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William Durandal
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Ryan Reynolds
Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile.
Maya Jasanoff
Now.
Ryan Reynolds
I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15, but it turns out that's very illegal, so there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.
Maya Jasanoff
Of $45 for a three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required. New customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of networks busy taxes and fees extra.
William Durandal
Cementmobile.com have you ever spotted McDonald's hot crispy fries right as they're being scooped into the carton and time just stands still? Bada Ba Magua placed his hands to his mouth and raised the fatal and appalling whoop. The scattered Indian started at the well known cry directly there rose such a yell along the plain and through the arches of the wood as seldom burst from human lips before. More than 2,000 raving savages broke through the forest at the signal and threw themselves across the fatal plain with instinctive alacrity. Death was everywhere, and in his most terrific and disgusting aspects, resistance only served to inflame the murderers who inflicted their furious blows long after their victims were beyond their power of resentment. It might have been 10 minutes before the sisters stood riveted. It might have been 10 minutes that the sisters had stood riveted to one spot, horror stricken and nearly helpless when the first blow was struck. Their screaming companions had pressed them in a body, rendering flight impossible. And now that fear or death had scattered most, if not all from around them, they saw no avenue open but such as conducted to the tomahawks of their foes. On every side arose shrieks, groans, exhortations and curses. At this moment Alice caught a glimpse of the vast form of her father.
Maya Jasanoff
Father.
William Durandal
Father, we are here. Shrieked Alice as he passed at no great distance without appearing to heed them, come to us, Father, or we die.
Anita Anand
Do not adjust your sets. This is not book at bedtime. Hi Jack. Or, you know, a particularly bloody version of Jackan Oreo Gory if you like. It's just that Williams found this very good. Thank you. Found this deep seated desire to be a storyteller and you do it very well.
William Durandal
Thank you very much.
Anita Anand
That's all right. That was an excerpt from that very famous massacre scene from James Fenimore Cooper's novel the Last of the Mohicans, which was made into that terrific film by Daniel Day Lewis that I just forced.
Maya Jasanoff
You to watch me to watch.
Anita Anand
I'd literally spent the last hour and a bit of my life watching people bleeding slowly to death under the tomahawk. So thanks for that.
William Durandal
It's one of my all time favorite movies. I love it.
Anita Anand
Yes. This massacre that you might remember from the movie, if you haven't already been forced to watch it by William watch it. It's immortalized in that film the Last of the Mohicans. And it is actually based on a real thing that happened. It's what the Americans still call the French and Indian wars, when Huron warriors ambushed an army of English redcoats after the surrender of Fort William Henry in 1757. And this became one of the most famous famous incidents in 18th century history. It was a key moment of the global conflict between France and England known as the Seven Years War. And in this war, the French with their Huron allies lay siege to this place, Fort William Henry. And after a six day bombardment, the British finally surrender. And the terms of surrender include the British being allowed to withdraw under French protection. But, but, but. And you heard from William's reading, there is very big but here. The Huron warriors, despite the French efforts to control them, attack the withdrawing column and it leads to this really quite horrific massacre. The Huron kill and scalp many of the British soldiers and civilians. They take captives and then they slaughter the sick and the wounded. And we're here to talk about this period of history because you can't really talk about Canada without talking about that conflict that shaped so much not just of Europe, the Seven Year War, but also of North America. We are delighted to welcome back Maya Jasanoff of Harvard University. Hello. Welcome, Maya.
Maya Jasanoff
Hi there.
Gary Lineker
Thanks for having me back.
Anita Anand
And thank you so much for not being frightened by the first time.
Maya Jasanoff
I have a lot of things to say about it.
William Durandal
First of all, we should say that Maya, like Anita this morning, had woke up without ever seeing this greatest of all movies.
Anita Anand
And unlike me, Maya didn't give in to your hectoring. Well done, Maya.
Maya Jasanoff
Well, above all, I didn't give in to the undoubted appeals of Daniel Day Lewis, which is the primary reason that I might tune in.
Anita Anand
I mean, just between you and me, me quite dishy. Look, the reason that you're here, you've written this Fabulous, fabulous book. Can I just show it to the class? Maya Jasanoff's Liberty's Exiles, the loss of America and the remaking of the British Empire. And it's very much, this is a bedrock of what we're going to be talking about in this episode and the next.
William Durandal
A spectacular, spectacular, award winning book which I'm ashamed to say I had never read before this week and I have loved it. Maya, you always said it was your best book and it is. It's absolutely fantastic. It's epic amounts of archival research, more than I think any of your other books is extraordinary.
Maya Jasanoff
And now that you've read it, I feel I must go and watch the Last of the Mohicans.
Anita Anand
No, don't, don't just watch the clips. Put in Daniel Day Lewis running. That's fine. You'll be sorted. Okay, so can we start off, I mean, I think, William, that the idea is to maybe paint a big picture of what's going on in the 18th century.
William Durandal
And particularly, Maya, if you could take us through, well, two things really. The lead up to the global Seven Year War, but specifically the cameras down to what will become Canada, the north part of British possessions in North America.
Maya Jasanoff
So we call it the Seven Years War in global history. But really it's part of what some historians would call the Second Hundred Years War because the whole of the 18th century really is a series of conflicts between chiefly Britain and France and a somewhat shifting set of allies which in the second half of the 18th century sees France and Spain often together and Britain and Protestant German powers together, including Prussia.
William Durandal
Prussia being the guys that have really got the whole kind of military thing going in an extraordinary way at this point.
Maya Jasanoff
Prussia getting that, particularly under the reign of their incredibly powerful, charismatic and important modernizing ruler, Frederick ii. Frederick the Great. Another thing that's striking about this period is there are these very pivotal rulers in a bunch of places. You'll end up with of course, the Empress Catherine in Russia later in the 18th century. You have Frederick the Great, you have Louis XIV, you have various important monarchs who are sort of changing the playing field. And Maria Theresa, Joseph the Second in Austria as well.
William Durandal
But Frederick the Great important because of his revolution in warfare which goes global.
