The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America

Journal of Southern History, August, 2007 by Warren R. Hofstra

The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America. By Colin G. Calloway. Pivotal Moments in American History. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xx, 219. $28.00, ISBN 978-0-19-530071-0.)

A casual visitor to eighteenth-century North America might not be surprised by a signpost on the year 1763 reading "nothing important happened here." The Peace of Paris drawing the Seven Years' War to a close in that year seemed only to confirm what had been accomplished militarily by 1760. The famous Proclamation of 1763 was, at least by historical lore, so wantonly flaunted that it was largely meaningless. And the British revenue measures that would provoke revolution by the mid-1770s were not yet visible on the political horizon. These perceptions and the realities upon which they were projected, however, are precisely why Colin G. Calloway's The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America is such an important new book.

Calloway borrows his title from Francis Parkman's comment about the signing of the Peace of Paris: "half a continent ... changed hands at the scratch of a pen" (quoted on p. 15). The disposition of imperial territory in North America had never before and has never since been so profoundly altered. Nor would be the course of Native American history. Calloway's concerns, however, stretch far beyond the conferral of land from one power to another in the traditional fare of diplomatic history. His investigation is set in the context of contemporary social and cultural studies and a deep concern for how the arrogance of eighteenth-century diplomacy affected where and how all peoples in the Americas lived. Moreover, the Peace of Paris, by his reckoning, set people and events moving toward the American Revolution and all that it foretold about the founding of the republic and the Indian wars that have confounded the meaning of the republic ever since. For this reason, Calloway's contribution merits priority among the titles in Oxford University Press's Pivotal Moments in American History series, edited by David Hackett Fischer and James M. McPherson.

In neatly tailored chapters, Calloway surveys the nature of American life and geography in 1763; the contests for land and sovereignty generated by national, ethnic, and racial diversity; the resulting explosion of Pontiac's War; and British efforts to resolve territorial contentions diplomatically. The book closes with two chapters detailing what could be called the diaspora of the 1760s as territorial settlements among European powers set immigrant, creole, and Native American peoples in motion across the major natural and political boundaries of what had been New France and New Spain.

Calloway's study would not have been possible before recent revolutions in social history, cultural history, ethnohistory, Atlantic studies, the new imperial history, and postcolonial concerns for the demographic and human consequences of diplomacy. But his accomplishment should not be seen in the genre of monographic studies following in the wake of paradigm shifts, pedantic but necessary to complete their meaning. Instead he wields the new tools of modern historiography to better understand how people, events, space, environment, and culture conflate in the process of historical change, moving, in his case, toward the American Revolution, and by implication providing a model for incorporating histories forged in theoretical abstraction into the dynamic of traditional narratives. Parkman redux.

WARREN R. HOFSTRA

Shenandoah University