The World of 1775

CHAPTER 1 · 1763–1775 · The Age of Revolutions, 1775–1848

Look at the map before anything moves: the Americas belong, on paper, to Europe. Blue Britain holds the Atlantic seaboard and Canada; everything grey — from New Spain through Potosí’s silver to Portuguese Brazil and the sugar islands — is a colonial possession, run for the profit of a distant crown. The engine of the whole system is at the two ◆ markers: the silver mountain of Potosí and the slave-worked sugar machine of Cap-Français, the richest colony on earth. This world calls itself stable. It is, in fact, borrowing against its own future.

The turn: Boston harbor, 16 December 1773.

This chapter is one scene of an interactive atlas: the map repaints as the dates advance, campaigns draw themselves, and every chapter argues its causes and consequences — then a field exam asks you to prove it on the map.