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Historical Context: British North America

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As both a civil war and a war against imperialist rule, the American Revolution was a complex event that marked the beginning of two nations, the United States of America and Canada. The latter evolved from the colonies that remained under British control by the Treaty of Paris of 1783 that ended the war for American independence.

There is no easy answer as to why the British colonies of Quebec, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and St. John's Island failed to become part of the new United States of America in 1783. While their northern location and economic orientation may account in part for this outcome, it is perhaps no coincidence that all of these colonies had recently been part of the French Empire in North America. Peninsular Nova Scotia and Newfoundland had been ceded to Great Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713; Quebec, St. John's Island (renamed Prince Edward Island in 1799) and Cape Breton were acquired at the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763.

Whatever the underlying cause, developments during the war - the failure of an American invasion of Quebec in 1775-76 and of the attack on Fort Cumberland in Nova Scotia in 1776, the presence of British troops in Halifax and Quebec, raids by Patriot privateers and the caution of the population - combined to keep the northern colonies within the British sphere of influence.

The impact of the American Revolutionary War was as great on the North American colonies that remained in the British Empire as those who joined the new United States of America. As the war came to an end, a flood of Loyalist immigrants obliged the British government to create three new colonies - New Brunswick, Cape Breton (re-annexed to Nova Scotia in 1820) and Upper Canada (now Ontario) - in what was left of the British Empire in North America. These colonies were among the first to lay the foundations for a second transcontinental nation in North America by joining Confederation in 1867.

The war also established a boundary between the two territories. Although the victorious Americans suggested that the British might want to withdraw completely from North America, they never seriously considered such a policy. The boundary was set at the St. Croix River in the east, vague highlands along the Quebec border to the 45th parallel, and then a line running along the St. Lawrence and through the middle of the Great Lakes. Because the maps used during the negotiations were unreliable, it would take more than half a century of negotiation to determine the exact border between the two emerging nations.