If you try to find a map of the United States in 1700, you’re going to run into a pretty big problem right away. The United States didn’t exist. Not even close. What you're actually looking at is a messy, violent, and deeply confusing jigsaw puzzle of imperial claims, indigenous nations, and vast stretches of land that Europeans had literally no clue about.
It’s wild.
Most people picture the original thirteen colonies hugging the coast and then just... emptiness to the west. That’s not how it was. In 1700, the continent was a high-stakes poker game between England, France, and Spain, with the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy and the Pueblo peoples holding some of the most important cards. Honestly, the maps from this era tell you more about what people hoped was true than what was actually happening on the ground. They are masterpieces of wishful thinking and political propaganda.
The cartography of "claimed" vs. "controlled"
There is a massive difference between a king in Europe drawing a line on a piece of parchment and a settler actually standing on that dirt. In 1700, the British were basically stuck. They had a thin strip of the Atlantic coast. If you look at a map from this specific year, you’ll see "Virginia" or "Carolina" extending theoretically all the way to the Pacific Ocean. It was a joke. They hadn't even crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains in any real numbers.
The French were the ones playing the long game.
By 1700, French explorers like René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle had already claimed the entire Mississippi River basin for Louis XIV. They called it Louisiana. It was massive. On a map, it looks like France owned the heart of the continent. But in reality? It was a network of tiny forts and fur-trading posts. You had maybe a few thousand Frenchmen scattered across millions of square miles. They survived because they made alliances with the Illinois and the Choctaw. Without those indigenous partners, the French presence on a map of the United States in 1700 would have evaporated in a weekend.
Spain was the old guard. They’d been there forever.
They held Florida, though it was mostly just St. Augustine and some missions that were constantly getting raided. Out West, they had New Mexico. But 1700 was a weirdly specific, tense moment for the Spanish. They were still reeling from the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Though they’d "reconquered" the area in the 1690s, the power dynamic had shifted. The Spanish crown claimed the Southwest, but the Comanches were about to start building an empire of their own that would eventually make those Spanish claims look like a suggestion rather than a reality.
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The empty spots aren't actually empty
One thing that drives me crazy about historical maps is how they label the interior. You’ll see "Terra Incognita" or just big blank spaces.
That’s a lie of omission.
Those spaces were densely populated and politically complex. In 1700, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy was at the height of its diplomatic power. They were the "buffer" between the French in Canada and the English in New York. They controlled the Great Lakes. If you were a mapmaker in London, you might label that area "New York," but if you were a British trader actually walking through the woods, you knew exactly whose land you were on. You paid taxes—in the form of gifts and tribute—to the people who actually lived there.
The weird shapes of the 1700s coastline
Cartography in 1700 was getting better, but it was still kinda "ish."
Longitude was the great nightmare of the age. Navigators could figure out latitude (how far north or south they were) pretty easily by looking at the sun or the North Star. But longitude? Knowing how far east or west you'd traveled? That required a clock that could keep perfect time on a rocking ship, which wouldn't be perfected until John Harrison’s marine chronometer much later in the 18th century.
Because of this, 1700-era maps often look "squashed" or "stretched."
California is the funniest example. On many maps from 1700, California is depicted as an island. This wasn't just a minor oopsie; it was a persistent geographic myth that lasted for over a century. Explorers saw the Gulf of California, assumed it kept going north, and just drew a massive channel separating California from the rest of the continent. Even after overland expeditions suggested otherwise, mapmakers kept drawing it as an island because it looked cool and people were used to seeing it that way. It’s a great reminder that "fake news" has always existed in the world of data visualization.
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A tale of three cities (that weren't New York)
In 1700, the centers of gravity were different.
- Boston was the big dog. It was the largest city in British North America, a bustling port of about 6,700 people.
- Santa Fe was already a century old. While English settlers were still figuring out how to survive in the Virginia swamps, the Spanish were already building adobe villas and churches in the high desert.
- Charleston (Charles Town) was the southern powerhouse. It was the gateway to the "Indian Slave Trade," a grim and often overlooked part of this era where thousands of indigenous people were captured and shipped to the Caribbean.
New York? It was growing, sure, but it wasn't the global titan it is now. It was a former Dutch colony (New Amsterdam) that had only been under British control for a few decades. It still felt Dutch. People spoke Dutch in the streets. The architecture was stepped-gable brick houses. When you look at the map of the United States in 1700, you have to remember that "British" was a very loose term for a population that was a mix of Dutch, Swedish, German, enslaved Africans, and indigenous people.
The Beaver Wars and the shifting boundaries
Geography isn't just mountains and rivers; it's economics. In 1700, the "border" between the French and the English was basically determined by where the beaver lived.
The fur trade was the oil industry of the 17th century.
Beaver hats were the height of fashion in Europe, and because the beaver had been hunted to near extinction there, North America was the new gold mine. The "Beaver Wars" of the mid-to-late 1600s had completely redrawn the indigenous map. The Iroquois, armed with Dutch and English guns, had pushed other tribes like the Huron and the Algonquin out of their ancestral lands to control the supply of furs.
This created a massive ripple effect.
By the time you get to 1700, you have "refugee" tribes moving into the Ohio River Valley. This created a power vacuum that the French and English both tried to fill. When you look at a map of this period, you’re looking at a snapshot of a massive, violent migration that was still settling. The lines on the map don't show the blood spilled to draw them.
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Practical takeaways for the history buff
If you're looking to actually use a map of the United States in 1700 for research or just because you’re a nerd for this stuff, keep these things in mind:
First, check the source of the map. A map made in Paris in 1700 will look radically different from one made in London. The French will emphasize the "Pays d'en Haut" (the upper country) and the Mississippi, making the English look like they’re trapped on a tiny island. The English maps will do the opposite, ignoring French forts and drawing "Virginia" all the way to the Great Lakes.
Second, look for the "Indian Nations" labels. If a map from 1700 doesn't mention the Creek, the Cherokee, the Iroquois, or the Wampanoag, it’s a bad map. It’s ignoring the actual geopolitical reality of the time.
Third, pay attention to the waterways. In 1700, roads were basically non-existent. If you couldn't get there by boat, you couldn't get there. The entire "map" is built around river systems—the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, the Chesapeake Bay, the Mississippi. That’s why cities like New Orleans (founded shortly after in 1718) and Quebec were so vital. They were the valves that controlled the flow of the entire continent's wealth.
To truly understand this era, stop looking for the "United States." It's not there. Instead, look for a continent in flux, where three empires and dozens of indigenous nations were locked in a struggle that no one was winning yet. It was a world where a map was more of a prayer than a piece of navigation.
Next Steps for Your Research:
- Compare National Archives: Go to the Library of Congress digital collection and search for "North America 1700." Then, do the same on the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) website. Comparing the French Carte de la Louisiane (1718, but based on 1700 data) with British maps of the same era is the best way to see the propaganda in action.
- Focus on the 1701 Great Peace of Montreal: If you want to see how the "map" changed, look up the treaty signed in 1701. It ended the Beaver Wars and is a crucial context for why the borders look the way they do on 18th-century maps.
- Trace the "Fall Line": Look at where the major colonial cities are located. Most are on the "fall line" of rivers—the point where waterfalls prevented ships from going further inland. This line effectively formed the "western" border of the English colonies for decades.
Maps aren't just about where things are; they're about who has the power to say where things are. In 1700, that power was up for grabs.