A Pre-Revolutionary Survey
1760-1776 Pontiac's Rebellion, Robespierre's Guillotine, New England Libertines & Gayanashagowa Inspired Declaration of Liberty
On the morning of June 2, 1763, Ojibwas and Sox assembled near Fort Michilimackinac. Blanketed women, weapons concealed, gathered to watch. For several hours the men played a spirited game. At close to noon, a player threw the ball toward the open gate, where Lieutenant William Leslie and Captain Etherington were casually admiring the on rushing player warriors. Then the women handed out tomahawks and short spears. The men wielded these weapons with skill and surprise - taking the fort, killing sixteen British soldiers. - Dowd 126
Recurring French deficits of the eighteenth century… may be attributed predominantly to the cost of the country’s wars… France’s participation in the War of American Independence… had disastrous consequences. Turgot warning Louis XVI in August 1774 that ‘the first gunshot would drive the state to bankruptcy’ was fulfilled. - Goodwin. pg. 10
The 1760s were the launching pad for the modern corporate democratic state. The French and American revolutions were gestating at this time and the nations that were born, events would sweep away monarchal and colonial-native power structures on two continents.
The English faced two big bets, and they lost the sure safe bet and won the longshot. In America, the English crown had been a power for centuries. The English had just defeated the French and driven them from America. Yet soon the British would be gone. In India, English power was in the form of the corporate Dutch East India company, a board of directors rather than the crown and a hierarchy of nobility calling the shots. Before Plassey, English power in India at that time was 4th rate, nothing, second rate to the French and Dutch, and they held precarious positions and interests in the complicated mesh of the sub-continent. Rather than disappear, the English rose to power and enriched Britain for centuries until the last of the Raj in 1947. The Battle of Plassey 1757 widely recognized as the turning point in India - before which the British were barely hanging on to a ledge with two fingers, kissing up to the Mughals and Rajputs, and after which the British firmly gained the upper hand over satraps and sepoys. The looting of the once illustrious wealth of Bihar and Bengal began by avaricious soldiers of fortune within the ranks of the British East India Company was well underway post Plassey by 1960. From here the East India company would source British wealth, power and prestige until the Raj left in 1947.
The difference was - in America, the sure bet folded under the withering storm of politics. In India, English action followed not from the dictates of the crown or government power, but from a corporate board of directors concerned with profit. The crown and Britain’s colonial political system was ruinous, self-defeating and self-terminating in America. In India, the logic of corporate business profit motive bulldozed all opposition albeit Maratha Confederacy to Mughal. The lesson was learned the world over. The democratic post-revolutionary government of the United States incorporated the new world order rules. The American government machinery would not replicate what it replaced, a political system of interpersonal patronage and peonage. Instead, the new American government would operate domestic and foreign interests with corporate like business interest driven logic. The history of civil rights drew lines around economic transactional relationships among equally free persons. Foreign wars like Vietnam and Iraq followed the rubber, tin and oil interests of Indochina or Middle East as well as protecting the fortunes of United Fruit bananas to the modern-day protection of straits and shipping zones from Houthi militias with naval warships.
Turning to 1760s Europe, who were these settlers? The British East India Company identity was English, but its rank and file were pan-European. Similarly the settlers of America came from all over through British corporate land sharing agreements. Scotland’s ‘Lowland Clearance’ kicked ambitious young persons out of ancestral familial land, leaving droves of now landless persons heading for the American continent or employment in the British East India Company. Though now associated with British colonial interests, the private company was long autonomous - independent of the crown, unlike British interests in the American colonies - a corporation that employed a private army many Europeans - many soldiers of fortunes from many parts of Europe like Switzerland, Germany or wherever, driven by hunger or luckless circumstance similar to the highlanders.
Fort Duquesne was a rendezvous, rough fisticuffs and handshakes, shouting and speechifying, scorning and smoking, drinking and regaling, fighting and reconciliation, prayer in despair, a supply depot, where Indians were fed and outfitted… as men prepared for the grim business of raiding and murdering on the British frontier. Among the peoples who met regularly there were the Delawares and the Ottawas. - Dowd. War Under Heaven. page 50.
In America - The 7 years’ war puts France out of the American continent and onto the path of bankruptcy and insoluble political conflicts that led to the guillotine and revolution. The French left behind forts, trade posts and a few mixed settlements. The French came to America to trade, primarily to trade European goods to native traders who mostly had furs. The English came to settle land and cultivate farms. They had little interest in trading with the natives, they valued land. French settlements came from the unintended coupling of French men and native women, whose offspring were the Metis. English settlements were formed from business ventures with surveyed lots and selling parcels to those willing to come from Europe. The French were haphazard and by-product. The English were aggressive and corporate. The point is that the native people expected the English to follow the same complicated set of behavioral rules the French established in mutual trade zones. The French practice of gift giving to native peoples as a regular part of trade practice was predicated on the intrusion of French presence on native land; here take these gifts out of hand so that we may do business in your land. The English scoffed at the idea of giving natives anything. This immediately led to revolt and insult. After war broke, a stunning series of defeats humbled British arrogance. A dozen forts fell from all around the great lakes. The English fell back to Fort Pitt where the war lapsed into a stalemate. Fort Pitt was close enough to the English supply chain of the East Coast that it could be held and re-supplied. The native warriors could not take Pitt. Nor could the British advance and retake the remote outposts of the lakes. The hostile Ojibwa, Ottawa, Delaware, Potawatomi and Seneca kept them out.
There the situation smoldered until by the 1770s, the English abandoned the native wars and turned their forces to the East - to deal with the colonial revolt. In 1773 some New Yorkers disguised as Mohawk Indians of the Iroquois nation had a tea party. The act of Euros dressing as Indians to commit crimes was ubiquitous - happened all the times, from down in Texas posing as Comanche raiders to rob and steal, to contemporaries of the Paxton Boys known as the Brave Fellows to kill natives in Pennsylvania country.
The Cherokee played a role in this war - as English provoking war between the Cherokee, Delaware and Ottawa - with the Cherokee attacking from the south - to divide and conquer.
References
Gregory Evans Dowd. War under Heaven Pontiac, the Indian Nations, & the British Empire. Baltimore, Md. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2004.
‌Goodwin, Albert. French Revolution. S.L., Routledge, 2018.
Dalrymple, William. The Anarchy : The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire. London, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.
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