The Louisiana Purchase and Anglo-American relations : how British anxieties about the Louisiana Purchase contributed to the War of 1812.

In this thesis, I examine Anglo-American relations leading up to the War of 1812 through the context of British anxieties regarding the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. This Franco-American treaty, in which Napoleonic France ceded New Orleans and the lands west of the Mississippi to the United States, I argue, had major implications for Anglo-American relations and inflamed the hostilities that eventually resulted in the War of 1812. The Louisiana Purchase only exacerbated British concerns regarding a possible Franco-American alliance, the continuance of their naval supremacy, the maritime trade economy, the transatlantic slave trade, and the contested Canadian border. I look at each of these issues, which historians have identified as causal to the War of 1812, through the crucial perspective of the Royal Navy, which served as the most visible representative of Britain abroad.