Strange as it is to say, the U.S. Declaration of Independence has deep roots in Canada.

That assertion may come as a surprise to people in the United States ahead of its 250th anniversary. The common narrative is fixated upon 1776, the 13 rebelling Colonies and the bold military actions of Founding Fathers such as George Washington.

But as I document in my new book, “Freedom Around the Globe,” there is a much wider and often forgotten geographical context. Indeed, it is impossible to understand fully the trajectory of the U.S. in 1776 without comprehending a wider imperial world and what happened in 1775. In fact, the American Revolution ran through Canada.

A broader British North America

In 1775, the first year of the American Revolutionary War, Britain possessed double the famous 13 colonies in North America alone, with many in Canada and the Greater Caribbean – including East and West Florida.

At least some of these colonies had become nominally British in the 1760s, thanks to military triumph late in the Seven Years’ War, 1756-1763. In late 1759, the British had vanquished the French at the battle of the Plains of Abraham near Quebec City, thus ensuring that the British gained this province and a string of French forts in the interior.

In 1763, with the Treaty of Paris, Quebec officially became part of the British Empire. It took British bureaucrats and politicians some years and not a little wrangling to figure out how to integrate French and Indigenous Catholics, with their own laws, into the British Empire.

A major milestone in this process was the Quebec Act of 1774, allowing the practice of Catholicism and modified French law in Canada. Colonists down south, especially fierce New England Protestants who took a dim view of Catholicism, viewed this act – and their new fellow imperial subjects – with dismay and considerable suspicion.

Pushing for a 14th colony

Still, by 1775,........

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