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发信人: icecap (暖一暖), 信区: English
标 题: Britain in North America
发信站: 哈工大紫丁香 (Wed Apr 2 11:50:41 2003) , 转信
Britain in North America - we would rather forget
The name of Sir Walter Raleigh and his efforts to found the colony in
Virginia in the 1580s, named after Elizabeth I, brought the American colony
to prominence at court in London. Then there was the voyage of the Pilgrim
fathers in the Mayflower in 1620. But all in all the American colony was
not a major factor in British life.
It was only in the middle of the 18th century that the bitter quarrel over
tax emerged as a major problem. Riots resulted , George III became more and
more repressive. Finally the British governments concession for the East
India Company to sell tea directly to the colonists, resulted in the
merchants, who would have been bankrupted by the action, tipping the entire
cargo of £10000 worth of tea into Boston harbour. The british reaponse
was to declare martial law, which led to further riots and eventually to
rebellion. The colonists declared independence in 1776 at Philadelphia
The British army and their weapons were ill suited to guerilla warfare, and
Cornwallis's surrender of his army of 3700 men at Yorktown was effectively
the end of the war.
From the British point of view the whole thing was an unmitigated disaster.
The army was 3000miles from home, and difficult to supply. The British navy
temporally lost control of the sea to the French. And the two British commanders
, Cornwallis and Clinton, quarrelled over how to conduct the campaign. Even in
Britain the political parties were not united on who to support, with the
Whigs attacking the king for his tyranical rule.
The British suffered their first major defeat for centuries, and retreated
to continue controling Canada, leaving the American Colonists to their new
country.
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※ 修改:·icecap 於 04月02日12:03:17 修改本文·[FROM: 61.158.43.220]
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