Seven Years' War

12 Key excerpts on "Seven Years' War"

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  Handbook of First Generation Warfare

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • University Publications

    (Publisher)

  The fighting in North America is known in the United States as the French and Indian War and in Quebec as the War of Conquest. War in Europe began in 1756 with the French siege of British Minorca in the Mediterranean Sea, and Frederick the Great of Prussia's invasion of Saxony on the continent which also upset the firmly established Pragmatic Sanction put in place by Charles VI of Austria. Despite being the main theatre of war, the European conflict resulted in a bloody stalemate which did little to change the pre-war status quo, while its consequences in Asia and the Americas were wider ranging and longer lasting. Concessions made in the 1763 Treaty of Paris ended France's position as a major colonial power in the Americas (where it lost all claim to land in North America east of the Mississippi River along with what is now Canada, in addition to some West Indian islands). Prussia confirmed its position in the ranks of the great European powers, retaining the formerly Austrian province of Silesia. Great Britain strengthened its territories in India and North America, confirming its status as the dominant colonial power. Poland remained neutral throughout the war, despite the fact that it was tied in a personal union with Saxony and the fate of Silesia was important to both. This signifies the demise of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a political power. Nomenclature In Canada, France, and the United Kingdom, the name Seven Years' War is used to describe the North American conflict as well as the European and Asian conflicts, as the name Nine Years' War was already taken. This conflict lasted seven years from 1756 to 1763. In the United States, however, the North American portion of the war, which started in 1754, is popularly known as the French and Indian War.

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  Britain and the Seventy Years War, 1744-1815

  Enlightenment, Revolution and Empire

  • Anthony Page(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  7 The years following the end of the Seven Years War (1756 – 1763) saw ongoing rivalry in the Caribbean, India and exploration of the Pacific. Rebellion in Britain’s 13 North American Colonies provided France with an opportunity for Chapter 1: The Seventy Years War THE SEVENTY YEARS WAR 13 revenge by providing military assistance to the insurgents. The War of American Independence (1775 – 83) transformed into another round of open war between France and Britain, with significant consequences for both states. The 1780s proved a decade of tension in which Britain and France backed opposing sides in the Dutch Revolt. In 1789, revolu-tion ended absolute monarchy in France, and the republican regime declared war on Britain in early 1793. There followed more than two decades of intense warfare that ended with defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. From 1744 to 1815 Britain was officially at war with France in 42 of 71 years. If we include the years from 1749 – 55, when Britain and France were clashing in India and North America, then it was 49 years, or nearly 70% of the period. In addition there were moments of mobilisation such as the gunboat diplomacy over the Bahamas and Gambia 1764 – 65, the near-war over the Falkland Islands in 1771 and the Dutch Revolt in 1787. And before France entered the American conflict in 1778, it encouraged the Patriots in their War of Independence. Talk of a Second Hundred Years War obscures the intensity of the Seventy Years War. 8 Eighteenth-century British foreign policy was characterised by a persistent tension between European and colonial aims. The virtues of a ‘blue-water’ maritime policy were relentlessly championed by parliamentary oppositions and the public. Britain should stay out of European conflicts, it was argued, and rest secure behind the wooden walls of a powerful Royal Navy.

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  Handbook of Proxy Warfare

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • University Publications

    (Publisher)

  Pitt significantly increased British military resources in the ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ colonies, and between 1758 and 1760 the British military successfully penetrated the heartland of New France, with Montreal finally falling in September 1760. The outcome was one of the most significant developments in a century of Anglo-French conflict. France ceded French Louisiana west of the Mississippi River to its ally Spain in compensation for Spain's loss to Britain of Florida. France's colonial presence north of the Caribbean was reduced to the islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, confirming Britain's position as the dominant colonial power in the eastern half of North America. Origin of the name The conflict is known by several names. In British America, wars were often named after the sitting British monarch, such as King William's War or Queen Anne's War. Because there had already been a King George's War in the 1740s, British colonists named the second war in King George's reign after their opponents, and thus it became known as the French and Indian War . This traditional name remains standard in the United States, although it obscures the fact that American Indians fought on both sides of the conflict. American historians generally use the traditional name or the European title (the Seven Years' War). Other, less frequently used names for the war include the Fourth Intercolonial War and the Great War for the Empire . Map showing forts at the start of the war. ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ In Europe, the North American theatre of the Seven Years' War usually has no special name, and so the entire worldwide conflict is known as the Seven Years' War . The Seven Years refers to events in Europe, from the official declaration of war in 1756 to the signing of the peace treaty in 1763.

