The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713-1763

Conclusion

429 Conclusion This study has argued that perceptions of western American geography influenced the course of imperial diplomacy, that ideas about the undiscovered West contributed to the origins, unfolding, and outcome of the mid-eighteenth century ’s Great War for Empire. Unease about the implications of British Hudson Bay exploration helped draw France into war with Britain. Spanish concerns about French westward exploration reinforced Spain’s neutral tendencies, keeping the Iberian empire out of the Seven Years’ War until its entry was too late to forestall French defeat or British victory. Increasing French skepticism about the value of the unexplored West and lingering Spanish disquiet about the danger it might hold shaped a diplomatic settlement removing France from the continent and pushing Spain east to the Mississippi. With respect to interimperial relations, the North American FarWest gained significance from the tendencyof European statesmen to understand it in terms of familiar territories like Peru and Mexico and idealized realms like China and Japan.The Spanish colonies, with their mineral resources and large, productive, and tractable indigenous and creole populations were indisputably important. The possibility that the North American West would resemble or lead to these places elevated the region’s significance in imperial strategists’ eyes. The same could be said of the undiscovered West’s relation to East Asia. The configuration of northwestern America and northeastern Asia remained unclear to earlyeighteenth -century Europeans, and the prospect that advanced Asian peoples might frequent or inhabit North America connected western lands to Indies visions. The Pacific tied these Spanish and Asian dreams together. The contents of the South Sea, and the boundary between North American lands and North Pacific waters was still uncertain for early-eighteenth-century Europeans. The Pacific surely led to Spanish and East Asian riches. It might hold new Japans and untouched spice islands. European imagination often filled strange lands and waters with extrapolations from other real or imagined areas. The more subtle way to explicate the undiscovered West’s significance is to think of it in terms not just of unknown space, but also of unrealized time. French, Spanish, and British geopolitical thinkers could see that western North America represented a significant part of the imperial and mercantile future. 430 | Conclusion Whether the region would hold profit or peril, bitter disappointment or splendid destiny, was as yet uncertain.What was clear was that wise statesmen ought to plan for the possibilities. Enlightened imperial thinkers observed that previous centuries’ geographic discoveries had revolutionized international affairs and that current statesmen were still grappling with the implications of Columbus ’s voyage.There was every reason to believe that future statecraft would continue to react to reconnaissance, and there was some basis for hoping that current statesmen might anticipate and inflect coming events. Eighteenth-century trends were evident enough and mid-eighteenth-century European faith in the utility of systematic thinking and the efficacy of government action sufficiently strong to suggest that forethought might pay. The West might afford new and better routes to Spanish Empire and Lake, offer new resources to cultivate or unearth, and hold new peoples to contain or convert, trade or ally with. A sage statesmen might think ahead and find a way to put these bounties at his empire’s disposal. This western futurity brings the story of the region’s relation to the Seven Years’ War in line with other aspects of that contest. A striking feature of the war as a whole is the extent to which its component conflicts arose not simply in reaction to earlier events but in anticipation of future developments. Austria ’s Count Kaunitz engineered a revolutionary anti-Prussian alliance not only to avenge Frederick the Great’s seizure of Silesia but also because of the realization that a rising and unscrupulous Prussia might endanger Austria in the future. Frederick launched his preemptive 1756 invasion of Saxony both as a reaction to the Austro-Russo-Franco alliance forming against him and in hopes of forestalling the disaster this coalition portended. French India governor JosephFran çois Dupleix’s attempts to gain control of indigenous revenue sources both responded to past French financial shortfalls and sketched the kind of EuroAsian empire soon to be engineered by Robert Clive and the British East India Company. Washington and his French adversaries west of the mountains had been sent to head off each other’s imperial expansion. In all these cases, statesmen were discerning the direction of events, looking ahead, and trying to adapt policy to prevailing...