What if France Kept Canada?

In February 1763 French and British diplomats signed a treaty in a Paris townhouse, and France gave up the whole of Canada. In exchange it kept two sugar islands in the Caribbean and two rocks off Newfoundland. Many people in Paris thought France had got the better of the deal, and by the standards of the time they had a case. This video asks what North America looks like if the argument in London goes the other way. That argument was real and it ran in print for two years. Britain had captured more than it could keep, and some of it had to go back to get a peace signed. The choice came down to Canada or the sugar islands, and Guadeloupe's cane fields were worth more in trade every year than every beaver pelt shipped down the Saint Lawrence. The case that won was not commercial. It was that a French Canada meant French soldiers on the frontier of the British colonies. Twelve years later those same colonies were shooting at British troops outside Boston. This scenario follows what happens if the frontier stays where it was: the Appalachian line becomes a real border rather than a policy, the western forts keep their garrisons, and the colonies keep a reason to want British soldiers nearby. It also takes the scenario's ceiling seriously. Seventy thousand French settlers still face more than a million and a half neighbours who are growing faster, on a river that freezes for months and can be closed by a fleet. A Canada held in 1763 is probably a Canada lost around 1795 instead. Covered in this video: what New France actually was and why its alliances mattered more than its numbers, the campaign that ended at Quebec and Montreal, the pamphlet war in London over Canada and sugar, the terms signed in 1763, the rising on the Great Lakes that followed, and a step by step alternate timeline running to the 1790s. #alternatehistory #whatif #newfrance #sevenyearswar #history