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  Early Modern Military History, 1450-1815

  • G. Mortimer(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  162 Early Modern Military History, 1450–1815 While these interpretations have much to commend them, the Seven Years War should best be viewed not as the end of a historical period or as the pre- lude to another more important event. Rather the war is best seen as the first part of a prolonged armed struggle for control of eastern North American. The Seven Years War did not end this struggle. On the contrary it marked the beginning of a particularly violent and intense phase of the conflict which had been waged intermittently since the seventeenth century. In the six decades between 1754 and 1815 eastern North America was the scene of inces- sant armed conflict. This conflict involved all of the major players who had participated in the Seven Years War – the British, the French, the Spanish, the Native Americans and the provincials, both Canadian and American. At issue was control over the continent and its resources. The apparent defeat of France in 1763 did not mark a definitive peace but rather a brief truce. The American War of Independence The third type of armed colonial conflict during the early modern period was the war of independence. Probably the most famous such conflict was the American War of Independence (1775–83). Historians have suggested that the war represents a departure from past practice. According to this view the American War of Independence was one of the first of what came to be known in the twentieth century as colonial wars of liberation. It was a conflict in which the combatants (at least in its North American aspects) were motivated by ideol- ogy and a desire for national self-determination. In this respect the American Revolutionary War anticipated the experiences of the wars of the French Revolution.

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  The Emergence of the Eastern Powers, 1756–1775

  • H. M. Scott(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The fighting’s second  1 This chapter is concerned primarily with the war’s impact on the relations of the major states, not with its battles and campaigns. There is no completely satisfactory modern study of the conflict. The best remains the incomplete masterpiece of R. Waddington, La guerre de Sept Ans: histoire diplomatique et militaire ( vols., Paris, –); the only comprehensive survey is the even older A. Schaefer, Geschichte des Siebenjährigen Krieges ( vols., Berlin, ). The best short account is W.L. Dorn, Competition for Empire – (New York, ), pp. –; while the central years of the Anglo- French War have been persuasively re-examined by R. Middleton, The Bells of Victory: The Pitt- Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years War (–) (Cambridge, ). 2 See, e.g., the emphatic verdict of the Danish foreign minister, J.H.E. von Bernstorff, in January : Bernstorffsche Papiere, . . Two years earlier, he had painted an admiring view of French power in the instructions given to Denmark’s new representative in Paris, Count E. Wedel-Frijs,  Jan. , Bernstorff Corr., . –, esp. p. . legacy was less direct, though scarcely less important, and lay in the financial and material exhaustion of all the belligerents at the end of a prolonged, intensive and extremely destructive struggle. It was to give a notably cautious and subdued tone to diplomacy after , when domestic reconstruction was everywhere a priority. 3 The Seven Years War had two distinct, if not totally separate, dimensions. Britain, France and, latterly, Spain fought for colonies and commerce, while simul- taneously Prussia was engaged in a desperate struggle for survival against a coali- tion which encircled her. The first of these was primarily maritime and colonial in nature, with Anglo-French fighting on the high seas and in North America, the West Indies, the Indian sub-continent and West Africa.

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  How the Army Made Britain a Global Power

  1688–1815

  • Jeremy Black(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Casemate Academic

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 4

  The Seven Years’ War, 1754–63

  The military force maintained by the Crown on the continent of North America, consists of seven independent companies, usually stationed in South Carolina, Virginia and New York, and each company, when complete, consists of one hundred men, but, as neither the officers or private men have ever seen any service and the companies are generally at a great distance upon separate duty, they can not be thought as they are now employed to be of any general service.

  CHARLES TOWNSHEND MP. 1

  The French lined the bushes in their front with one thousand five hundred Indians and Canadians where they also placed their best marksmen, who kept up a very galling, though irregular, fire upon the whole British line, who bore it with the greatest patience and good order, reserving their fire for the main body of the French, now advancing … The general exhorted his troops to reserve their fire, and at forty yards distance they gave it, which took place in its full extent, and made terrible havoc amongst the French. It was supported with as much vivacity as it was begun and the enemy everywhere yielded to it.

