1763 Proclamation Line enforced

[Melvin Loh]

WI the British govt after 1763 had been able to station somehow the necessary 10,000 soldiers in the contested areas of the Proclamation Line, in order to safeguard Indian lands by preventing the further encroachment of white settlers ? Could there have been triggered an even earlier war between the Crown and Indians and the colonists over the ownership of Indian land and the taxation of the colonies to provide for this standing army ? Might some native tribes have even turned against their erstwhile benefactors and attacked British troops, so's there could've been another version of Pontiac's War ?

[Othniel]

Most likely they have to trade those troops out often. Americanism is contagious...and might cause desertion on the part of the British in favor of their fellow common man.

[Tyr]

err Britain was the nation of the common man. America was the nation of money can buy you anything.

[Paul Spring]

18th Century Britain was very much a "money can buy you anything" country, probably more so than the US or any other western nation today. Almost every member of Parliament, every Cabinet official, many civil servants, and most officers in the army and navy essentially bought their positions.

[Tyr]

The US was worse for it though. In Britain you had social standing and money whilst in America there was just money, money was the social standing.
Britain was a lot better for poor people making good due to its upper class having inherited titles and so being safe whilst in America the rich kept down the poor as they could easily be a potential threat.

[Paul Spring]

If we're talking about the 18th century, the gap between rich and poor was vastly smaller in the colonies than in Britain. Even the wealthiest plantation owners and merchants in the colonies couldn't compare with the richest aristocrats and mercantile families of Britain, while the relatively small cities in the colonies had nothing as bad as the slums of London. The contrast between extreme wealth and poverty was something that typically appalled US visitors to Britain at least up to the mid 19th century, when the US began to develop similar extremes with economic growth and industrialization.

It is true that British wealth was more likely to be inherited than it was in the US. This doesn't seem like a particularly great thing to me.