The southern frontier was but one of many borders, in India, Africa, the West Indies, and North America, where Englishmen of the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries vied with their rivals, notably the French, for commercial and colonial supremacy. Only at intervals was this a contest of arms. But always there existed the keenest rivalry for the control of the staples of world trade and of the areas where these could be produced. From Hudson Bay to the Caribbean the competition for sugar, tobacco, indigo, fish, and peltries was waged upon the seas and along a far-flung, imperfectly defined, international border. [Note: C. M. Andrews, 'Anglo-French Commercial Rivalry, 1700-1750,' in American Historical Review (hereinafter cited as AHR), XX. 546]