Antiques.(Canada)

 
You know that these two nations are at war about a few acres of barren 
land in the neighborhood of Canada, and that they have expended much 
greater sums in the contest than all Canada is worth. 
Voltaire, Candide, 1759 

The Treaty of Paris of 1763, which brought the Seven Years' Wars to a close, marked the end of the French empire in the New World and the beginning of British domination. Voltaire's "few acres of barren land" were part of what is now the second largest country in the world. However, in the beginning the British were faced with establishing imperial control only over the settlements of Quebec along a small strip of land on the Saint Lawrence River and the Great Lakes. It was a daunting prospect to absorb a non-British population of some seventy thousand Roman Catholic Canadiens who had hitherto lived speaking French under French law and institutions.

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Of the other Canadian colonies, only Nova Scotia, which included all of Acadia north and east of Maine, proved more susceptible to British dominion. By 1767 it had a population of some seven thousand Americans, two thousand Irish, two thousand Germans, barely one thousand English, and fewer than one thousand Acadians. West and north lay the vaguely outlined domains of the Hudson's Bay Company, founded in 1670. These three parts of the territory deeded to the British--Quebec, Acadia, and Upper Canada and the West--made up what became the Dominion of ...