[Pelham]

Yep. That’s another parallel.

“The parliament’s remedy for the terror or guerrilla war along the frontier was to deny the yeomanry access to the frontier”

I was just reading about that in Ray Raphael’s “Founders”. It was one of the many aggravations following the French and Indian War that stuck in the craw of Colonials and unified them against London. It affected George Washington directly.

[nathanbedford]

I suppose that Western land speculation was the 18th century version of Silicon Valley and George Washington, who was a surveyor partly for that very reason, was in the thick of the boom.

When the British won the French and Indian War (the Seven Years War here in Europe) their aim was to get the sugar islands which they regarded to be a far more value than the rough and untamed land which produced border wars and a few furs in the peace negotiation which followed.

I think one of the reasons why capitalism flourished in America when Europe experienced the French Revolution, the revolutions of 1848, the Russian Revolution and the post-World War I communist revolutions in places like Hungary and Germany, was because the continent lacked the safety valve of the frontier. That frontier meant that labor was very valuable and scarce and it meant that the American economy would flourish as a merit based economy.

It might contribute to the fact that the American Revolution was not a precursor of the excesses of the French Revolution and it might even be an explanation why Britain managed to escape the horrors of the French Revolution and the subsequent revolutions in 19th century on the European continent. The British Empire had a frontier in the sense that they had a colonial empire and most of the European nations did not. Even France could not boast of the same safety valve.