  RICHARD HUMPHRYS, 28TH FOOT, BATTLE OUTSIDE QUÉBEC, 1759. 2

  Crisis

  The threat was very much felt in Britain, prior to the large-scale French invasion preparations in 1759. Crisis and alarm were seen in December 1757, with an express from Bridport, a coastal port, bringing the news to nearby Dorchester that French troops had landed there and were marching inland. In fact, a French privateer had driven a British coaster ashore and had sent some of its hands to pillage the ship. Similarly, in April 1755, Dublin ‘was alarmed’ by (false) reports that the French had invaded western Ireland.3

  Conventionally dated to 1756 when Britain’s ally Frederick II ‘the Great’ of Prussia invaded Saxony and the French successfully attacked the British base at Minorca, the Seven Years’ War is like World War Two in that its beginning can be differently dated. Just as the latter began to a degree in 1937, with the outbreak of full-scale war between China and Japan, so the earlier conflict really began in 1754 with fighting in the Ohio Valley, fighting that led in 1755 to unsuccessful British attacks on French bases in North America. Indeed, in a repetition of Britain’s delayed entry into the War of the Austrian Succession, in 1742–3 it was not until 1758 that the British Army made a significant intervention in European power-politics, and the forces sent to Germany that year did not begin fighting the French until 1759.

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  European and Native American Warfare 1675-1815

  • Armstrong Starkey(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter FiveIndians and the wars for empire, 1689–1763

  Imperial wars

  We now turn from a two-year period of war in New England involving settlers and natives to the protracted imperial struggle for the control of North America. Conflict between France and Britain now determined issues of peace and war in northeastern North America. King William’s War (1689–97), Queen Anne’s War (1702–13), King George’s War (1744–8) and the Seven Years War (1756–63) had their roots in Europe rather than America. Peaceful relations between frontier neighbours could be ruptured arbitrarily as the result of diplomatic breakdowns between London and Paris. Years of warfare might also end abruptly with peace treaties restoring the status quo ante bellum without regard for the sacrifices and interests of North American combatants. A prolonged period of peace and co-operation between Britain and France between 1713 and 1740 also meant diminished conflict on the frontier. From the European perspective, North American conflict was initially a sideshow, but by the Seven Years War, European armies and fleets would intervene on a large scale, transforming the nature of warfare and achieving decisive results.

  Nevertheless, European-Indian conflict in North America was also governed by motives independent of the policies of European cabinets. Expanding English settler populations pressed on Indian lands, reaching the Ohio River by 1760. Indians sometimes resisted this expansion by diplomatic means, invoking the protection of imperial powers, or retreated to more remote and secure regions. But they were also prepared to use force to protect their autonomy, security and rights to the land. Indian motives for war were no different from those voiced at the time of King Philip’s War. Now, however, Indian tribes could look to one or the other of the European powers as allies in their wars of resistance. Indians participated in the imperial wars of the era for motives of their own. Although they were a powerful military asset, Indian allies were reliable friends only as long as their allies recognized their interests. Thus, when the Iroquois found that an English alliance did not protect them from disastrous defeats at the hands of the French, they concluded a peace with the French in 1701 and pursued a policy of neutrality in the imperial wars until the Seven Years War. Indians also made war in times of imperial peace. The western Abenaki chief Grey Lock carried out a successful guerrilla war in 1723–7 which barred much of Vermont from settlement. He does not appear to have had any regard for imperial interests, but fought to protect his people’s independence.1

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  European Warfare in a Global Context, 1660-1815

  • Jeremy Black(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  7 WARFARE, 1756–74

  The late 1750s brought to a close the long-standing series of conflicts between China and the Zunghars of Xinjiang. Victory underlined China’s position as the leading land power, but this was a war waged entirely on land and only in East Asia. The contrast with the range and variety of the Anglo-French struggle was striking. Indeed, the naval strength and transoceanic advances of the British at the expense both of the French in North America in 1758–60 and of the French and native powers in India in 1750–65, ensured that Britain became the strongest global power, and underlined the extent to which the Seven Years’ War was a world war, an important contribution to the global context of military developments.

  Within Europe, there were no struggles that were as striking in their consequences, but that does not mean that it is pertinent to appropriate the warfare of the period as indecisive, and that is the case whether the wars are considered in themselves or as an indicator of a more general situation. The reiterated claim about the indecisive character of pre-French Revolutionary warfare is questionable. Aside from individual battles or campaigns, the diplomacy of the period, a vital source for contemporary assumptions about military capability, provides, with its bold plans for alliances and partitions, little sense of military indecisiveness.