Maya Jasanoff
Absolutely. Yeah. So he's very significant. And we can add, by the way, that as far as Britain is concerned, remember that this is a period where the monarchs of Britain are also the electors of Hanover. So George I, who becomes king in the early 18th century, comes from Hanover, is succeeded by his son George ii, who's the Monarch over the period that we're discussing right now. And as elector of Hanover, he has responsibilities to his German state. And his German state is very near that of Prussia, Frederick ii. And in the run up to the Seven Years War, you see an alliance being created between Great Britain, Hanover and Prussia. And the German states in general are big sources of military manpower. American listeners will be familiar with the Hessians who are brought from the state of Hesse as mercenaries essentially by the British to fight in the American Revolution some years later.
Anita Anand
Take us to why you've got Britain and France facing off against each other in North America. First of all, why is that part of the world so important to them and how do they find themselves in such conflict?
Maya Jasanoff
So you've got, in North America, basically, you have a continent whose future is very much in the balance. And the lay of the land going up into the French and Indian war, seven years war, is that you have the 13 colonies of British America strung along the eastern seaboard, but then to the west of them, essentially blocking any further expansion westward by these growing, burgeoning, heavily mercantile, but also land hungry colonies of the coast. You have the expanse of what's called New France, which has been in French hands, French claims since the 16th century, really, and ranges from Hudson's Bay and from Newfoundland up in the north, all the way down the river valleys of the Ohio. To some extent, that's in contest. The Mississippi down to the Gulf of Mexico and New Orleans in the South.
William Durandal
Just before I came and had dinner with you at Harvard Meyer last month, I'd been in Frontenac, which I hadn't realized was a French possession as far down in the Mississippi on the outset of St. Louis.
Maya Jasanoff
So, yeah, I mean, some of the cities that still have versions of their French names in the United States that are part of New France are Detroit in the Great Lakes, which is a big area of conflict and contestation between Britain and France in the second half of the 18th century, and the United States and St. Louis, which is a gateway to the west and was for St. Louis under the French. So the French have claim to this huge amount of land, but the French have very few people living in it. The population of New France in this period is in the five digits, you know, 75,000, something like that.
William Durandal
Compared to what in the British territory?
Maya Jasanoff
Compared to about one and a half million and growing pretty fast.
William Durandal
Oh, really?
Maya Jasanoff
To look at the map, you see what looks like this big French expanse claiming the continent, potential access all the way to the west if they want to push for It. But in reality, it's the coast and the rapidly growing colonies in British hands that have the real energy and the economic power.
William Durandal
Is that the imbalance, Maya, that leads the French to cooperate more closely with their Indian allies. In all these movies like Las the Mucus, you're always seeing a couple of French generals in their sort of posh European kit, and then you have all these sort of guys with tomahawks around them.
Anita Anand
Or is it. I mean, we just did a couple of episodes with Cartier and others, and those who sort of follow them, you know, really making allegiances, you know, trying to set up shop with the Mi' Kmaq and the Wendat and say, you know, we can work together. You know, we start with furs, and then we can actually have some kind of coalition. Are they just better at dealing with the native population? What's the truth of this?
Maya Jasanoff
Both sides are doing this. And one of the exceptions that I would take to your opening with the Last of the Mohicans.
William Durandal
Yes, I should. I should apologize for that Very, very sort of Victorian reading of the references to sandwiches and so on. Exactly.
Maya Jasanoff
Anyway, but. But I would say that one of the. One of the misconceptions, perhaps, that's perpetrated by that is the idea that, you know, the French have these uniquely horrific Indian allies, while the British are more upstanding, et cetera. In truth. I mean, you know, a lot of this land is, of course, it's really native land, and they ought to have possession of it. And. And they're more powerful in many of these places. When you have 75,000 people scattered across a territory ranging from New Orleans to Quebec and beyond, this is really tiny numbers of people. And so, of course, along the way, the white traders are heavily dependent on relations with Indians. And there's also various objectives. I mean, you have Jesuit priests who are interested in converting people.
William Durandal
Tell us about them, because they're interesting. You mentioned when we were setting up a French movie, what was it called? Black Robe.
Gary Lineker
Yes.
Maya Jasanoff
There's a good movie or an instructive movie about the Jesuits in New France in the 17th century called Black Robe. It was made, I think, just about a year or so before Last of the Mohicans. And it gets into some of the interactions on the ground, and it includes, I think, a number of actors from indigenous peoples and certainly indigenous languages. So it's just something I would recommend to any listeners who want to get.
William Durandal
Something more serious than the last time.
Maya Jasanoff
Yeah, maybe we. We could put it that way. But suffice to say, I mean, what I want to get across here is that if you're looking at, say, the Great lakes in the 17th and early 18th centuries, you see Europeans trading, particularly the fur trade, in areas with indigenous peoples, Indians or Native Americans. Either phrase is used widely. And both of these groups, British, French, they're small numbers of people and they're very embedded in these communities. And in fact, the historian Richard White has influentially written about this time and place is what he calls a middle ground. A place where, in fact, there are ways in which white and Indian communities manage to create a sort of modus vivendi together that will later be shattered by much more aggressive claims to land that are being pursued particularly by colonists, but are also thrown into dispute by increasingly high level war between the respective governments of Britain and France.
William Durandal
Maya, one other thing I think we should stress, which I learned from you, I remember when we were talking, when we last had you on the show, is how much richer the Caribbean is at this point than the North American continent. Because we today obviously think that America is the big economy and the Caribbean is a small fry. But the opposite is true at this period, isn't it?
Maya Jasanoff
All of the action is further south. I mean, the truth of the matter is that the biggest power in the Americas at that time is Spain, which has New Spain, it has New Granada, it has Peru. I mean, it has, you know, huge claims and of course, Portugal, with Brazil and. And the Caribbean islands, which are rapidly growing into huge industrial centers really, of sugar production on the backs of millions of imported enslaved Africans to do the work. And the economy of northern New England, part of New France, is very much bound up with that sugar economy because it's part of what we call the Triangle trade, where you have trade in enslaved captives coming across the Atlantic from Africa, going to work on the sugar plantations. Then you have the byproducts of sugar production, rum, molasses, sugar itself being brought into the colonies and into, of course, Europe itself. And then you have the big product coming from the northern Atlantic, namely code salted, dried packed fish, which is sent down to the Caribbean as a very protein rich food source for the enslaved laborers.
