Event Details

The Seven Years’ War in Imperial Perspective

The historiography of the Seven Years’ War is curious. No-one doubts its importance – even if we sometimes think of it as the eighteenth century equivalent of World War I with the American or French Revolution as the equivalent of World War II. Nevertheless, unlike World War II, the Seven Years’ War is relatively understudied, and when it is studied is seldom seen as a major event in its own right. This paper gives an overview of current scholarship on the Seven Years’ War, with an emphasis on the war as an imperial conflict, being an outcome of longstanding and unresolved conflicts between Britain and France. It sees the Seven Years’ War less as a dress rehearsal for the American Revolution, as is customary in much early American and Atlantic historiography, than as a culmination of imperial tends that had been developing and maturing for much of the previous half century.