Northern North America (1684–1827 CE); Empires Contested, Nations Born, Frontiers Pushed

Geography & Environmental Context

Northern North America includes the modern United States and Canada, excluding the West Indies. It is divided into three subregions:

• Northeastern North America: east of 110°W, from New England and the Maritimes through the Great Lakes and Hudson Bay to Virginia, the Carolinas, most of Georgia, and the Mississippi Valley above Little Egypt.

• Northwestern North America: west of 110°W, from Alaska and the Yukon to the Pacific Northwest and northern California north of the Gulf line.

• Gulf and Western North America: the wedge south of the Montana diagonal, encompassing the plantation South, the Mississippi Valley below Illinois’ Little Egypt, the Plains, the Southwest, and California south of the Oregon border.

Together, these lands embraced a mosaic of boreal forest, prairie, Appalachian highlands, arid plains, subtropical deltas, and Pacific fjords. Each subregion developed distinct lifeways, but all were drawn into the same imperial rivalries and revolutionary transformations.

Climate & Environmental Shifts

The Little Ice Age persisted into the 18th century, bringing harsh winters to the northeast, erratic salmon and root harvests in the northwest, and drought cycles to the Southwest. Hurricanes battered the Gulf coast, while floods shaped the Mississippi delta. Resource pressures mounted: beaver populations declined from overtrapping, forests receded around port towns and plantations, and horse herds spread across the Plains.

Subsistence & Settlement

• Indigenous nations maintained diverse economies: maize horticulture in the northeast and southeast, bison hunting on the Plains, salmon fisheries along Pacific rivers, and seal and whale hunting in the Arctic.

• Colonial settlements took different forms: French Canada and Louisiana, Spanish missions in the Southwest and California, British seaboard colonies, and Russian posts in Alaska.

• The United States, born of revolution, expanded westward into Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Ohio Valley, while Loyalists and Acadians reshaped Canada’s demography.

Technology & Material Culture

Indigenous technologies — birchbark canoes, snowshoes, horse gear, cedar plankhouses, irrigation systems — persisted alongside European imports: muskets, iron tools, plows, mills, sailing ships, and missions. Hybrid cultures emerged, such as Métis in the fur trade, African-descended Gullah in the Carolinas, and Spanish-Indian ranching lifeways in the Southwest.

Movement & Interaction Corridors

• Rivers: the St. Lawrence, Great Lakes, Mississippi, and Columbia were arteries of commerce and war.

• Maritime networks: Atlantic ports linked to Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa; Gulf and Pacific ports tied into global markets.

• Overland corridors: mission trails, fur brigades, and horse trade networks tied regions together.

• Migration: enslaved Africans carried to the South, European immigrants to the seaboard and interior, Loyalist refugees to Canada, and Indigenous nations displaced westward.

Cultural & Symbolic Expressions

Indigenous diplomacy — wampum belts, council fires, potlatch ceremonies, and Green Corn rituals — remained central. European religions spread: Catholicism in French and Spanish zones, Protestantism in the British colonies, syncretic traditions among African and Native peoples. Symbols of sovereignty proliferated: forts, flags, treaties, missions, and plantations marked territorial claims.

Environmental Adaptation & Resilience

Indigenous nations diversified subsistence, shifting to fur trapping, mounted bison hunting, or blending ritual with Catholic observance. Colonists adapted to hurricanes, droughts, and floods with new architecture, irrigation, and crop rotations. Food storage, trade alliances, and hybrid practices allowed resilience in a volatile climate.

Political & Military Shocks

• Imperial wars: Nine Years’ War, Queen Anne’s War, and the Seven Years’ War reshaped borders and alliances.

• Revolutions: The American Revolution created the United States; the Haitian Revolution reverberated through the Gulf; Indigenous uprisings, from Tecumseh’s confederacy to Pueblo resistance, challenged colonial regimes.

• Territorial transfers: Louisiana Purchase (1803), Florida cession (1821), Russian America consolidations in Alaska.

• War of 1812: Britain and the U.S. contested Great Lakes and Gulf coasts, leaving Native confederacies weakened.

