Over the first half of the century, two major and interlinked developments transformed the landscape of European administration. The first was the rise of a professionalized bureaucracy, military, and diplomatic corps. The second was the rapid improvement of European communication systems: massive road projects, centralized postal networks, packet boat services, and more. Correspondence and paperwork practices of diplomatic agents spread across Europe, and of metropolitan ministers in France and Britain, quickly reflected both these developments—but many of these communication improvements were still absent in French and British North America.
However, by the mid-Eighteenth Century, both France and Britain began to apply these practices to their Atlantic Empires—practices implemented with close and watchful eyes to their rival. France, out of an administrative push to consolidate the paperwork of New France, looked to more closely tie Canada and Louisiana by forging regular correspondence channels between the two territories. Britain, in turn, looked to create a singular communications hub around New York, one clustered around military offices and other imperial institutions. As Britain inaugurated its Atlantic packet boat service, France sought to create a fleet of frigates specially designed to carry transatlantic news. These paperwork and correspondence practices not only revealed the continued back and forth of emulation and improvement between the French and British Empires. They also came to physically reshape each empire, as the pathways of imperial paperwork quickly became inscribed upon the continent as new roads and routes constructed to and around chosen administrative communication hubs.
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