  The Seven Years’War in Europe, 1756–63

  Yet, such an argument has been made, not only more generally for ancien régime warfare, but also, more specifically, for the mid-century. The latter has been linked to developments in weaponry, particularly the spread of artillery. It has been claimed that, during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), the impact of cannon and howitzers turned the artillery into the ‘dominating force on the battlefield,’ and that this was used to deter attack, making war more indecisive: ‘the respect induced by the improved efficiency of artillery fire was to keep the enemy in check . . . Trapped . . . armies were facing each other, until one or other ran out of supplies.’1

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  The Wars of Louis XIV 1667-1714

  • John A. Lynn(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  nouveaux convertis. His 1686 campaign against the Protestant Vaudois ranks as the most rapacious and reprehensible of his reign. During the Nine Years War, one of his greatest anxieties was that the Allies would descend on his coast with troops and arms to support the erstwhile Protestant community. And while he worried that the Allies would play the religious card by fomenting a Huguenot rising against him, he tried to use Catholic sympathies in Ireland against William III.

  Table 8.1 France at war, 1495–1815

  a

  Period	Total years	War years	Interstate war years	Internal war years
  1495–1559	65	50 (76.9%)	48 (73.8%)	3 (4.6%)
  1560–1610	51	33 (64.7%)	17 (33.3%)	28 (54.9%)
  1611–60	50	41 (82.0%)	30 (60.0%)	21 (42.0%)
  1661–1715	55	36 (65.5%)	36 (65.5%)	6 (10.9%)
  1716–88	73	31 (42.5%)	31 (42.5%)	0 (0%)
  1789–1815	27	23 (85.2%)	23 (85.2%)	4 (14.8%)

  a In this table, if a war consumed any part of a given year, it is counted as a war year; thus, the Nine Years War, 1688–97, is calculated here as involving ten years.

  French wars changed in intensity, to be sure, but not in some simple sense of moving from ‘total war’ to ‘controlled war’. In order to judge the transformation in warfare during the reign of the Sun King, the periods that preceded and followed it need to be included in the picture; this means considering certain parameters of war from 1495 to 1815, an era that can be subdivided into six different periods of conflict from the French perspective. Parameters deserving of note include the number of years in which wars took place, the extent to which France had to fight its interstate wars on its own territory, and the degree of internal or civil conflict that afflicted the state.

  Table 8.1 presents the six periods of warfare, 1495–1815, and the percentages of war years and the percentage of internal or civil war years in each. A cursory examination suggests that, measured by the number of calendar years in which interstate war occurred, the period of Louis's personal reign, 1661–1715, had more in common with the eras that preceded it than it did with the remaining years of the ancien régime

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  The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783

  • A. T. Mahan(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Dover Publications

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER VIII.

  SEVEN YEARS’ WAR, 1156–1163. — ENGLAND’S OVERWHELMING POWER AND CONQUESTS ON THE SEAS, IN NORTH AMERICA, EUROPE, AND EAST AND WEST INDIES. — SEA BATTLES : BYNG OFF MINORCA ; HAWKE AND CONFLANS ; POCOCK AND D’ ACHÉ IN EAST INDIES.

  T HE urgency with which peace was desired by the principal parties to the War of the Austrian Succession may perhaps be inferred from the neglect to settle definitely and conclusively many of the questions outstanding between them, and notably the very disputes about which the war between England and Spain began. It seems as though the powers feared to treat thoroughly matters that contained the germs of future quarrels, lest the discussion should prolong the war that then existed. England made peace because the fall of Holland was otherwise inevitable, not because she had enforced, or surrendered, her claims of 1739 against Spain. The right of uninterrupted navigation in West Indian seas, free from any search, was left undetermined, as were other kindred matters. Not only so, but the boundaries between the English and French colonies in the valley of the Ohio, toward Canada, and on the land side of the Nova Scotian peninsula, remained as vague as they had before been. It was plain that peace could not last; and by it, if she had saved Holland, England surrendered the control of the sea which she had won. The true character of the strife, shrouded for a moment by the continental war, was revealed by the so-called peace; though formally allayed, the contention continued in every part of the world.

