Don’t underestimate the French and Indian War – it’s one of the keys to understanding the American Revolution. That’s what history professor Dr. Susan Hanssen told Drew Mariani during a segment on his Rediscovering America Series.

“A lot of young people tend to think of America as a superpower and to think of Great Britain as a small European country…off the coast of the continent of Europe,” Hanssen told Drew. What the young people don’t realize, she said, is that the reverse was true during the 1700s. At that time, Great Britain had become, “the largest empire on earth,” and “the largest naval empire…because of the French and Indian war.”

Hanssen describes the French and Indian War as a three-part conflict. One part was the conflict between American Colonial and British forces against the French and Indians. Another part was fought on the European continent which “made Prussia…an independent country,” Hanssen said. The third part was the British effort to stop France’s “incursions into India.”

“It’s a very consequential war,” Hanssen said; one that ushered in a “diplomatic transformation.” The result of which left France bankrupt and made Britain the dominant global power.

The resounding victories on all three spheres meant the sun never set on the British empire, Hanssen said. “The sun would rise in Canada and the Americas, and the sun would set in India.”

Success, however, was not diffuse. After the war, the British enacted the Proclamation Line of 1763, a boundary which prevented the American colonists from westward expansion. Hanssen said the colonists expected they would be able to move west into the “back country” as part of the shared victory on the battlefield. “At the same time,” Hanssen explained, “they were taxed and expected to pay for the war. So, this created enormous resentment.”

Tensions between the colonies and the British started to flare. In 1770, an argument between a British solider and a colonist snowballed into a mob. That resulted in British soldiers opening fire on the colonists there in what came to be known as the Boston Massacre.

Unfair taxes also consumed the minds of colonists. Hanssen explains that Parliament gave a monopoly to the British East India company who sold tea “directly to the American colonies.” While the cost of tea was cheaper for the colonists, Parliament added a tax on the tea. Even with the tax, the tea was still cheap. To the colonists, though, “this was a backhanded direct tax—precisely what they had been protesting against since 1765.”

This frustration led to the famous Boston Tea Party in 1773 when well-to-do Bostonians dumped tea from the British East India tea into the Boston Harbor.

The British Parliament responded harshly. In 1774, they introduced a series of acts which closed the Harbor, increased the British Naval presence in Boston, and usurped local governing authority. These provocative moves angered the colonists, who “rightly saw it as a destruction of the rule of law,” Hanssen said.

War, then, seemed unavoidable.