Transition

Between 1684 and 1827, Northern North America was transformed from a patchwork of Indigenous nations and rival empires into a continental stage of settler republics, expanding frontiers, and Indigenous dispossession. The fur trade, cod fisheries, plantations, and salmon runs tied its subregions into global markets, while revolution and war redrew its maps. By 1827, the United States was pushing across Appalachia, Canada remained in Britain’s orbit, Russian America and Spanish missions dotted the Pacific, and Native nations, though battered, continued to anchor economies and cultures from the Arctic to the Gulf.

The Pacific Northwest is one of the last significant non-polar regions in the world to be explored by Europeans.

Centuries of reconnaissance and conquest have brought the rest of North America within the claims of imperial powers.

A number of empires and commercial systems during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries converge upon the Northwest Coast, by sea as well as by land across the continent.

The Russian and Spanish empires are extended into the region simultaneously, from opposite directions.

British interest in the maritime fur trade peaks between 1785 and 1794, then declines as the French Revolutionary Wars diminish Britain's available manpower and investment capital.

The country also concentrates its foreign trade activities in India.

Port Louis, open to free trade after the demise of the French East India Company, sees a major increase in shipping, especially from Europe and North America.

For example, from 1786 to 1810 almost six hundred ships from the United States call on Mauritius, and the United States establishes a consulate in Port Louis in 1794.

Privateering is an even greater boon to the economy.

News of the French Revolution reaches Mauritius in 1790, prompting settlers unhappy with royal administration to establish more representative forms of government: a colonial assembly and municipal councils.

When a squadron arrives three years later, however, to enforce the new French government's abolition of slavery, the settlers turn the squadron back.

Napoleon sends a new governor to the island in 1803, resulting in the dissolution of the assembly and councils.

The waning of French hegemony in the region permits a British force of ten thousand, carried from the Indian subcontinent by a fleet of seventy ships, to land on Mauritius in 1810.

The French capitulate to the British, but the British agree to leave in place existing legal and administrative structures.

The 1814 Treaty of Paris awards the island, together with the Seychelles and Rodrigues islands, to Britain.

English becomes the official language, but French and Creole dominate.

Few British immigrants come to the colony.

The Napoleonic wars of the early nineteenth century divert the attention of the maritime powers from suppressing what they derogatorily call piracy, but when peace is restored to Europe in 1815, Algiers finds itself at war with Spain, the Netherlands, Prussia, Denmark, Russia, and Naples.

In March of this year, in what becomes the Second Barbary War, the United States Congress authorizes naval action against the Barbary States, the then-independent Muslim states of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli.

Commodore Stephen Decatur is dispatched with a squadron of ten warships to ensure the safety of United States shipping in the Mediterranean and to force an end to the payment of tribute.

After capturing several corsairs and their crews, Decatur sails into the harbor of Algiers, threatens the city with his guns, and concludes a favorable treaty in which the dey agrees to discontinue demands for tribute, pay reparations for damage to United States property, release United States prisoners without ransom, and prohibit further interference with United States trade by Algerian corsairs.

No sooner has Decatur set off for Tunis to enforce a similar agreement than the dey repudiates the treaty.

The next year, an Anglo-Dutch fleet, commanded by British admiral Viscount Exmouth, delivers a nine-hour bombardment of Algiers.

The attack immobilizes many of the dey's corsairs and obtains from him a second treaty that reaffirms the conditions imposed by Decatur.

In addition, the dey agrees to end the practice of enslaving Christians.

European maritime powers pay the tribute demanded by the rulers of the privateering states of North Africa (Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco) to prevent attacks on their shipping by corsairs.

United States merchant ships, no longer covered by British tribute payments after the American Revolution, are seized and sailors enslaved in the years that follow independence.

In 1794 the United States Congress appropriates funds for the construction of warships to counter the privateering threat in the Mediterranean.

Despite the naval preparations, the United States concludes a treaty with the dey of Algiers in 1797, guaranteeing payment of tribute amounting to ten million US dollars over a twelve-year period in return for a promise that Algerian corsairs will not molest United States shipping.