  In India, Dupleix, no longer able to attack the English openly, sought to undermine their power by the line of policy already described. Mingling adroitly in the quarrels of surrounding princes, and advancing his own power while so doing, he attained by rapid steps to the political control, in 1751, of the southern extremity of India, — a country nearly as large as France. Given the title of Nabob, he now had a place among the princes of the land. “ A merely commercial policy was in his eyes a delusion ; there could be no middle course between conquest and abandonment.” In the course of the same year further grants extended the French power through extensive regions to the north and east, embracing all the coast of Orissa, and made Dupleix ruler of a third of India. To celebrate his triumphs, perhaps also in accordance with his policy of impressing the native mind, he now founded a town and put up a pillar setting forth his successes. But his doings caused the directors of the company only disquietude; instead of the reinforcements he asked for they sent him exhortations to peace; and at about this time Robert Clive, then but twenty-six years old, began to show his genius. The success of Dupleix and his allies became checkered with reverses; the English under Clive’s leadership supported the native opponents of the French. The company at home was but little interested in his political schemes, and was annoyed at the failure of dividends. Negotiations were opened at London for a settlement of difficulties, and Dupleix was summoned home ; the English government, it is said, making his recall an absolute condition of continued peace. Two days after his departure, in 1754, his successor signed a treaty with the English governor, wholly abandoning his policy, stipulating that neither company should interfere in the internal politics of India, and that all possessions acquired during the war in the Carnatic should be given back to the Mogul. What France thus surrendered was in extent and population an empire, and the mortification of French historians has branded the concession as ignominious ; but how could the country have been held, with the English navy cutting off the eagerly desired reinforcements ?

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  Decades of Reconstruction

  Postwar Societies, State-Building, and International Relations from the Seven Years' War to the Cold War

  • Ute Planert, James Retallack(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  conclusion European historians often identify 1763 as a decisive year in North American and global history. This interpretation can be problematized, however, by examining the situation of the Native Americans in the Ohio Valley and the area south of the Great Lakes. Here, there was neither a clear starting date nor an end point of the war that could serve as an all- embracing, clear-cut break separating wartime from postwar reconstruc- tion. Warfare ended at different times in different areas. There were peace negotiations and agreements on postwar reconstructions in different loca- tions throughout the 1750s and early 1760s. The end date of the war was subject to political interpretation and, alongside the various peace settle- ments, warfare was continued until 1765 by those Native Americans who did not recognize the Treaty of Paris in 1763. As a consequence of such chronological heterogeneity, there was no complete and irreversible breakdown of race relations on a larger scale in 1763. Different percep- tions and stereotypes prevailed on both the Native American and the British sides. In some forms of Native American historicity, the war was not even treated as a coherent event. The battles and campaigns dissolved into cycles of violence that Native Americans had been exposed to since the beginning of British colonial rule in North America. Taking these perspectives into account, 1763 can no longer be regarded as a turning point that introduced a new “global” era in British imperial- ism. This conclusion leads to the more general question about the role that 1763 in Native American Country 83 indigenous peoples should play in global constellations, such as the post- war order British politicians formulated in 1763.

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  The Causes of War

  Volume IV: 1650 - 1800

  • Alexander Gillespie(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Hart Publishing

    (Publisher)

  (McFarland, North Carolina). 86; Charters, E (2009). ‘Disease, Warfare and Imperial Relations’. War in History . 16(1): 1–24. 73 Brumwell, S (2006). Paths of Glory . (Continuum, London). 249–90; Fowler, W (2005). Empires at War� (Walker, NYC). 186–93, 199–200, 213–14; Lenman, B (2001). Britain’s Colonial Wars, 1688–1783 . (Pearson, London) 151–54; Stacey, C (1966). ‘Quebec, 1759’. The Canadian Historical Review . 47(4): 344–55. 74 Clodfelter, M (2017). Warfare and Armed Conflict: A Statistical Encyclopedia . (McFarland, North Carolina). 86; McGarry, S (2013). Irish Brigades Abroad . (History Press, Dublin).139–41. (after nearly losing the profitable Martinique and St Dominique in January) as a British naval force of 5,000 men, albeit ravaged by disease (which killed about one-fifth of them), prowled the region, looking for targets in the Caribbean. The French also received news of another defeat in India as the British achieved victory at Masulipatam in late January 1759, where 350 Brits and 6,900 associated sepoys, saw off 600 French and 2,000 of their sepoys, inflicting large losses of about 1,500 on them. The Brits also had success in their naval battle at Pondicherry, where nine British battleships trumped 11 French ones, with the latter suffering 1,500 casualties. 72 The French also continued to receive bad news from North America. Fort Niagara fell at the end of July, after the 500 French defenders were overwhelmed by 4,000 British, American militia and their Iroquois allies. Louis XV then lost his prize North American jewel, Quebec. This began in the middle of 1759, when the British estab-lished positions on the Ile d’Orleans, across the St Lawrence River, allowing them to besiege Quebec. After the first attack at the end of July (and the British suffered just over 200 dead and an equal number wounded) the British turned to scorched earth tactics on the surrounding French population.

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