Anita Anand
That sort of supply belt thing is just so haunting because you need to feed the slaves, so you need to take some land, so you need to take it from people and you need to do more enslaving. I just wanted to turn back to the idea that I had in my head and just, you know, by all means, shoot it down. But we did an episode where we talked a Lot about Samuel de Champlain, who is the man who founded Quebec and New France, the very seed of it. And he did write about this vision that he had of this utopia of the two peoples of France and the Indians, you know, becoming one, working together as one, having this sort of shared identity and community. How long after Champlain's death does that actually survive? Or does it, you know, does it die with him? Or does it, you know. Do the French have a better attitude to indigenous people than the Brits do? Say when they turn up.
Maya Jasanoff
I'm very reluctant to get into these games of, you know, who's better and who's worse in certain ways.
William Durandal
Spoil sport.
Maya Jasanoff
I think that what we have to think about here are power dynamics and end goals and numerical balances and all of that stuff.
William Durandal
Not for nothing are you a double professor at Harvard.
Maya Jasanoff
What we can see, I think very much, are, as it were, periods of greater and lesser interaction and tolerance, if you will, with Native.
Anita Anand
I mean, I totally bow to your professor. I do. I do. I really do. I haven't read sort of, you know, English sources saying we have met a, you know, great noble people that I think we can, you know, sort of become a melded new.
Maya Jasanoff
Well, I think the big. I think the big example to put forward, and I don't want to you discount the exceptional qualities of Champlain. I mean, similarly, you can look in the Spanish Empire and you see someone like Bartolome de las Casas, who has a unbelievably seeming to us sort of fresh, tolerant attitude toward indigenous peoples and very much laments the brutalities of the conquistadors. I mean, there are these figures, definitely. But what I would say, for example, in the middle of the 18th century in British North America, is that the relationships formed between the colonists and, say, the. What was then called the Iroquois and we would now refer to as the Haudenosaunee Confederacy is incredibly important and real. And this is a group of confederated tribes or nations in what is now sort of central New York state, ranging west. Six nations, as they're called. And they form together a confederacy which is quite powerful, which then creates a kind of alliance with the British, which they think of as the. The covenant chain. And this is a real alliance, I would say.
William Durandal
And there is an example. One of your colleagues was writing, I remember, a book on the Mohawk baronet. Will you tell us quickly about him?
Maya Jasanoff
Well, I think that the figure who's important here and will be important in. I mean, in fact, he's important in the events around Fort William Henry is a man called William Johnson. William Johnson is of Irish origin. Moves to North America as many ambitious men from the fringes of the British Isles. I'm sure some of Willie's ancestors among.
William Durandal
Them, always on the wrong side. My lot.
Maya Jasanoff
They come, and they're eager to get colonial offices. And whether it's in the military or civil administration. So William Johnson ends up settling in central New York State and becomes the commissioner or Superintendent of Indian affairs, so called. And his job is basically to create and nurture the alliance between the Haudenosaunee and the British. And he even is one of many again, of these men in sort of imperial frontier situations. Very much like his counterparts in the East India Company at this time, in that he forms intimate relations with a number of indigenous women, but in particular one called Molly Brant, who is a very significant figure in her Mohawk community. And the two of them live together for many years, have a lot of children. And Molly and her brother Joseph will be very significant players in the American Revolution, actually, and in maintaining the alliance between the Mohawks and the British in that conflict.
William Durandal
Now, Maya, the outbreak of the French and Indian wars, which we call Seven Year War, actually involves no less a character than George Washington with a whole troop of. Are they Huron? Who's he with? Or Mingo Nation? And they ambush a French detachment under Joseph Coulombe de Jumonville. And that is one of the things that kicks off the whole global conflict, isn't it?
Maya Jasanoff
Washington at that time, he's in his.
Gary Lineker
Early 20s, and he's been trained as.
Maya Jasanoff
A surveyor in colonial Virginia. And he joins the Virginia kind of militia. His elder brother Lawrence, as well as the governor of colonial Virginia at that time, are both speculators in a company called the Ohio Company, which is one of these kind of land speculation companies eager to get in on what they perceive of as the very rich lands beyond the Northwest frontier. It's now the Ohio Valley. And I think that in most American listeners minds, the idea that this is the kind of wild Northwest frontier will sound quite funny. But that's what it is in that period. And a lot of what happens in colonial conflicts in North America in the 1750s, 60s, 70s, on up until really the War of 1812 concerns eager colonial subjects who want to push west when a metropolitan government maybe feels a little bit differently about it. So we have to see this as very much a colonies first operation, where the governor of Virginia and others who are into getting land in the Ohio Valley are eager to send their men out there and lay claim to land which the French are also busily claiming. The French have a whole series of.
Gary Lineker
Forts that they're building.
Maya Jasanoff
And it's in one of these expeditions that George Washington, who's sent off to threaten a French fortification in the Ohio River Valley, ends up ambushing, as you say, a group of French soldiers. The numbers in these encounters are tiny, we have to say. I mean, they're in the dozens or something. And this skirmish and its follow up acts, which include a much larger and more kind of put together expedition under the command of the British General Braddock the following year.
William Durandal
We'll move on to Braddock next. So save Braddock up.
Gary Lineker
Yeah.
Maya Jasanoff
So this skirmish ends up being what many people recognize as the first skirmish in the so called French and Indian War taking place in 1754. I do just want to make one little point as well, that the French and Indian War, as it's called in North America, is very much sort of, what would I say, synonymous with the Seven Years War as it erupts in Europe. But we do need to change the dates on it a little bit in the same way that if you look at say World War II from the perspective of Asia, you might tell the story really starting in say 1937 with the Japanese invasions of Manchuria. Similarly, you know, this is a conflict which in its Seven Years War, guys, if you want to put that label, looks very much like a conflict, you know, between all of these European princes on battlefields in Germany and whatever. But really we have to see it as a global conflict that's starting earlier and starting in North America with this ongoing competition for power between Britain and France.
Anita Anand
I mean, I mean, should we be calling it actually the First World War I? You know, World War I, because it is a global, as you say, a global conflict.
Maya Jasanoff
You know, we himself called it the first global war. The First World War. And it absolutely was. It would go on to encompass really every continent that the British and French and Spanish empires had an interest and would be a huge global conflagration.
William Durandal
We left Washington with his ambush without really explaining why he was there. So as I understand it, it's access to the land beyond Pennsylvania that the English and the French are really competing over. Do you want to just take us there for a second, Maya?
Gary Lineker
Yeah.
