ABSTRACT
Continental history, like all the approaches to early American history, has its detractors. For the paradigm of Atlantic history, and from the perspectives of the great Atlantic empires, a continental view of early American history has often seemed less than appealing because the early modern North American West has traditionally been considered of limited historical importance. During the first century-and-a-half of British settlement in mainland North America, the Appalachians, New France, Louisiana, France’s Indian allies, and perhaps a certain want of inland initiative confined a substantial British presence to lands within reach of the Atlantic. If Britain’s was the North American Empire with the most negligible western presence, France’s trading, proselytizing, and alliance-making, centered in the Great Lakes, Illinois Country, and lower Mississippi Valley, offers the best example of European dynamism in the early West. Spain established an earlier and more westerly presence in occidental North America than did France and Britain.
