France's leaders felt it would be difficult to compete with the Royal Navy and were afraid that Great Britain's maritime superiority could threaten its profitable colonies in the West Indies as well as its standing in Europe.

Almost an afterthought for London and Versailles was the fact that these desired lands were already populated by Indigenous bands (different groups or tribes) that had a long history fighting each other.

This maritime domination gave Britain a clear advantage in term of its ability to send reinforcements and supply to its North American colonies.

In July, 1758, a British expedition led by Major-General Jeffery Amherst successfully captured the Fortress Port of Louisbourg in the French colony of Île Royale.

Upon arrival, the army set up base five kilometres from Quebec City at the Île d'Orléans (whose French inhabitants had partially evacuated after the news of Louisbourg surfaced).

Believing that the British campaign would eventually run out of supplies (or would be crushed by Canada's harsh winter), Montcalm's strategy focused primarily on defence.

Montcalm had positioned a light guard along the western approaches, but at no time was there ever indication that the British would try to land along the rushing river shore and have an army climb up the cliffs.

[6]: 8  After the Plains of Abraham, the French had regrouped in Montreal under the command of François Gaston de Lévis, leaving the under-supplied British to endure a harsh Canadian winter in a city they had already destroyed.

In February 1763, the Treaty of Paris made the northern portion of New France (including Canada and some additional lands to the south and west) officially a British colony.

On the one hand, there was a need to appease the French, who – defeat in war notwithstanding – continued to present a major threat to British interests given their demographic advantage.

But more importantly, the retention of Canada was motivated by the argument that removing the French presence from North America would reinforce the security of Britain's Empire in the region.

[13]: 190  His conception of the relationship between the conquered and the conqueror implies that one must to do away with the idea that, as British identity and the English language came to underpin the mode of governance, the legislative, administrative and judicial branches of the old legal and social order collapsed and the Canadiens population was too passive to actively participate in this transformation for better or for worse.

This exclusionary sentiment is echoed in the Quebec grand jury presentment of October 1764, which objected to the presence of Catholic Jurors as an "open Violation of our most sacred Laws and Libertys, and tending to the utter subversion of the protestant Religion and his Majesty's power authority, right, and possession of the province to which we belong.

"[13]: 195  However, beyond this seemingly rigid religious ideology, the judicial framework presented ambiguities that permitted Governor Murray to make exceptions to accommodate practical realities.

[13]: 196  The shifting legal definition of Catholicism in the Province of Quebec represents not an instance of British cultural domination and paternal enforcement, but rather a propensity for mutual adaptation in the face of regional circumstances and challenges.

Indeed, not only did the Canadiens have to adapt to unfamiliar power dynamics, but the British officials and civilian population were also forced to adjust in order to acclimate to new constructs of governance.

[13]: 200  The continued use of the French-Canadian parish as the basis of the administrative spatial conception of the colony's territory illustrates British adaptation to existing modes of land-ownership instead of imposing their own.

[14]: 274  This fact, combined with the failure of the Irish solution for populating Quebec left the British with few options to alleviate their outstanding war debts except by raising taxes on its other colonies.

[14]: 275  Furthermore, it can also be concluded that the absorption of Quebec directly contributed to the frustrations that boiled over in the American Revolution because it removed the reason for blocking the westward expansion of the thirteen colonies – i.e. the French threat.

[14]: 267  French industry did not profit so radically from wartime expenditure, in part because its members failed to impose themselves as contenders on the high seas, but also because they did not have the same level of economic infrastructure as the British to begin with.

The 1763 Treaty of Paris confirmed the British possession of the province of Quebec and the French retention of Caribbean colonies and Newfoundland fisheries.

This arrangement explains why defeat was of little to no economic consequence to the French state: it had managed to rid itself of territory it had long considered excess weight, while holding on to the parts of the empire that were central to its commercial prosperity.

Much of the historiographical debate surrounding the conquest is linked to the rise of Quebec nationalism and new schools of thought developed at the time of the Quiet Revolution.

The Laval school includes those Francophone historians such as Fernand Ouellet and Jean Hamelin who see the positive benefit of the conquest as enabling the preservation of language, and religion and traditional customs under British rule in a hostile North America.

[15] They argue that the conquest exposed the Canadiens to constitutional government and parliamentary democracy and with the Quebec Act, guaranteed the survival of French customs in an otherwise Anglo-Protestant continent.

Scholars such as Donald Fyson have pointed to the Quebec legal system as a particular success, with the continuation of French civil law and the introduction of liberal modernity.

[16] The Montreal school, originating at the Université de Montréal and including historians such as Michel Brunet, Maurice Séguin, and Guy Frégault, posits that the conquest is responsible for the economic and political retardation of Quebec.

It was only the tenacity of the Canadiens in opposition to the alien rule of the British, Groulx argued, that had helped the French Canadians survive in a hostile North America.

For example, one Canadien politician and future Father of Confederation, Étienne-Paschal Taché, stated that "The last cannon which is shot on this continent in defence of Great Britain will be fired by the hand of a French Canadian.

Historian Jocelyn Létourneau suggested in the 21st century, "1759 does not belong primarily to a past that we might wish to study and understand, but, rather, to a present and a future that we might wish to shape and control.