ABSTRACT
This chapter describes four wars and their ultimate effects on England and its American colonies. For most of the seventeenth century, the monarchs of both England and France placed domestic and European policies far above colonial considerations, being reluctant to allow the latter to entangle them in war. In 1689, for a wide variety of reasons dynastic, commercial and territorial England decided to fight France and joined with Holland, Spain, Austria, Sweden, and a group of German states in the War of the League of Augsburg, or, as it is known in American history, King William's War. When King William's War ended, it still had not been decided which nation was to control the Grand Banks or the fur trade the issues which, to some extent at least, had contributed to its outbreak. Another opportunity to settle these issues soon arose, however, with the eruption of the War of the Spanish Succession, or Queen Anne's War.