Maya Jasanoff
So you have this series of river valleys that are a whole sort of river system that defines the kind of what we would call now the Midwest up to the mysterious Mississippi being the big one in the US and the Ohio river is the most important of those. It runs through Western Pennsylvania forms the southern edge of the state of Ohio now and ultimately joins up with the bigger river systems of the Mississippi. And so it's really that area on the western frontiers of Virginia, of Pennsylvania that are in play in this period. And why not, as far as the.
Gary Lineker
Colonists are concerned, Right.
Maya Jasanoff
I mean, it's the extension of what they already are trying to have in parts further east. It's mountainous. I mean, we're getting into the Appalachian Mountains here and it's heavily wooded, but you get into a river valley and of course it's very lush, potential agricultural land. The other thing I want to highlight is that in the British imagination at this time, British ideas of wealth, I mean, land is the essence of, of it, right? Land is what undergirds the great, we call them landed estates of the British Isles, the big aristocratic titles. So for the British colonists, these sort of ambitious, high placed, socially people like the governor of Virginia or like the Washington family, which are slaveholding, plantation owning people having big landed estates is very much part of their vision of what a wealthy future for themselves is gonna look like.
Anita Anand
Well, I mean, if anyone's interested in digging deep into this, I'll just remind you that we did do an American series, America's Empire, and we did the Founding Fathers and there is a huge whopping, great big fat episode on Washington. And so the minutiae of all of this time and his interest and his, you know, sort of extracurricular activities that made him rather rich. It is episode 151 of our podcast. We are going to take a break, but we ought to sort of circle back to where we began, which was that read from William and we should talk about Braddock and we should talk about Fort William Henry and the subsequent massacre that we started with. So tell us first of all, you mentioned Braddock. Who is Braddock and why is he important?
Maya Jasanoff
Braddock is the British general of the official British army. We're talking here of the formal army, the regulars again, supplemented by these colonial militias, Virginia rangers, light horse and these sorts of things in addition. So Braddock, I highlight this because, you know, this is another thing that comes up a lot in these conflicts is there's a combination of the British regulars and then various colonial militias. And if you want to come up with an analogy in India, say you have the East India Company army versus the British or alongside the British regulars. One of the parts of the story of India in the first part of the 19th century is the presence of British regulars actually increases is a great deal. And the relative importance of the east India company army goes down. Anyway, Braddock is a British regular military officer and he is dispatched after these, whatever you want to call them, skirmishes, ambushes, encounters. He is dispatched on a proper expedition into the Ohio country against a British ford called Fort Duquesne.
William Durandal
Washington is also with Braddock at this point, isn't he? He's on both trips.
Maya Jasanoff
Yeah, he is. Washington is promoted at this point to Lt. Colonel. He's serving under Braddock. He's like an aide de camp, something like that. And they go marching up toward fort Duquesne, which is at a river confluence which is today the city of Pittsburgh at this time, 1755, this is a French fort and it's again one of a string of forts that run down from sort of lake Erie down further in the Ohio river valley and part of that big French chain going from Quebec down to St. Louis and south down the Mississippi. And the British are very eager to take over these forts and take over that land. So Braddock leads an expedition and goes marching up this again, heavily forested, rather mountainous terrain against the French and in it thinking he's going to win easily and then go on and keep on marching up and go up into the great lakes and all of that. He is in fact badly defeated.
Anita Anand
Well, I mean, there's a. There's a misplaced sort of arrogance that the French don't know how to fight and that they're lazy and that they won't put up much resistance. I mean, you know, since my in depth research into last of the Mohicans, I just wanted to quote one phrase which actually, actually you do see a lot in the source material at the time, which is a huge underestimation of the French by the British that, you know, they're not fighters, particularly the French.
William Durandal
Militias, who turn out to be rather good at all this.
Anita Anand
Yeah. And you know, they're ill equipped. They, you know, their supply lines don't work. But in the mean, just before the massacre takes place, you've got this commanding officer saying, you know, you don't need to worry about the French. There's no problem because they've got this latinous voluptuousness which gets in their way. I just wrote it down. I thought that's fantastic.
William Durandal
That's probably, judging by that reading we did, that's probably, probably in the source material.
Anita Anand
Well, I mean, the thing is though, they are wrong because the French do beat them back. And why do they beat them back? Is this the underestimation of their capability or is it that The British are just, you know, sort of ill equipped to fight in those terrains. What happens? Why did the French do so?
Maya Jasanoff
Well, I mean, I think. One thing I want to emphasize, I'm not a military historian, but I would just say that, you know, all of these encounters, they're again, between really quite small numbers of people. People, I mean, you know, a couple of thousand for Braddock. And that constitutes the big army.
William Durandal
And there's always this thing, isn't there, with the British at this period? They always start slow. The British military is quite a small force. We always assume that the British in the 18th century are.
Maya Jasanoff
Yeah, it's a few thousand under Braddock. But, you know, all of these are. They're happening again at these heavily wooded areas, far from anything you could consider to be a supply post. You know, the British are good, and they get even better at moving things around by ship and by sea, and then, you know, provisioning and moving troops and doing all these things. You're very far from any kind of coast. And the French, again, remember, their strength is inland. The French have the, you know, river valleys, and they are well established in these places. And the British are sort of marching further and further away from their centers of power toward the French centers of power. And again, I'm sure you could get a military historian on who would have much more expert things to say about the tactics of the fighting methods.
Anita Anand
But what you're saying, I mean, one broken supply line will make all the difference.
Maya Jasanoff
The other thing I would say is that the British are very accustomed to this kind of open field fighting. Right. I mean, they want to go. They want to see set up. They want to line up their troops and have them face the other troops and then go at it. Right?
William Durandal
Form a square.
Maya Jasanoff
Yeah, exactly. And they're. And they're. They're good at that.
Gary Lineker
And that's what they're used to. And that's how the European battles are fought. But in North America, that is not how you generally do things. You know, for example, I remember a children's book I had. I think it was called something like Meet George Washington. And it was telling us all about.
Maya Jasanoff
You know, George Washington's adventures as a young man. And I remember there was an illustration in it of a soldier with his.
Gary Lineker
Back against a tree, kind of dressed up in camouflage, holding a gun. And, you know, the idea of this is that the way that you fight in these terrains successfully is to adopt more of these kinds of what we might consider, I don't know, guerrilla tactics or something.
William Durandal
Like that not to wear a bright red coat.
