And that land was technically held by the French, who left it alone except for a bunch of trading posts, and they were like, je ne veux pas l'Anglais. Thank you, four years of high school French. Anyway, the war wasn't really about land. It was really about our old friend, trade. The British wanted to expand into the American interior to allow for more colonists, because the British benefited both from the export of raw materials from the Americas and the import of British consumer goods to the Americas. So more colonists meant more trade, which meant more wealth, which meant ever fancier hats. And the French realized that this British Atlantic Maritime trade was making Britain so rich that Britain might come for France's actually valuable colonies, which were not in the continental US, but those slave-based sugar plantations in the Caribbean.