Payments in ransom and tribute to the privateering states amounts to twenty percent of United States government annual revenues in 1800.

The effectiveness of Tripoli's corsairs had long since deteriorated, but their reputation alone is enough to prompt European maritime states to pay the tribute extorted by the pasha to ensure safe passage of their shipping through Tripolitanian waters.

American merchant ships, no longer covered by British protection, are seized by Barbary pirates in the years after United States independence, and American crews are enslaved.

In 1799 the United States agrees to pay Yusuf eighteen thousand dollars US each year in return for a promise that Tripoli-based corsairs will not molest American ships.

Similar agreements are made at the time with the rulers of Morocco, Algiers, and Tunis.

Northeastern North America (1684–1827 CE): Empires, Nations, and Atlantic Gateways

Geography & Environmental Context

Northeastern North America includes all territory east of 110°W, except the lands belonging to Gulf and Western North America. This encompasses the Great Lakes basin, the St. Lawrence River corridor, Hudson Bay and Labrador, Newfoundland, Greenland, the Arctic, the Maritime provinces, and the Atlantic seaboard from New England through Virginia, the Carolinas, and most of Georgia. It also contains the Mississippi Valley north of Illinois’ Little Egypt and the Upper Missouri above the Iowa–Nebraska crossing, as well as northeast Alabama, central and eastern Tennessee, and nearly all of Kentucky.

Anchors included the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence system, Hudson Bay, the Mississippi headwaters, the Appalachian piedmont and coastal plain, and the Greenland ice sheet. This was a land of forests and prairies, river valleys and tundra, increasingly tied to transatlantic markets.

Climate & Environmental Shifts

This age unfolded under the continuing Little Ice Age. Winters were harsh: ice closed the St. Lawrence, snow lingered across New England and the Maritimes, and Greenland’s fjords froze for longer periods, forcing Inuit hunters to adapt routes and tools. In the Great Lakes and Midwest, shorter growing seasons sometimes strained maize harvests. Atlantic storms battered coastlines, while the cod-rich Grand Banks remained among the world’s most productive fisheries.

Subsistence & Settlement

• Indigenous nations:

  • Iroquois (Haudenosaunee), Huron-Wendat, and Algonquian peoples relied on maize horticulture, deer, moose, caribou, and fisheries.

  • Inuit in Greenland and Labrador centered subsistence on seals, whales, and caribou, adapting to changing sea ice.

  • Southeastern groups (Cherokee, Creek) combined horticulture with hunting.

• Colonial settlements:

  • New France spread from Quebec to the Great Lakes and Mississippi through forts and missions.

  • New England, New York, and the Chesapeake grew rapidly, displacing Native peoples.

  • Hudson’s Bay Company (chartered 1670) expanded posts like York Factory and Fort Albany, anchoring the fur trade.

  • Spanish Florida persisted tenuously until ceded to Britain (1763), then to the U.S. (1821).

  • Greenland saw Inuit continuity until Danish missions after 1721.

• Economic systems: Fur and cod in the north, wheat and mixed farms in the interior, tobacco, rice, and indigo in the southern reaches.

Technology & Material Culture

• Indigenous technologies: canoes, snowshoes, fishing gear, longhouses, wampum belts, dog sleds, umiaks, and harpoons.

• European imports: firearms, iron tools, textiles, plows, ships, and mills.

• Trade goods: kettles, knives, and muskets became embedded in Native economies.

• Colonial towns: churches, courthouses, colleges, and printing presses reflected European traditions, while frontier cabins and missions reflected adaptation.

Movement & Interaction Corridors

• Fur trade networks: Carried beaver pelts from the Great Lakes and Hudson Bay into Europe, exchanged for manufactured goods.

• Maritime corridors: The Grand Banks drew fleets from England, France, Spain, and Portugal; New England merchants trafficked with the Caribbean and Africa.

• Indigenous corridors: Canoe routes and portages linked Hudson Bay, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi basin.

• Greenland: Inuit maintained ice routes across Baffin Bay; Danish missions established lasting presence after 1721.

