ABSTRACT
The Peace of Utrecht was acutely controversial in Great Britain. It was a Tory peace pushed through in the face of bitter Whig opposition which did succeed in watering down the massive commercial rapprochement with France that was an integral part of Tory plans. Dupleix ignored not the general order to cut costs, but the ban on completing the fortifications, paying the costs out of the large fortune he had made in inter-Asian trade. The British Crown was lucky in that bad harvests and soaring state indebtedness made the French monarchy anxious for peace and not concerned to extract full advantage from its victories. Colonial British-American ports – especially Boston, Newport, New York, Philadelphia, and, to a lesser extent, Charles Town – did very well out of privateering. The whole concept of an evolving triumphalist British identity based on imperial trade, imperial swagger, and Protestantism growing and evolving between 1739 and 1748 is sheer post facto constructionism by historians.
