Voluntarism and Imperial Supremacy: Politics and the Military Establishment in the Expansion of the British Empire in French North America, 1760-1775

This dissertation explores the tensions between two ideological facets of the British empire—voluntarism and imperial supremacy—that emerged after the Seven Years’ War as British officials attempted to come to terms with the territorial expansion and the increased diversity of their empire.In the immediate aftermath of the war, few perceived any challenges incorporating diverse peoples like Catholic, francophone Canadians into the Protestant British empire because most perceived commerce, not ethnicity or religion, as the empire’s principle mechanism for gaining and maintaining loyalty of disparate peoples.At the same time, the empire pursued a policy of imperial supremacy in North America: a deliberate attempt to exclude foreign competitors from the continent to ensure the security of the provinces.Through a series of successive crises that stretched the limits of the empire’s resources throughout the continent, imperial officials slowly began to codify inequality in the laws and governance of its provinces, which had the effect of cementing social, political and economic distinctions between different groups in order to exploit those differences and allow the empire to draw directly on provincial societies for men and material in pursuit of maintaining Britain’s supremacy over the continent.This process emerged in full force in Quebec, where a series of challenges compounded to produce a political settlement that almost fully subordinated the province to the empire’s control.