The British public was only ever interested in maps of the colonies when there was a war going on. As the colonial rebellion took off, London map publishers quickly reprinted maps that had originally been issued during the French and Indian War (known as the Seven Years’ War in North America). These included John Green’s large map of New England, first published in 1755. William Faden gathered a number of these reprinted works in his North American Atlas of 1777, which he introduced with a new and rather hurriedly made map of all the British colonies.
The map’s ornate title design depicted the role of the colonies within the British Atlantic as a source of agricultural goods: a Caribbean sugar plantation on top of the mountain; at right, a New England/Maritimes fishing net hung up to dry; to the left, enslaved men load barrels of tobacco, bales of cotton, and other goods onto a tender to be ferried to sailing vessels anchored offshore. The map itself shows a core contradiction in the colonial system: the colonies appear without western boundaries, open to expansion, yet the British government had prohibited the colonists from encroaching further west onto Native American territories, plainly mapped here. Faden retitled the map in 1783, with extensive changes to the interior and a new title: The United States of North America, as one of many regional maps published to mark and to celebrate the creation of a new country.