Episode Details

In the spring of 1760, two armies sat outside Quebec and stared at the river, because whoever’s ships came first would win a continent. This is the story of how the French and Indian War ended — and how the victory planted the seeds of a far bigger one. From the bloody French revenge at Sainte-Foy, to three British armies converging on Montreal across a thousand miles of wilderness within a day of each other, to the burning of the French colors and the insult Amherst dealt a beaten enemy; then out to a war gone global — Havana, Manila, an empire stripped at both ends — and to the peace table in Paris, where Britain argued over whether a few acres of Canadian snow were worth more than the sugar island of Guadeloupe. France was erased from the continent. Sixty thousand French Canadians passed under a foreign crown. And at the very hour of total victory, a Philadelphia printer’s old arithmetic and a quiet warning about loyalty named the thing London could not see: that with the French gone, the colonies no longer needed Britain at all.