since army officers preferred to reserve their own redcoats for combat. Although the conflict represented the first time that large formations of regulars were deployed in the North American interior, no study has fully explored how economic factors affected attempts to acquire support for such operations. As this paper shows, though imperial administrators failed to anticipate how the relative scarcity and high price of labor and transportation in the colonies would frustrate efforts to replicate standing logistical methods practiced in Europe—where officials simply located and hired adequate numbers of workers locally—they also badly misjudged the wholly unprecedented costs entailed in fielding a large professional army across the Atlantic. Thus, despite provincials’ evident faults, their use conferred a double benefit to the empire: substituting them for hired civilian personnel not only enabled regular units to obtain sufficient levels of local support, but also offset some of the sizable expenses generated by the army, since American legislatures ultimately paid most of the costs of their own troops.

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