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A truly continental history in both its geographic and political scope, The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713-1763 investigates eighteenth-century diplomacy involving North America and links geographic ignorance about the American West to Europeans' grand geopolitical designs. Breaking from scholars' traditional focus on the Atlantic world, Paul W. Mapp demonstrates the centrality of hitherto understudied western regions to early American history and shows that a Pacific focus is crucial to understanding the causes, course, and consequences of the Seven Years' War.

On November 3, 1762, in the waning days of the Seven Years’ War, a beleaguered France ceded the trans-Mississippi remnants of the colony of Louisiana to Spain. This cession has always been something of an enigma; its necessity is not immediately obvious. Spain had not occupied western Louisiana, Britain had not conquered it, and neither was demanding it. Trans-Mississippi Louisiana remained, so far as European diplomacy was concerned, under French dominion, the last piece of a remarkable continental venture. From 1524 to 1762, French scouts, missionaries, traders, officials, and settlers had tried to explore North America’s territories, harvest its resources,

In the history of the United States, and in an account of the agreements ending the Seven Years’ War, Louisiana figures most prominently as the colony France gave away. But before France yielded Louisiana, it had to acquire claims to the great Mississippi Valley—twice. To understand the first of France’s Louisiana cessions, it is necessary to examine the reasons why French officials once found the colony so desirable. In 1699, one year after founding the French Compagnie royale de la Mer paci-fique, Pierre Lemoyne d’Iberville’s landing on the Mississippi Delta—followed by his and his brother Jean-Baptiste de Bienville’s

On November 16, 1700, Louis XIV proclaimed, in accordance with the will of Charles II of Spain, that Louis’s grandson Philip, duc d’Anjou, would inherit the Spanish throne. The ensuing War of the Spanish Succession (1702–1714) would determine which European powers would profit from the riches of Spanish America. Louis and his ministers hoped that French commercial penetration of the Spanish Empire would make Spanish resources available to French merchants and those merchants’ income available to royal tax collectors. In the years after 1700, the French government directed its diplomatic, military, and commercial policies to this end. William III

Consideration of the inhibiting effects of western exploratory difficulties and disappointments, of the Far West’s geographic position, and of the competitive allure of other potential targets of investigation yields a fair explanation for the pre-1763 Spanish failure to explore the better part of the North American West. Such consideration leaves open, however, the question of why, if the physical and human geography of the North American West rendered its thorough exploration by Spaniards themselves arduous and unappealing, they could not avail themselves of Indian information, utilizing native geographic knowledge as a substitute for Spanish sails and feet. When Vizcaíno sailed

One character making occasional appearances in earlier chapters has been Henry Ellis (1721–1806). Like Arthur Dobbs, Ellis was one of those second-tier figures of eighteenth-century British imperial history who frequently influenced or exemplified important historical developments. In a sparkling 1970 essay, John Shy used Ellis to help illuminate the “spectrum of imperial possibilities” following the Seven Years’ War. In this book, Ellis has spoken confidently of the great islands of necessity existing in the North Pacific. He has participated in the 1746–1747 British expedition in search of a Northwest Passage from Hudson Bay, and his account of the

In 1730, a report “Touching upon the Discovery of the Western Sea” appeared as an attachment to a letter from the governor of New France, the marquis de Beauharnois (1726–1747). The report’s author was the French explorer Pierre Gaultier de Varennes et de La Vérendrye. While serving as commander of French furtrading posts north of Lake Superior in 1728 and 1729, La Vérendrye had been seeking information about western lands and waters from Indians at the French forts. His interlocutors included a former slave of the Assiniboines; Auchagah (also spelled Ochagach), “a savage [Sauvage] of my post”; “a Monsoni

Eighteenth-century French surveyors triangulated their way across France and China. A French geographer trod the forests of Siberia and sailed the waters of the North Pacific. His brother collected in Saint Petersburg and dispatched to Paris maps of an empire spanning the world’s largest continent. French cartographers produced maps of stunning clarity and precision revealing not only the heart of Gaul but also the reaches of “Tartary.” In North America, in contrast, travel-weary explorers found their westward progress checked short of the South Sea; and, in France, bewigged cartographers pondered western rivers and inland seas whose existence they suspected and

La Vérendrye and his compatriots were not alone in their search for a water route to the west, nor was a great river the only form such a passage might take. In 1731—a year after La Vérendrye’s report “Touching upon the Discovery of the Western Sea”—Arthur Dobbs, Ulster landowner and member of the Irish House of Commons, wrote a seventy-page memoir positing the existence of a Northwest Passage from Hudson Bay to the Pacific and encouraging the Hudson’s Bay Company or the British Admiralty to dispatch ships to look for it. Dobbs used different kinds of evidence to