Gary Lineker
Well, the word camouflage is a French word, right? So, you know, you just can think.
Maya Jasanoff
About it maybe as a little bit.
Gary Lineker
Of a difference in familiarity with the terrain and use of more scouts in better ways and, you know, this kind of thing.
William Durandal
Maya, just before we take a break, tell us your version because I know that you disapprove of the not only the language used by Last of the Mexicans, but also its depiction of that ambush. It was a far smaller and less exceptional massacre than British propaganda made it into.
Gary Lineker
I would just say that that description.
Maya Jasanoff
Is intended to conjure up ideas of.
Gary Lineker
Exceptional native savagery which. Which have all kinds of things to tell us about American attitudes about indigenous peoples and much less to tell us about the nature of conflict in the 18th century.
Anita Anand
Well, on that admonishment, take a break and join us after the break. Well, there will not be a reading in sight, but we'll get into.
William Durandal
I don't think Maya's gonna be watching the last weekends anytime soon. Even with Daniel Day Lewis bare chest.
Anita Anand
Literally never gonna get that hour of my life back. Anyway, join us in a moment.
Ryan Reynolds
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Jack
Hello, everyone, it's Gary Lineker. Here from the Rest Is Football. Just a quick message to tell you all about the Club World cup tournament that's taking place in the US at the moment. It's 32 of the best teams from all around the world battling it out to be crowned the best side on the planet. We've reached the knockout stages of the competition, which means all the the big guns will be going head to head. Manchester City, Real Madrid, psg, Chelsea and Bayern Munich are just some of the sides vying to lift the trophy. Join myself, Alan Shearer, Micah Richards, and our expert out in America, Alex Aljo as we guide you through the explosive final stages of the tournament. To make things even better, if you're watching the video version of the show on Spotify or YouTube, you can also watch all the Goals and the best bits of the action as we discuss the games. A first for podcasting, just search the rest is football. Wherever you get your podcasts.
Anita Anand
Welcome back. So after two dismal years, British luck is turning. By the year 1758, you've got a stronger government at home, headed, as Maya was telling us, by William Pittsburgh, for whom Pittsburgh is named. We're learning things every day, along with better generals, stronger finances, and all of these things together are beginning to count. So Pitt lavishly subsidises the colonies. He induces them to provide crucial assistance in troops and supplies for the army and fleet he sends across the ocean. The Royal Navy had kept the French navy tied up at the docks and port in France, and so, you know, there is some space for damage to be done. And this is kind of the backdrop for the extraordinary story of James Wolfe. Now, first of all, give us a little pen portrait of the man, James Wolfe, and why we should know about him.
Gary Lineker
So James Wolfe is a career professional military officer. He has already served in the previous war, the War of the Austrian succession in the 1740s, and he'd been a garrison commander in the Scottish Highlands, which, of course, is also a place of some military conflict, as you will know, William, in the 1740s, he is, again, so many of these people are one of these Anglo Irish commanders. He's a young, ambitious commander who is very much on the make. And his appointment to a command in North America is going to be the making of him, and he absolutely intends to make the most of it. So the British sent across this amphibious force. They participate in the siege of Louisbourg, which is of a huge French force.
Anita Anand
I mean, the size of this fleet is significant. You know, you've got sort of James Wolfe commanding, what is it, 8,500 men on this fleet, which is. Which is a lot. And I just one thing to add about him, you know, if you met him in the street, you may not be that impressed by Woolf, because the descriptions of him seem to portray quite a sickly sort of, you know, weakling of a man who, you know, the kind of man you imagine would have rather the limp handshake. That was the general impression of him even at the time, wasn't it, Maia?
Maya Jasanoff
Absolutely. He was understood as this kind of.
Gary Lineker
You know, ambitious, neurotic, like, slightly frail kind of character.
Anita Anand
Basically describing Woody Allen. He's Woody Allen in battle, right?
Gary Lineker
Yes. As I tell my students, he had the kind of mentality that would make him very much a kind of person who would want to get into Harvard and then excel once he got there, I mean, I think he was very.
Maya Jasanoff
Sort of ambitious for success. And so this big British fleet goes across. They successfully lay siege to a large French fort which essentially guards the mouth.
Gary Lineker
Of the St. Lawrence River. And from there the plan is that they will go sailing down the St. Lawrence and take control of the capital of New France, namely the city of Quebec. So this is a big operation and.
Maya Jasanoff
It shows the British doing something which.
Gary Lineker
They'Re very good at and is responsible for a lot of their military success in the decades to come.
Maya Jasanoff
And that is these joint operations, amphibious operations, where they're able to move troops.
Gary Lineker
Well, they can position them and they can land them and then the troops can go and wreak damage on land. And by the way, what is one of the great sources of naval timber for the British, particularly for the masts, it is the white pines that grow with lush profusion in the territories of formerly New France, soon to be increasingly British North America. In any event, they successfully make their way down the St. Lawrence River. I should add there's a whole sort of side story which I think we should talk about, which deals with the French speaking inhabitants of part of Nova Scotia in this period, which end up getting expelled and real sort of ethnic.
Maya Jasanoff
Cleansing operation which you write about very.
William Durandal
Movingly in your liberty's exiles.
Gary Lineker
Yeah, there's a real sort of ethnic cleansing operation of French speaking colonists from.
Maya Jasanoff
Nova Scotia in this period.
William Durandal
I'd never read about that before. It's a horrific.
Anita Anand
Yeah. So how do they make the move? Maia, just give us an insight into how they chase them out.
Maya Jasanoff
I'm going to give you one little.
Gary Lineker
Twist going back, which is that we talked about New France versus the thirteen.
Maya Jasanoff
Colonies of North America. Well, in the end of one of.
Gary Lineker
The earlier wars in this region, the British get possession of a large chunk of present day Nova Scotia. And this has been part of New France up until 1713 when the British get it. And a lot of the people living there are French speaking Catholics and they're known as Acadians because this province of New France is called Acadie Acadia. The Acadians go about doing their business. The people, particularly from the New England colony of Massachusetts, end up moving up into this region. There's a very, very profitable fishing industry as we've already touched on.
Maya Jasanoff
But at the time of the renewed.
Gary Lineker
Conflict in the 1750s, the presence of these French speaking colonists in really British Nova Scotia becomes increasingly troublesome to the British and they end up getting cleared out very much like The Highlanders from Scotland in very much the same period.
