what to read before the Read?

[Monte Davis]

What's added most for me since first time through M&D has been reading in
the history of the French and Indian War (1754-1763), which was the North
American trigger for the Seven Years War (1756-1763)... ending less than a
year before Mason & Dixon's arrival in America, and still reverberating
loudly throughout the book.

It's a historical truism that the Seven Years War was "the first world
war." In terms of statecraft and big battles, it was mostly European --
George II of England (and Hanover) allied with Frederick the Great of
Prussia against Austria, Russia, France and Spain. But it also led to

(1) England ending the French presence (and competition) in India, settling
in for almost 200 years of domination there
(2) English conquest of Canada, ending the French colonial (if not
cultural) presence in Canada and claims from the Great Lakes down into the
Mississippi and Ohio valleys -- leaving the Louisiana territory accessible
only via New Orleans, unsupportable and ripe for American purchase 40 years
later
(3) English acquisition of Florida and some rich Caribbean islands from
Span and France

So Mason and Dixon, caught up in the "global" naval conflict early in the
book, spend most of it as citizens of an England dazed with its own
success, trying to manage a vastly enlarged colonial empire. In America,
they emcounter important *local* consequences:

(4) after more than a century of playing off the English and French against
each other (often in service of their own inter-tribal wars), the Native
Americans -- from the Micmac and Abnaki in northern New England, through
the Iroquois Five Nations and Huron in north/west New York and the Great
Lakes, down through Midwestern tribes to the Cherokee in South Carolina and
Georgia -- now had to deal with only the English.
(5) But now the English themselves split more openly between the colonists,
relentlessly pressing westward (and dealing furiously in land that might or
might not be legal tor safe to settle, like soldier/surveyor/speculator
George Washington) and London, which from its PoV had saved their bacon
from both French and Indians and was tired of sending more redcoats every
time settlers provoked Indian attacks. The colonists, of course, thought
*they* had done the heavy lifting in the war. They had little taste for
London's limits on expansion -- and less for new customs duties or other
taxes intended to pay down the war's enormous debt and rationalize the
financial administration of the new, bigger empire.

So in the late 1760s, while M&D were hacking their way west, and coastal
city mobs were rioting against the Stamp Act, the colonial elites were
talking to each other more often and systematically than they ever had
before about common grievances and a united front against London... and the
rest is history. Not the retrospectively packaged "ideological" history of
democracy and "no taxation without representation," but a very
up-close-and-personal history of a Zone recently wracked by war, under the
eye of a new global empire, with nobody certain about the new rules, and
the Indians and remaining Frenchmen up to god-knows-what out in the
endless, tempting, terrifying hinterland.

The Wikipedia article on the Seven Years War is enough background for that
(and M&D's occasional glances at something new and fearsome in Prussia),
but as before I recommend Fred Anderson's work on the French and Indian
War, available in longer and shorter versions (both also in Kindle)
https://www.amazon.com/Crucible-War-British-America-1754-1766/dp/0375706364/ref=mt_paperback?_encoding=UTF8&me=

https://www.amazon.com/War-That-Made-America-History/dp/0143038044/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=



On Mon, Oct 30, 2017 at 2:40 PM, Gene DA <genevievej.da at gmail.com> wrote:

> Having not yet read M&D, what other literature is alluded to? If there are
> recurring ones or major ones, that would be helpful.
>
> Also, I have read a number of the essential articles of Federalist Papers,
> but there's a lot, any specific ones you suggest? Or are the key ones good
> enough for a primer?
>
> Any such suggestions are appreciated.
>
> On Mon, Oct 30, 2017 at 12:17 PM, Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> There is a wonderful book by Henry Miller about the books in his life
>> where
>> he says something like: you shouldn't read more, you should read less.
>>
>> 2017-10-30 17:32 GMT+01:00 Arthur Fuller <fuller.artful at gmail.com>:
>>
>>> Last thing I binged was Sons of Anarchy; I watched seven seasons in one
>>> week, a season a day. I remember saying to a friend of mine, this is not a
>>> biker story, this is Shakespeare on wheels, and I was proved correct in the
>>> credits of the last episode, a quote from King Lear, the best play ever
>>> penned.
>>>
>>> I read a shocking stat last week, and it made me realize how little I
>>> know and how uneducated I am. Last year, 180,000 books were publlished in
>>> England alone. At 3 per week, and sometimes it's slower going, depending on
>>> the depth. Let's calculate this; 3 per week time 52 weeks equals 156 books
>>> per annum, which is a miniscule fraction of the books published in England,
>>> let alone the USA, Canada, etc. In other words, I am just slightly better
>>> than illiterate. I've read every word from Thomas Pynchon and William
>>> Gaddis and a few others, including J.S. Mill, Jeremy Bentham and Werner
>>> Heisenberg. But there remain the couple of hundred thousand books per year
>>> that I have not read.
>>>
>>> Arthur
>>> ​
>>>
>>
>>
>
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