The Duke of Newcastle, The Earl of Halifax, and the American Origins of the Seven Years' War

Abstract

On the fourth of July 1754 a garrison of Virginians, under the command of the young George Washington, marched its British colours out of a small log fort in an isolated valley of the Appalachian mountains, where it had capitulated to a French detachment the previous evening. Washington's defeat had an impact upon world history no less significant than did his more famous victories subsequent to a more dramatic removal of British colours, on another fourth of July twenty-two years later. The French expulsion of British colonials from the Ohio valley led to nine years of war in America and quickly escalated into seven years of general war, so wide in its geographical extent that Churchill called it the first world war. At the end of hostilities in 1763 the acquisition from France of Canada and a number of West Indian islands laid the foundations of the nineteenth-century British empire.