The Pan-British world in the late eighteenth century

By the early eighteenth century, the English had established a series of colonies along the Atlantic coast of North America. These stretched from what became Massachusetts in the north to Georgia in the south. The English claimed land emptied by disease, war, or treaty from the indigenous and then settled in increasingly greater numbers. By the mid-and late 1700s, North American colonies formed a critical part of the commercial empire British merchants built over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.