The Board of Trade’s annotated <em>Map of North America</em>

In the years leading up to the Seven Years’ War both England and France released competing maps of North America, aggrandizing their own land claims and accusing the other power of overreach. London cartographer Emmanuel Bowen’s <em>An Accurate Map of North America</em> published in 1755 explicitly accused the French of “chicanery” and “fraud.” In 1763 the English Board of Trade used a lightly revised edition of Bowen’s map to annotate their suggested borders for a postwar British North America. They drew a red line down the Appalachian Mountains as the proposed westward limit to settler expansion, which eventually came to be known as the Proclamation Line.