Ungefähre Karte der Kolonialkontrolle in Nordamerika im Jahr 1750

Awesome 

That’s a great map.

Very cool, although I think a different color for the Russians would be preferable.

Mexico is quite incorrect on this map- by the 1750 Spanish control over Mexico proper had integrated indigenous peoples into the empire in a centralized system, not counting that here is excluding most of the population really

This map is not just “approximate”, it is conceptually misleading.

It mixes three very different things under the same visual language: settlement, military presence, and influence, and by doing so it ends up telling a distorted story of colonial control in North America circa 1750.
The problem is the choice of markers. By privileging forts, trading posts, and coastal enclaves, the map implicitly adopts an Anglo-French frontier logic and then applies it wholesale to Spain, where it simply does not work.

Spanish America was not organized around thin military dots projecting influence into empty space. It was organized around cities, towns, parishes, roads, land grants, and indigenous communities fully integrated into imperial administration. Large parts of what this map renders as weak or diffuse “Spanish presence” were, in reality, densely populated, tax-paying, legally incorporated regions with functioning civil government, courts, and economic systems.

Depicting Spain mainly through presidios while ignoring the interior urban network of New Spain fundamentally misrepresents Spanish territorial control. Indigenous populations in Spanish America were not external allies operating at arm’s length, as in much of the French case; they were subjects of the Crown, embedded in the demographic, political, and economic core of the empire. Leaving them out is not a neutral omission, it erases the very mechanism by which Spanish rule functioned.

As a result, the map visually overstates English control, roughly captures French influence, and drastically understates Spanish power. It presents colonization as a coastal or frontier phenomenon everywhere, when in reality only some empires operated that way.
This isn’t just a cartographic simplification. It’s a narrative choice that reshapes history by omission.

Never realize the French had so much control of the water ways.

Cool map.

What is the French settlement south of Hamilton, Ontario?

Excellent map, and thank you for sharing! I’m doing an alternate history of France post 1763, and this map will definitely help.

Cool to see Kaskaskia on a map since I’ve been able to trace lineage through there. Along the way, I found some great uncles who crossed the great plains and made their way to Santa Fe 70 years before Lewis and Clark headed west from St. Louis.

Never knew that Kaskaskia (now in Illinois) was a major outpost in French America.