to devote itself to its original business of trade.

Thus by 1763 the British power had achieved a dazzling double
triumph. It had destroyed the power of its chief rival both in the
East and in the West. It had established the supremacy of the
British peoples and of British methods of government throughout
the whole continent of North America; and it had entered, blindly
and without any conception of what the future was to bring forth,
upon the path which was to lead to dominion over the vast
continent of India, and upon the tremendous task of grafting the
ideas of the West upon the East.

Such was the outcome of the first two periods in the history of
European imperialism. It left Central and South America under the
stagnant and reactionary government of Spain and Portugal; the
eastern coast of North America under the control of groups of
self-governing Englishmen; Canada, still inhabited by Frenchmen,
under British dominance; Java and the Spice Islands, together with
the small settlement of Cape Colony, in the hands of the Dutch; a
medley of European settlements in the West Indian islands, and a
string of European factories along the coast of West Africa; and
the beginning of an anomalous British dominion established at two
points on the coast of India. But of all the European nations
which had taken part in this vast process of expansion, one alone,
the British, still retained its vitality and its expansive power.