What if America spoke French? King Charles’s remark and its deep roots

The story, however, begins with the Iroquois. “Iroquoia” refers to the traditional homeland of the Iroquois Confederacy, stretching from the Genesee River to Lake Champlain in present-day New York State. It was the centre of power for the Five Nations — the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Onondagas, the Cayugas, and the Senecas — who commanded a vast region of eastern North America.

The arrival of European traders and settlers along the margins of Iroquoia in the 17th century posed unprecedented challenges for the Five Nations. Close ties with Dutch traders supplied them with guns and ammunition, making them the most feared and effective raiders in northeastern North America.

By the late 17th century, the Five Nations had destroyed or displaced entire peoples in the Ohio River Valley and the lower Great Lakes Basin. Their campaigns ranged from present-day Wisconsin to northern New England, and from the Canadian Shield to South Carolina. Yet the large influx of captives gradually diluted their cultural cohesion. “Adoptees,” as Fred Anderson notes in The War that Made America (2006), “who had previously been converted to Catholicism posed a particular threat to the ability of the Five Nations to carry on their warfare against the French and their native allies.”

The English conquest of New Netherland in 1664 cut off the flow of Dutch arms and ammunition, weakening the Iroquois war machine. Between 1665 and 1667, each of the Five Nations made peace with New France—the principal arms supplier and trading partner of their enemies—and the tide of conflict ebbed.

As Anderson observes in his other book, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (2000), “Peace allowed the Iroquois to recover a measure of demographic stability but brought new challenges as French Jesuit missionaries began to evangelize among them, dividing each of the Five Nations internally.” In time, Iroquois neutrality became both the foundation of internal stability and a crucial source of diplomatic leverage in shaping relations between rival European empires.

The Ohio River issue

France needed access to the Ohio River and its northern tributaries because this system provided the only efficient inland route between its settlements in Canada and those in the mid-Mississippi Valley, known as the Illinois Country. Controlling this network would also limit British expansion by keeping their colonies east of the Appalachians and restricting their access to inland trade and movement.

The British, however, feared such a French barrier as much as the French wanted it. Officials worried that a growing colonial population, confined between the Appalachians and the Atlantic, would lower wages and eventually compete with British manufacturers instead of buying their goods. They also disliked the cost of maintaining military forces in America to guard against French expansion.

As Anderson notes in Crucible of War, “British colonists themselves saw the Ohio Country mainly as a vast realm for future settlement—the more so since two vigorous provinces, Virginia and Pennsylvania, claimed that Ohio lands fell within their territorial limits.”

The Seven Years’ War

The dispute over the Ohio River Valley became one of the key causes of the Seven Years’ War. This conflict was not a single, unified struggle but a series of interconnected wars across different regions. It included a North American war between France and Britain—centred on the Ohio Valley but extending across the Atlantic world; a conflict in South Asia, especially in southern India, where the same rivals clashed and whose effects reached into Southeast Asia and parts of China; and a European war, in which Frederick the Great of Prussia faced a coalition led by Austria, Russia, and France.

As the editors of The Oxford Handbook of the Seven Years’ War (2024) observe, “It is generally agreed that the immediate causes of the Seven Years’ War occurred in the borderlands of the North American interior.”

Among its many consequences, the war strengthened European, especially British, power in India and made Britain the dominant imperial force in North America. Britain took control of Canada and claimed vast territories stretching from the Mississippi River to the Appalachian Mountains.

It is perhaps in this context that the remark was made that, had Britain not triumphed, America might well have developed under French influence.