Fred Anderson’s Seven Years’ War in imperial perspective

Abstract

Contributors to this forum have had their territory allocated to them, but it would be utterly churlish not to stray out of it and begin with few general comments on this splendid book. Credits must begin with the publisher. Alfred A. Knopf are making available at airport bookstalls at most reasonable price book with standards of production which the British university presses cannot now match even for specialised scholarly monographs or editions of texts at the astronomical prices that they currently charge. Its typeface and paper are of sumptuous quality; it has robust binding and is embellished by beautiful illustrations and excellent maps finely reproduced. Anderson's literary skills mean that the content matches his publisher's capacity to produce what is most attractive object, likely to appeal to wide audience who will want to read as well as to own the book. He has the laudable aim of trying to be accessible to general readers and to be understood by those specialized prior knowledge (p. xv). He writes with much panache but with exemplary clarity and vigour that carries the reader easily and agreeably through long book. Both specialists and non-specialists will enjoy the sharp delineation of personalities, such as an uncharacteristically acerbic one of Wolfe, who at Quebec stood fair chance of sacrificing twelve superb battalions to no larger purpose than gratifying his desire for heroic death (p. 359), and the narratives of the great setpieces of the war in North America, Washington at Fort Necessity, Braddock on the Monongahela, Amherst at Louisbourg, as well as Wolfe at Quebec. If the book is fine example of military history in its traditional form, the narrative of campaigns and of the fortunes of war, it is also military history with all its modern sophistication, which treats war as an expression of the capacities and values of whole societies, and it is much more than military history even at its most ambitious. As its subtitle proclaims, it is an account of the fate of empire in British North and of the emergence of the United States of America. To encompass this great theme, Anderson extends his coverage beyond the formal end of the war to the repeal of the Stamp Act and the passing of the Declaratory Act in 1766. He believes that events after the end of the Seven Years' War, which are conventionally seen as marking the first stages of the revolution, in fact saw the continuation of great debate about the colonies' role in the empire that had begun with the war. The theme of war and its role in the failure of empire is set out at the very beginning of the book and sustained throughout. Without the Seven Years' War, American independence would surely have been long delayed, and achieved (if at all) without war of national liberation (p. xvi). The essence of the argument is that the war gave rise to fundamentally different interpretations of the nature of the British empire on both sides of the Atlantic. On the American side the war was seen as a providential victory, secured by free men in glorious cause -- that shaped the understanding of the colonists, lifted their expectations of imperial partnership, and embittered their reactions to the seemingly high-handed, intrusive policies that Grenville, Halifax and their colleagues sought to impose after the war (p. 587). These policies were directly attributable to the British interpretation of the experience of the war. Its lessons for them were that there was no relying on (p. 585). Britain had been forced to depend during the war on the willingness of Americans to contribute men and money of their own volition. It was widely believed that they had done so inadequately. The empire must now be made to work through the capacity of sovereign British authority to command compliance rather than again risking the uncertainties of voluntary co-operation. Hence British troops were to be kept in America in peacetime and were to be paid for by colonial contributions levied by parliament. …