The Roman Influence on Post French and Indian War British Frontier Policy (2011)
Undergraduate: John Millett
Faculty Advisor: Wayne Lee
Department: History
When Britain signed the Treaty of Paris of 1763, it became sovereign of all of North America east of the Mississippi. Although the treaty did remove the threat of a large scale French invasion of Britain’s North American colonies, it also tasked the British army in North America with defending and policing vast tracts of undeveloped land. Given the difficulty of the terrain, lack of roads, and general hostility of the Indian population, this mandate was no mean task, and as a result, considerable thought went into how the frontier could be most effectively policed.
When formulating their frontier policy, it seemed likely that British officers and policy makers would have drawn from Roman examples of frontier management. Rome had controlled a vast empire, many Romans had written about their imperial project, and most British officers and policy makers would have been familiar with the Roman authors because they were aristocrats whose education included learning to read Latin.
The research project sought to establish the extant of the influence, and it ultimately found that the influence was minimal. One unsigned, undated letter to General Jeffery Amherst specifically cited Roman road and fort building as a model to be intimidated, but otherwise the sources are mute. It seems likely that the Roman model was not practical because the areas in question were much less populated and because the British had much fewer troops relative to the area that they had to control.