William Durandal
Loaded into prisons and then shipped off on boats.
Gary Lineker
They are systematically rounded up by British military officers. Wolf is part of this. And they are carried away, men, women.
Anita Anand
And children and entire people, and often.
William Durandal
Separated women and children from their men.
Gary Lineker
It's a straight up ethnic cleansing operation.
Maya Jasanoff
And a number of them end up.
Gary Lineker
Moving further south into present day Maine. Many Americans will be familiar perhaps with Acadia National Park. It's the same name, of course, Acadia there. And to this day, there's French speaking communities even, you know, tucked away in part parts of Maine.
Maya Jasanoff
But above all, their best known emigration.
Gary Lineker
Takes some of them to New Orleans, where Acadian gets shortened into the term Cajun and the descendants of these Acadians become the Cajuns of Louisiana spices.
William Durandal
It's Acadian.
Anita Anand
Gosh.
Gary Lineker
So that's a sort of side plot happening here.
Anita Anand
And just you have to wait for one second while our minds are blown by another fact you casually throw on the table. Okay, this is extraordinary. Thank you. Do carry on.
Maya Jasanoff
Okay, so Back to.
Gary Lineker
That's 1758. They've got Louisbourg, Louisburg, and they move on down the St. Lawrence River.
Maya Jasanoff
Then Wolf is charged with attacking the city of Quebec.
Gary Lineker
Now, oh, one other little side thing. You know, I've been stressing the smallness of numbers about a lot of this, and one of the consequences of that is that you see all of the same people kind of recurring in these things. So, for example, on Braddock's campaign, we have George Washington, right? We also have Thomas Gage, who ends up being the commander in chief of the British forces in Boston at the beginning of the American Revolution. And they're both, you know, in Braddock's expedition in 1755, what do we have in, in the, in the surveying of the St. Lawrence river and its entry.
William Durandal
Point, James Cook turns up, doesn't he? Exactly.
Maya Jasanoff
Go on. Here, James Cook, who had been a.
Gary Lineker
Merchant mariner, joins the British Navy, will end up being the guy who is sent off on this huge expedition to the South Pacific. He charts the, the entry points to.
Maya Jasanoff
The St. Lawrence river and will then go on to do this huge charting expedition of the South Pacific, which will be the, the sort of warm up for the British colonization of Australia in the, in 1780s. Anyway, they're moving on down the river. They end up outside Quebec. But then they have a real challenge. Wolf has a real challenge, which is that Quebec is situated on a river on the St. Lawrence River. But it's, but it's high up Cliffs. And it's hard to figure out kind of how to attack this city. So they arrive there at the beginning of the summer of 1759, and Wolf's job is to figure out how to attack the city. And he tries various things. They have conflicts at different points, kind of around the. Around the city.
William Durandal
They do quite a lot of slash and burn round about, don't they? A lot of the French attack.
Maya Jasanoff
And the effort here is, of course, again, to try to, you know, cut off supply and so on. And the. The French commander adopts a maddeningly successful strategy, which is that he refuses to come out and engage. And it's maddeningly successful because it means that Wolf can't take the city, right? I mean, if the army is still staying in there, he can't do anything about it. The best he can do is kind of get the little things around the edges and try to whittle away from the outside, but he lacks any obvious way to get the city itself. He tries to persuade the civilians to come out and turn on the commanders.
Gary Lineker
And, you know, all of this kind.
Maya Jasanoff
Of thing, but none of it really works. And so as he's sitting there, you know, the months go on, it's hot, it's sticky, they're wearing the red wool coats, you know, sitting in the. In the St. Lawrence river in, you.
Gary Lineker
Know, mosquito filled and all of that in 1759.
Maya Jasanoff
And Woolf knows, look, I mean, time is running out. If he doesn't get this thing done by the autumn, this is going to fizzle. And so he decides to do something quite daring, really, and indicative of his rather brilliant, neurotic temperament of sort of thinking it through and working it out and then coming up with a real stroke of genius if it works and terrible risk if it doesn't.
Gary Lineker
And that is to try to scale up the cliffs in the dead of night. And rather than attacking the city, which.
Maya Jasanoff
Has these big fortified walls kind of facing the river, to come up around the back, as it were, onto the open plains that are behind the city.
Gary Lineker
And then engage in one of these.
Maya Jasanoff
Much more sort of open field type.
Gary Lineker
Of confrontations that the British are used to and like. But it does involve a complicated river.
Maya Jasanoff
Crossing, climbing up, fainting, so that the French don't know that they're coming for the climbing up.
Anita Anand
Let's not just throw that away. It is a sheer cliff face. I mean, the climbing up, you have.
Maya Jasanoff
To kind of rappel up the cliffs and you meanwhile, have to, of course, pretend. I mean, you have to pretend to the French that you're not doing it because, you know, obviously when you're coming.
Gary Lineker
Up, you know, anyone who's above can.
Maya Jasanoff
Just like shoot down on you and you're really done for, right?
Anita Anand
So throw pebbles at you, you're going to come down.
Maya Jasanoff
So they have to, again, they have to do all of these kind of, you know, duplicitous things to make it.
Gary Lineker
Seem that they're doing something other than what they are.
Maya Jasanoff
And so in the dead of night, they end up scrabbling up the cliffs in the middle of the night.
William Durandal
Is there a path that's shown to them or is it their own initiative?
Gary Lineker
It is climbing up the cliffs.
Maya Jasanoff
It's 200 meters. It's not a joke. Imagine trying to carry up your artillery. They have only a couple of small cannon that they can can, that they can bring with them up there. But, you know, no one imagines that this can happen. And so the French commander, he hears some gunfire in the night or whatever.
Gary Lineker
Because, you know, they're through the summer there's been, you know, these little confrontations around the edges of the city.
Maya Jasanoff
But then when he gets up in the morning, he's like, he sort of goes out, there's the British army, you know, right outside the city and they've.
Gary Lineker
Managed to make it. And at this point he does the thing he hadn't done before, which is that he comes out to fight and there is an actual battle. It takes place on this open field which is rather poetically called the Plains of Abraham. And on the Plains of Abraham there is a day long battle at the.
Maya Jasanoff
End of which Montcalm is fatally wounded.
Anita Anand
And, well, he takes a bullshot to the gut, doesn't he? Like, you know, quite a large hit of metal to his stomach.