Cultural & Symbolic Expressions

• Indigenous nations:

  • The Haudenosaunee Confederacy remained a powerful political and diplomatic bloc.

  • Oral traditions, seasonal rituals, and clan governance reinforced autonomy.

• Colonial cultures:

  • Catholic missions dominated New France; Protestant congregations spread in New England and the South.

  • Anglicanism tied seaboard elites to Britain.

  • Jewish communities established early synagogues in port cities like Newport.

• Greenland Inuit: Rituals around whale and seal hunting persisted; Christian teaching blended with older cosmologies after Danish missions.

• Symbols of territory: forts, flags, treaties, and wampum belts embodied contested claims of sovereignty.

Environmental Adaptation & Resilience

Indigenous farmers rotated crops, built surpluses, and shifted villages as conditions required. Hunters diversified prey; Inuit adjusted hunting gear and routes to ice changes. Colonists overexploited cod, timber, and beaver but also relied on Native knowledge for survival in harsh climates. Beaver depletion shifted fur trade routes deeper into the interior, while forest clearing transformed seaboard ecosystems.

Political & Military Shocks

• Imperial wars: The Nine Years’ War, Queen Anne’s War, and the Seven Years’ War drew Indigenous peoples into shifting alliances.

• Seven Years’ War (1756–63): Britain seized New France, transforming the balance of power.

• American Revolution (1775–83): Created the United States from New England to Georgia; Loyalists resettled in Canada, reshaping its demographics.

• War of 1812: Britain and the U.S. clashed over the Great Lakes and Chesapeake; Native confederacies (notably Tecumseh’s) collapsed in defeat.

• Greenland: Danish rule consolidated after missions, linking Inuit more firmly into European frameworks.

Transition

By 1827 CE, Northeastern North America had become a patchwork of Indigenous nations, colonial legacies, and new settler republics. The fur trade and cod fisheries tied forests and coasts to Atlantic markets; French Canada endured under British rule; the United States secured independence and expanded inland. Greenland was drawn into Danish orbit. Indigenous nations remained vital, but faced epidemic disease, land dispossession, and broken alliances. What had begun as an imperial frontier was by the early 19th century a continental zone of nations, settler societies, and Native resilience under unprecedented pressure.

Britain recognizes the independence of the United States following their defeat at Yorktown in 1781.

In the peace treaty of 1783, American sovereignty is recognized from the Atlantic coast west to the Mississippi River.

Nationalists lead the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 in writing the United States Constitution, ratified in state conventions in 1788.

The federal government is reorganized into three branches, on the principle of creating salutary checks and balances, in 1789.

George Washington, who had led the revolutionary army to victory, is the first president elected under the new constitution.

The Bill of Rights, forbidding federal restriction of personal freedoms and guaranteeing a range of legal protections, is adopted in 1791.

The Bourbons allow Chile to trade more freely with other colonies, as well as with independent states.

Exchange increases with Argentina after it becomes the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata in 1776.

Ships from the United States and Europe are engaging in direct commerce with Chile by the end of the eighteenth century.

However, the total volume of Chilean trade remains small because the colony produces few items of high unit value to outsiders.

Freer trade brings with it greater knowledge of politics abroad, especially the spread of liberalism in Europe and the creation of the United States.

Although a few members of the Chilean elite flirt with ideals of the Enlightenment, most of them hold fast to the traditional ideology of the Spanish crown and its partner, the Roman Catholic Church.

Notions of democracy and independence, let alone Protestantism, never reach the vast majority of mestizos and native Americans, who remain illiterate and subordinate.

During the brief eleven months of British occupation, the oppressive Spanish trade restrictions are lifted, and Havana is thrown open to trade with Britain and particularly with the North American colonies.

More than seven hundred merchant ships visit the port during those months, more than the number that had visited Havana in the preceding decade.

British capital, as well as large numbers of low-priced slaves, enter the island, boosting sugar production.

For the most part, Britain maintains Spanish administrative institutions, although an attempt is made to reform the judicial system by ending some of the existing privileges and streamlining judicial practices.