The Struggle for North America

    Although the outcome of many events contributed to the world-wide spread of the English language, three developments within a fifteen-year period from 1745 to 1760 are especially significant. 1745 is widely remembered in Scotland as the year when the last serious revolt of Gaelic-speaking Highlanders occurred—and failed a year later: henceforth, English would spread into parts of Britain where it had rarely been heard before. The second and third events happened close together in time but in places very far apart. In India, the British won a decisive victory over the French at Plassey in 1757, and in 1759 other soldiers of George II captured the city of Quebec, the jewel in the crown of the French empire in North America.

The campaigns leading to Plassey and Quebec were part of a longer struggle known both as the Seven Years War (1756 to 1763) and, in the American context, the French and Indian War. The war was the final one in a series of four, the earliest of which lasted from 1689 to 1697. All involved conflicts between royal families in Europe, but all four also pitted French and English speakers against each other in North America. In the Seven Years War, British Prime Minister William Pitt gave an especially high priority to defeating France in the New World and to seizing all French lands in North America.

If the Seven Years War arose from long-standing rivalries between London and Paris, it was nevertheless a young colonel from Virginia named George Washington who touched off the conflagration with an attack on French troops in Pennsylvania in 1754. For some years English and French colonizers had seen the Ohio Valley west of the Appalachian ranges as the key to the future settlement of North America. Whoever wished to control that vast territory would naturally have to control the Ohio River, which starts its course to the Mississippi River at the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela River, the site of modern Pittsburgh. The French succeeded in defeating Washington and later the English general Braddock (the latter dying in one battle), but British forces persisted, building roads and a chain of redoubts such as Fort Bedford in their campaign to capture Fort Duquesne at the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela.

    In 1758 the French burned and abandoned Fort Duquesne, with the British soon building Fort Pitt on the same site. The struggle between the two powers for North America more or less ended in 1763 with France giving up its claims to the Ohio Valley as well as control of Canada. Apart from the French, the other losers in this struggle were several Indian tribes that had also opposed Britain. Although France later had the Louisiana Territory to sell to the emerging United States, the Seven Years War proved to be crucial. In 1898 the German statesman Otto von Bismarck was asked what he believed was the most decisive fact of modern history. He replied, "The fact that the North Americans speak English."

Sources for this page:

David Crystal. English as a Global Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Howard Peckham. The Colonial Wars: 1689 to 1762. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964.