Abstract, for HIST 101 Paper submitted today

[rfmcdonald]

"One of the causes of the War of American Independence were the continuing disputes between British imperial authorities and North American colonists over British North America’s new frontiers, acquired from France after the Seven Years War, including the territory of Nova Scotia, old Acadia. In each of these distinctive frontier areas, American radicals–drawing from their ideology of popular representation–sought to convince local elites to side with the revolutionaries, and in so doing, legitimate the absorption of these frontiers into the emerging American nation-state. However, the American radicals failed in many of these regions, particularly in the colony of Nova Scotia, where the radicals could theoretically have had more success owing to Nova Scotians’ intimate and continuing trade and migration links with New England. These potential Nova Scotian sympathies towards the Thirteen Colonies-and of Nova Scotia’s mercantile elites–were squandered as a result of American military attacks, most notably by American privateering off of the Nova Scotian coast. This privateering disrupted the trade with points elsewhere in the British Empire that sustained Atlantic Canadian communities at a very high cost in financial and human suffering. In the end, it may have been the American rebellion with its privateering raids which permanently detached Nova Scotia politically–if not economically or culturally–from its New England partners."