William Durandal
They run. See how they run. And never was a rout more complete than that of our army reported. A Frenchman.
Gary Lineker
And much to his own glory and some would say even his hopes. Wolf also takes bullets to the wrist and the torso and he ends up also dying at the end of this battle. And it is a hugely significant battle because the British take control of the capital of New France and with it the keys to that part of North America. And the significance of this.
Anita Anand
Before you do the significance, let's do the spooky bit because there is a report that Woolf, you know, the night before when he's sort of with his troops and there are officers saying that while they were crossing the river the previous night, Woolf is reciting Thomas Gray's elegy written in a country churchyard. And there Is a line in that, Maya, don't give up on the spooky. Here, lady, this is really good. There is a line in that which says the path of glory lead but to the grave. And all of his men, when they seem cut down, even though he's one, like, oh, that's what that poem means. Now we understand and can do an essay on it. So, you know, that was. That were pretty portentous anyway, as you were the significance of it. We've done the spooky, now do the.
William Durandal
Signature and the Benjamin Wiss painting we've got to talk about too.
Gary Lineker
That's where I'm headed, interestingly enough. Well, is it spooky or is it self aggrandizing? Because Woolf very much wants this kind of fate. One could argue, you know, for example, he had this fiance for a long time in Britain. And you know, the poor fiance is sitting there and, you know, he's never coming back, basically. I mean, he's just busily looking for glory. And you know, and so it's very clear in the way that he comports himself and you know, writes to his mother and says, you know, I'm sure I'm never going to get married and so on, even though he has this fiance that he's eager for a certain.
Maya Jasanoff
Kind of future for himself, which he.
Gary Lineker
Gets because he has the big victory. He dies on the battlefield. And then a painter from colonial Pennsylvania, which of course is one of the great frontier states in this period, who is making his name for himself as a court painter to George II and then George III by the name of Benjamin west, paints a hugely significant canvas depicting this event. It is called the Death of General Wolfe. And it is in the manner of the so called history painting, a genre of big famous scenes, typically from ancient history or if modern history, with everybody kind of puzzlingly dressed in togas. And one of the things about Wolf's, excuse me, West's rendition of the death of General Wolf is that he paints everybody in modern garb. And it shows Wolf, you know, passing away in this very kind of romantic way with a shaft of light, you know, artfully poised right over his face. And he's in the arms of various officers and around him are congregated not only British redcoats, but also very operatively a member of one of these colonial regiments, dressed in green as a ranger, showing the participation of the colonists in their own defense. And a very statuesque Native American, looking very much like a sort of Greek statue, but depicted carefully.
William Durandal
And lots of Scotsmen in Plaid, lots of Scotsmen.
Gary Lineker
And the whole thing is a big image of the sort of British Empire as it sees itself after the victories.
Maya Jasanoff
Of the seven years.
Anita Anand
So I've seen this. I went. We did a wreath lecture with a woman, I'm sure, you know, eminent Canadian historian called Margaret Macmillan. And this painting there, which is. It's a fairly large thing. It is. It's almost like a religious pilgrimage. It's the one where you find the biggest knot of people sort of standing reverential in front of it. So, yes, now we're running out of time for this episode, as we always do when we're chatting to Maya, because we get carried away with such good tangents and good stories. Exactly, yeah. So, I mean, the French are the principal losers out of all of this and they end up giving up Canada, pretty much formerly New France and Louisiana. I mean, it's not just France, it's Louisiana as well. They do, though, keep a toehold in two islands off Newfoundland. I mean, just tell us a little bit about, you know, the presence that they managed to cling onto.
Gary Lineker
Well, yes, they do cling on to these two little islands which are called St. Pierre and Miquelon. And they are important for them as their footholds in this incredibly lucrative cod fisheries business in the North Atlantic. However, the thing I want to highlight is actually something that goes to the point that we were discussing earlier, which is when they're doing the negotiations at the end of the war and, you know, obviously the British have the upper hand. Having won a victory, they are faced with various choices about where they choose to concede and where they don't. And the operative thing they do is they choose to surrender the vast expanse of New France from. From everything except basically New Orleans, but the whole Mississippi Valley, all the way up to Hudson's Bay to the British.
Maya Jasanoff
But what do they keep? Guadeloupe Islands.
Anita Anand
Thank you.
Gary Lineker
You have to come in with that. William, would you like to tell us what the other one is?
Anita Anand
Yeah. Get it. Get it, Maya. Get it, Maya. Get him, Maya.
Gary Lineker
Guadalupe and Martinique.
Maya Jasanoff
So they retain Guadalupe and Martique.
Gary Lineker
And this is significant, of course, because those are unbelievably valuable commercially to them because they're sugar producing islands.
Maya Jasanoff
And so, I mean, I think it.
Gary Lineker
Neatly encapsulates the differential in wealth and promise that you would swap basically, you know, this vast expanse of the North American continent for Guadalupe and Marnique, in effect. And that was the right thing to do at that time. It was definitely the right thing to do. And by the Way these places are all still part of Greater France to this day.
William Durandal
Now we're heading on in the next episode. The next massive earthquake in North American history, of course, is the American Revolution. And in that we see this newly conquered New France remain with Britain while all the stuff that the British had goes to America. Is there anything at this stage, Meier, which hints that that's the way it's heading? Is there anything that Wolf could have seen if he'd been very clever at this point, that would have shown him the way the wind was blowing? Because very short was it only 20 years now that the American Revolution will break out after this enormous British victory. The British completely triumphant in Canada. They've just taken also Havana. They've also taken quite a lot of West Africa. They've taken Dakar, the port of the slave port, they've taken Plassey. The whole of the whole beginning of the East India Company and Clive and all that story is beginning to end this time. Is there any hint of the way the wind is blowing yet of the American Revolution?
Gary Lineker
12 years later we'll have the beginning of the American Revolution and the answer is yes and no. It is no, emphatically in terms of the kind of colonial outlook, the imperial outlook that you see embodied in a painting like the death of General Wolf from 1770.
Maya Jasanoff
The idea that we are now all.
Gary Lineker
Part of this great imperium settlement. Emigration to the colonies increases significantly, the economic growth is high, et cetera. But yes, because the causes of the American Revolution come really straight out of the victories of the Seven Years War.
