In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

283 10 French Reactions to the British Search for a Northwest Passage from Hudson Bay and the Origins of the Seven Years’ War Après avoir dominé la période de la succession d’Espagne, la question des rapports de l’Amérique espagnole avec l’Europe et les colonies européennes d’Amérique fut probablement la question primordiale de la politique internationale au milieu du XVIIIe siècle. —Pierre Muret, La prépondérance anglaise (1715–1763), 1937 Dans l’histoire du dix-huitième siècle, peu d’événements ont donné lieu á autant de controverses et à plus de jugements contradictoires que les incidents diplomatiques que préc édèrent la guerre de Sept Ans. —Richard Waddington, Louis XV et le renversement des alliances, 1896 During and immediately after the War of Jenkins’ Ear and the larger War of the Austrian Succession it joined, British explorers, promoters, and officials sought ways to overcome the physical and diplomatic barriers to British Pacific navigation . French officials observed these British efforts and contemplated their implications . The question raised was how the French Empire would respond to the prospect of its leading rival’s obtaining the South Sea access that the Utrecht settlement and North America’s obstinate impermeability had so far denied to France.1 An earlier version of material in this chapter appeared in Paul Mapp, “French Reactions to the British Search for a Northwest Passage from Hudson Bay and the Origins of the Seven Years’ War,” Terrae Incognitae, XXXIII (2001), 13–32. My thanks to the journal for allowing me to reuse it. 1. Pierre Muret, La prépondérance anglaise (1715–1763) (Paris, 1937), 381 (“After having dominated the period of the Spanish Succession, the question of the relations of Spanish America with Europe and the European colonies of America was probably the primordial question of international politics in the middle of the eighteenth century”); Richard Waddington, Louis XV et le renversement des alliances: Préliminaires de la guerre de Sept Ans, 1754–1756 (Paris, 1896), v (“In the history of the eighteenth century, few events have given rise to as many controversies and to more 284 | French Reactions to the British Search for a Northwest Passage One response was writing. French evaluations of British South Sea and North American probes appear in the letters and memoirs circulating among mid-eighteenth-century French ministers, ambassadors, and foreign ministry officials, and the availability of these papers allows analysis of the geostrategic considerations driving French diplomats between the two great mid-eighteenthcentury European wars. Presentiments of another French confrontation with Britain were prominent in these papers. In the years after the War of the Austrian Succession, French officials knew that another Anglo-French conflict was possible, suspected it was probable, and feared it was unavoidable. Territorial and commercial disputes in India, Acadia, the Caribbean, and the Ohio Valley remained unresolved, and tensions arising from these squabbles unallayed. Still counting the lives and fortunes lost in the last war and fearful of the disasters that a more momentous future war might bring, most members of the French government hoped to prevent or delay the outbreak of new hostilities. Indeed, French officials often disparaged the value of contentious North American areas like the OhioValley and questioned whether their possession justified the hazards of another struggle with the British Empire.2 Despite the desire to avoid war and doubts about whether disputed North American territories were worth fighting over, French statesmen responded aggressively between 1748 and 1755 to a variety of small-scale British actions in the two empires’ North American marchlands. The French government had forts constructed in contested territories to repel British traders, land speculators, and soldiers. It sent expeditions into the Ohio Valley to establish a French claim to the region, and it destroyed or seized British forts challenging this assertion. It sent new army regiments to Canada, and its soldiers and their Indian allies defeated Washington at Fort Necessity in 1754 and Braddock on the Monongahela in 1755. British statesmen countered these French measures.The chain of increasingly bellicose actions and reactions leading to 1754 and 1755 Anglo-French Ohio Valley combat conduced also to 1755 and 1756 French decisions instigating a global Anglo-French war. This sequence of events raises the question of why French officials allowed seemingly minor frontier provocations in marginal contradictory judgments than the diplomatic incidents that preceded the Seven Years’ War”). In this chapter, translations from French are mine unless otherwise noted. 2...

Share