The Seven Years' War
and the Fate of Empire
in British North America,
1754-1766
by Fred
Anderson
n
this engrossing narrative of the great military conflagration of the
mid-eighteenth century, Fred Anderson
transports us into the maelstrom of international rivalries. With the
Seven Years' War, Great Britain decisively
eliminated French power north of the Caribbean--and in the process
destroyed an American diplomatic system in
which Native Americans had long played a central, balancing role--permanently
changing the political and cultural landscape of North America.
Anderson skillfully reveals the clash of inherited
perceptions the war created when it gave thousands of American
colonists their first experience of real Englishmen and introduced them to
the British cultural and class system. We see
colonists who assumed that they were partners in the empire encountering
British officers who regarded them as subordinates
and who treated them accordingly. This laid the groundwork
in shared experience for a common view of the world, of the empire, and of
the men who had once been their masters.
Thus, Anderson shows, the war taught George
Washington and other provincials profound
emotional lessons, as well as giving them practical instruction in how to
be soldiers. Depicting the subsequent
British efforts to reform the empire and American resistance--the riots of
the Stamp Act crisis and the nearly
simultaneous pan-Indian insurrection called Pontiac's Rebellion-- as
postwar developments rather than as an anticipation
of the national independence that no one knew lay ahead
(or even desired), Anderson re-creates the perspectives through which
contemporaries saw events unfold while they
tried to preserve imperial relationships.
Interweaving stories of kings and imperial
officers with those of Indians, traders, and the diverse colonial
peoples, Anderson brings alive a chapter of our history that was shaped as
much by individual choices and actions as by
social, economic, and political forces.
n
this engrossing narrative of the great military conflagration of the
mid-eighteenth century, Fred Anderson
transports us into the maelstrom of international rivalries. With the
Seven Years' War, Great Britain decisively
eliminated French power north of the Caribbean--and in the process
destroyed an American diplomatic system in
which Native Americans had long played a central, balancing role--permanently
changing the political and cultural landscape of North America. 
