‘Magna Britannia’

Abstract

This chapter reveals the continuity of colonial thinking about geopolitics after the end of the Seven Years War. It shows how the unsettled state of Europe continued to trouble colonists after 1763. From its earliest days, the patriot movement warned about the renewal of international tensions, criticizing British colonial policy alongside the isolationist turn of British foreign policy as sources of weaknesses. Despite the conquest of Canada, the prospect of a French war of revenge and the spectre of French infiltration continued to dominate colonial discourse, maintaining its hold over conspiratorial thinking. These fears reached a height in the late 1760s and early 1770s, when a string of international crises in Poland, Corsica, the Falkland Islands, and Sweden unleashed a series of major war scares that shaped and tempered patriot manoeuvrings during the imperial crisis.