| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America. By Colin G. Calloway. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. xx, 219 pp. $26.00, ISBN 0-19-530071-8.)

In this compelling account, the historian Colin G. Calloway offers ample evidence for including the year 1763 among the Pivotal Moments in American History, the Oxford University Press series to which this book belongs. Calloway states that his intention "is not to retell the familiar story of the growing rift between Britain and her thirteen colonies, nor simply to narrate the events of just one year," but rather to assess "the enormous changes generated by the Peace of Paris ... [and] their impact on many societies and countless lives in North America" (p. 14). Calloway succeeds marvelously. By connecting political events with social and cultural history, Calloway takes his readers on a panoramic tour of North America in the wake of the 1763 Treaty of Paris, the hard-bargained peace accord that formally ended the Seven Years' War (more commonly referred to as the French and Indian War in Britain's American colonies). Borrowing a phrase from Francis Parkman, a nineteenth-century Whig historian with whom Calloway shares little interpretative ground, Calloway illustrates how "the scratch of a pen" in Europe dramatically affected the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, including Native Americans, Britons, Canadians, and American colonists (p. 15).

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