William Durandal
Because of the costs, because of the massive amount of money that the British have to now find in order to pay the debts of this war.
Maya Jasanoff
Absolutely, that's part of it. The other part of it I like.
Gary Lineker
To highlight is that the British now find themselves managing this big global empire with subjects who are not just English speaking Protestants or German speaking Protestants and the Atlantic Seaboard, but are also French speaking Catholics of Quebec are also the hundreds of millions of Bengalis and now subject to tax collection by the East India Company. And of course the ongoing interest of, of the sugar planters in the West Indies.
Maya Jasanoff
And so you see the British trying.
Gary Lineker
To manage all of these different interests of these different groups in ways that look sensible from a metropolitan perspective. If you're sitting in London and you're trying to manage this whole thing, but if you're sitting in say Boston or Williamsburg or Philadelphia, look very provocative.
Anita Anand
Why the hell should you be paying more?
Gary Lineker
Well, exactly, yeah.
Anita Anand
Look, we've got a lot to talk about. And that's where we're going to pick up on the next episode. If you're a member of our Empire club, do you know what, you can just listen to it straight away because what you need in your life is an endless loop of us. That's what you need. So go to empire uk.com I mean, she makes it bearable, to be honest. Empirepod uk.com empirepod uk.com Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Anand.
William Durandal
Goodbye from me, William Durandal.
Anita Anand
Before you go, can we tell you about something really exciting?
William Durandal
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Anita Anand
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William Durandal
If you don't know who Goal Hanger is, they are the producers of this show. And if you're looking to get the brand right into the center of everybody's routines, they are the people you want to talk to.
Anita Anand
If you're curious, just head over to goalhanger.com that's goalhanger. H-A-N-G-E-R dot com.
Empire Podcast Episode 269: "Colonising Canada: The Truth Behind ‘The Last of The Mohicans’ (Ep 3)"
Release Date: July 2, 2025 | Host: Goalhanger
In Episode 269 of Empire, hosts William Durandal and Anita Anand delve into the historical realities behind the famed massacre scene depicted in James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. This episode explores the true events of the Fort William Henry massacre, the broader context of the Seven Years' War, and the intricate relationships between European powers and Indigenous peoples in 18th-century North America. Harvard University historian Maya Jasanoff joins the discussion, providing expert insights into the complexities of colonial expansion and its lasting impacts.
The episode begins by setting the stage for the Seven Years' War, a global conflict often referred to as the "Second Hundred Years' War," characterized by prolonged clashes between Britain and France along with their respective allies. Maya Jasanoff explains how pivotal rulers like Frederick the Great of Prussia and Empress Catherine of Russia influenced the dynamics of the war (07:03).
Maya Jasanoff [07:09]: "Prussia, particularly under Frederick the Great, revolutionized warfare, making it a global force."
The British Empire, under the dual monarchy of the Electors of Hanover, formed alliances with Hanover and Prussia, leveraging the military prowess of these German states to challenge French dominance in North America (07:24).
Anita Anand recounts the harrowing events following the British surrender of Fort William Henry in 1757. Despite the surrender terms that allowed British troops to withdraw under French protection, Huron warriors, allied with the French, perpetrated a brutal massacre against the withdrawing column (03:32).
Anita Anand [03:21]: "It's immortalized in that film The Last of the Mohicans, and it is actually based on a real thing that happened."
Contrary to romanticized portrayals, Maya Jasanoff emphasizes that both French and British forces relied heavily on Indigenous alliances, challenging the simplistic narrative of European superiority (11:30).
Maya Jasanoff [12:48]: "Both sides are doing this. The French are not uniquely horrific; the British also engaged in brutal tactics."
William Durandal reads an excerpt from The Last of the Mohicans, highlighting the exaggerated violence and savagery often portrayed in literature and film (03:09). Maya Jasanoff critiques these depictions, arguing that they perpetuate misconceptions about Indigenous peoples and the nature of colonial conflicts.
Maya Jasanoff [32:49]: "The description is intended to conjure up ideas of exceptional native savagery, which tells us more about American attitudes than the actual nature of 18th-century conflicts."
The episode shifts focus to key military figures such as James Wolfe and a young George Washington. Maya Jasanoff provides a detailed account of Wolfe's strategic brilliance during the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759, leading to the British capture of Quebec and a pivotal turning point in the war (35:55).
Maya Jasanoff [44:28]: "Wolfe decides to scale the cliffs in the dead of night, a daring maneuver that leads to the decisive Battle of the Plains of Abraham."
George Washington's early involvement in colonial militias and his role in skirmishes against French forces are discussed, highlighting his emergence as a significant military leader (20:55).
Maya Jasanoff [22:12]: "Washington is promoted to Lt. Colonel and serves under Braddock, participating in key expeditions that shape his future."
Anita Anand explores the aftermath of the Seven Years' War, where Britain emerges victorious, gaining control over vast territories in North America while France retains only valuable sugar-producing islands like Guadeloupe and Martinique (53:05).
Gary Lineker [53:31]: "They neatly encapsulate the differential in wealth and promise by swapping the vast expanse of North America for these lucrative islands."
The episode discusses the demographic and economic impacts of British policies, including the forced expulsion of French-speaking Acadians from Nova Scotia, leading to the creation of Louisiana’s Cajun communities (39:38).
Anita Anand [41:06]: "It's a straight-up ethnic cleansing operation, moving men, women, and children away from their homes."
Maya Jasanoff connects the outcomes of the Seven Years' War to the looming American Revolution, explaining how Britain's increased debt and the complexities of managing a sprawling empire sow the seeds of colonial discontent (55:00).
William Durandal [55:00]: "Because of the costs, because of the massive amount of money that the British have to find in order to pay the debts of this war."
The episode concludes by reflecting on how the war's repercussions set the stage for future conflicts, including the American quest for independence and the reshaping of global power structures (56:17).
Episode 269 of Empire offers a comprehensive and nuanced exploration of the Fort William Henry massacre and its place within the broader scope of the Seven Years' War. Through engaging discussions and expert analysis, listeners gain a deeper understanding of the intricate power dynamics, colonial ambitions, and the enduring legacy of these historical events on modern geopolitics.
Notable Quotes:
This detailed summary encapsulates the key discussions, insights, and conclusions presented in Episode 269 of Empire, providing a comprehensive overview for listeners seeking to understand the true historical events behind popular narratives.