a direct reaction¶

1776 was a direct reaction by Anglo colonists in North America to the imperialists back home telling them not to continue expanding west into French-claimed territory, following the terms of the treaty at the end of the Seven Years' War. The war was a global inter-imperialist conflict between Britain and France, largely triggered by British colonists breaking with the crown's uneasy truce with their imperial rival. This was the era of the Scramble for America, an attempt at an "equitable" theft of a continent. The conflict was preceded by decades of accelerating settler violence and building of a "national identity" for the colonists, promising the lower classes all the land they could steal and defend, from both the indigenous populations and the French colonial claimants. The French lost to the vastly more populous British colonists, and the Americans naturally used the fact of many natives fighting alongside the French as propaganda fuel for further genocidal incursions. The British continuously ordered them to stop violating the Treaty of Paris. When the colonists refused, the crown imposed increasing economic sanctions and measures of direct administration on them, which as we all know, the colonists used as yet more propaganda to help build nationalist fervor and foster an identity separate from Britain. We should be perfectly clear that the British empire was not at all interested in respecting indigenous sovereignty. They simply were not interested in perpetual war with France, and felt like their colonial interests in North America were perfectly satisfied for the time being. Britain wanted to focus its attention to the east (particularly in the much more lucrative Indian Ocean tea and spice trade). The treaty with France set the colonial borders at the Mississippi, giving them plenty of space for exporting cotton, tobacco, timber, fish, etc. The colonists on the other hand, wanted a larger piece of the pie from the colonial economy, and they wanted to expand all the way across the continent. As their independent economic and geopolitical interests diverged, they started organizing more and more militarily. Fighting between rebel colonists and the imperial troops started years before the Declaration of Independence. Skirmishes grew in size and severity, as Britain tried to tamp down the independent colonial ambitions of their own colonists. The War of Independence was not a "revolution." It was not about poor, beleaguered colonists shaking off the oppressive yoke of empire: it was about BECOMING an empire, independent of the empire that had spawned them. And it signaled a qualitative leap in the ongoing genocide. In conclusion, fuck this cancerous Yankee growth that has metastasized all over the continent and the planet.