Citizens of Convenience by Lawrence B. A. Hatter

He is the author of Citizens of Convenience: The Imperial Origins of American Nationhood on the U.S.-Canadian Border. is Associate Professor of History at Washington State University. He is an Associate Professor of History at Washington State University and a former Research Fellow at the Washington Library. Hatter is the author of Citizens of Convenience: The Imperial Origins of American Nationhood on the U.S.-Canadian Border, published by the University of Virginia Press in 2017. Hatter joins Jim Ambuske to discuss the politics of the northern border, taking us on a journey from the diplomatic halls of Paris and London to the trading grounds of Detroit, Ontario, and Quebec in the aftermath of the American Revolution. They were, as today’s guest calls them, Citizens of Convenience, people who frequently shifted their identity from American citizen to British subject and back depending on local circumstances and their own self-interest.ĭr. But even though diplomats drew a line dividing a republican nation from a monarchical one, lines on paper mattered little to people on the ground in places like Detroit and Montreal where Americans, Canadians, and native peoples had an incentive to move goods and people freely across the new border. border with Mexico gets all the attention, but in the eighteenth century it was the northern border with Canada that mattered the most. You can see a digital copy of the Mitchell Map here. They used maps like John Mitchell’s 1755 work A Map of the British and French Dominions in North America to figure out what separated the United States from what remained of British America in Canada. As part of the treaty negotiations, American and British diplomats had to determine the new nation’s borders.

In 1783, the United States and Great Britain signed the Treaty of Paris, which confirmed American independence.

Citizens of Convenience by Lawrence B. A. Hatter