Why did the colonists identify themselves as British through the mid eighteenth century quizlet?

- In the 18th century, after numerous wars against its great rivals France and Spain, Britain emerged as the world's leading empire and its center of trade and banking.
- The existence of global empires implied that their warfare would also be global.
- What became a worldwide struggle for imperial domination, which eventually spread to Europe, West Africa, and Asia, began in 1754 with British efforts to dislodge the French from forts they had constructed in western Pennsylvania.
- For two years, the war went with the French and Indians winning against the British, until, after a lot of British tax money was poured towards the war, the tides changed with the help of bribing allies in Europe like Prussia and Austria.

- Britans had a sense of liberty. Advocates of British freedom celebrated the rule of law, the right to live under legislation to which one's representatives had consented, restraints on the arbitrary exercise of political authority, and rights like trial by jury enshrined in the common law.
- On both sides of the Atlantic, every political cause, it seemed, wrapped itself in the language of liberty & claimed to be defending the "rights of Englishmen."
- Britain was "the one nation in the world whose constitution has political liberty for its purpose" and followed the principle that no man, even the king, is above the law, preventing political tyranny.
**Protection, natural rights, "Free Speech"?? - Zenger

- Indians primary aim was to maintain their independence from both empires. Domination by any outside power, Indians feared, meant the loss of freedom.
- After the British won the 7 year war against France, the Treaty of Paris left Indians more dependent than ever on the British and ushered in a period of confusion over land claims, control of the fur trade, and tribal relations in general.
- Indians of the Ohio Valley launched a revolt against British rule, known as Pontiac's Rebellion.
- One of the rebellions leaders, Neolin, rejected European technology to free the indians from commercial ties with whites and preached a pan-Indian identity (all indians a single, united, cooperating people).

- During the 18th century, many educated Americans began to be influenced by the outlook of the European Enlightenment & sought to question society using
the scientific method of careful investigation, research, and experiments
- Benjamin Franklin's wide range of activities, including writing newspapers, literary, philosophy, scientific, & political debates, establishing libraries and even forming other formal meetings like the attempted Albany Plan, exemplified the Enlightenment spirit & made him probably the best-known American in the 18th-century world.

- In response to the rationalism of the Enlightenment and a desire for greater religious purity, the Great Awakening, a series of local events united by a commitment to a "religion of the heart," tried to make a more emotional and personal Christianity.
- More than any other individual, the English minister George Whitefield, who declared "the whole world his parish," sparked the Great Awakening when he brought his emotional brand of preaching to colonies like New England.
- The Great Awakening reflected existing social tensions, threw into question many forms of authority, & inspired criticism of aspects of colonial society.
- Revivalist preachers frequently criticized commercial society, insisting that believers should make salvation, not profit.
- The revivals encouraged many colonists to trust their own views rather than those of established elites & asserted their rights to independent judgment.

- Slavery threw together individuals who had never considered their color or residence on a single continent a source of identity or unity.
- By the nineteenth century, slaves no longer identified themselves as Ibo, Ashanti, Yoruba, and so on, practicing their original religions and speaking their original languages, but as African-Americans, with a new unified culture.
- By the mid-eighteenth century, the three slave systems in British North America had produced distinct African-American cultures:
1. Chesapeake: healthful climate, the slave
population reproduce itself, small size of
most plantations, slaves here were
continuously exposed to white culture.
2. South Carolina: rice plantations, harsh
conditions, low birthrate, dependent on
continued slave imports, seldom came
into contact with whites, and enjoyed far
more autonomy than elsewhere in the
colonies.
3. Georgia: servants and skilled workers,
assimilated more quickly into Euro-
American culture, sexual liaisons between
white owners and slave women produced
the beginnings of a class of free mulattos.

Sets with similar terms

How and why did the colonists sense of collective British identity change during the years before 1764?

What were the bases of the colonists sense of a collective British identity in the eighteenth century?

Why did the public sphere grow in America during the eighteenth century quizlet?

Which best describes the change in colonial warfare during the eighteenth century?