Relations between Britain and its American colonies_美文

Relations between Britain and its American colonies

This week in our series, we tell about relations between the American colonies and Britain after the French and Indian War about two hundred fifty years ago.

The French and Indian War was one part of a world conflict between Britain and France. It was fought to decide which of the two powerful nations would control North America.

The British defeated the French in North America in seventeen sixty-three. As a result, the British took control of lands that had been claimed by France. Britain now was responsible for almost two million people in the thirteen American colonies and sixty thousand French-speaking people in Canada. In addition to political and economic responsibilities, Britain had to protect all these colonists from different groups of Indians.

This would cost a lot of money. Britain already had spent a lot sending troops and material to the colonies to fight the French and Indian War. It believed the American colonists should now help pay for that war.

The colonists in North America in seventeen sixty-three were very different from those who had settled there more than one hundred years before. They had different ideas. They had come to consider their colonial legislatures as smaller, but similar to the British Parliament in London. These smaller parliaments had helped the colonists rule themselves for more than one hundred years. The colonists began to feel that their legislatures should also have the powers that the British Parliament had.