ABSTRACT
Of all the North European countries, the British had the greatest impact on American life. In the early nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville already discerned the makings of a great future power in the British ex-colonies of North America, ‘marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe’. 1 Within a century of their independence, his prediction was fulfilled. At the close of the nineteenth century, the United States had emerged as a great industrial economy whose economic might was increasingly matched by the weight of its political power and the global reach of its cultural influence. The history of the British in the Americas is not, however, simply the story of the creation and development of the colonies which later became the United States. While the North American colonies inevitably loom large (partly because of the sheer volume of historical work devoted to them), their history does not embrace the entire experience of the British in the Americas, nor does it set the boundaries of British influence in the development of the Americas.
