Alan Taylor: prediction

Transcript context

…In general, why did the British find it easier to mobilize Native Americans as allies? Is it just because they were less expansionist? It basically, again, comes down to population numbers. You have approximately two-and-a-half million people living in the 13 colonies. Their population is doubling every 22 years. This is the fastest population growth of any place on earth at that time. They are an agricultural people, overwhelmingly; 95% of Americans made their living by agriculture at that time. As the population doubles, they want the next generation to have the same standard of living, which means they need twice as much land, and so they’re expanding. Meanwhile, the British, their population at that time during the war is based in Canada, and it’s much smaller. The British are just running a few small forts in the West, and they need native help to defend those forts against American expansion. Native peoples are calculating the enemy of my enemy as my friend, and they see the British as providing them with firearms to resist the American expansion. For the great majority of native peoples, the British Empire is the better bet in order to maintain their hold on their homelands. Fast-forwarding to the War of 1812, which you’ve written an excellent book about, why couldn’t the then more than 7 million Americans overwhelm the, what, 300,000 to 500,000 — I’ve seen different estimates — British subjects in what we now call Canada?…

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