ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the impact on British readers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries of travel and exploration literature produced about North America. If Romantic readers were fascinated, as they undoubtedly were, by representations of American 'Indians', Terminology for the indigenous peoples of North America is a vexed issue. The political legacy was soon evident in the French Revolution, which was to divert Britain's attention from the trauma of a defeat compared by some to the United States' failure in Vietnam nearly two hundred years later. The Quebec Act of 1774 then controversially recognized the Catholic Church, maintained French civil law, and effectively consolidated the existing elite, whilst implementing tight executive control via the Governor and an appointed Council. In the War of 1812, Britain once again made use of Native allies, and once again the Treaty of Ghent abandoned them to their fate.
