Empires of the Atlantic World by John H. Elliott

Author:John H. Elliott [Elliott, John H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: History, European History, Amazon.com, Usernet, C429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 9780300123999
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2006-01-01T15:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

War and Reform

The Seven Years War (1756-63) and imperial defence

The great international conflict known to the colonists as the French and Indian War, and to Europeans as the Seven Years War, was a struggle for global primacy between Britain and France. In that struggle, in which Bourbon Spain was to be directly involved in its closing stages, the fate of North America would be decided. Not only were the lives and prospects of millions of North Americans - the Iroquois and other Indian peoples, French Canadians, colonial Britons, West Indian planters and their slaves - to be changed for ever by the conflict and its aftermath, but its impact would be felt throughout the hemisphere, even in Spanish territories as far away as Chile and Peru. War, even war at second or third remove, was to be the catalyst of change in British and Spanish America alike.

The conflict on North American soil in fact began in 1754, two years before the formal outbreak of war in Europe, when Governor Robert Dinwiddie of Virginia sent a military expedition under the 21-year-old Lieutenant-Colonel George Washington to the further side of the Allegheny mountains in a bid to challenge the assertion of French sovereignty over the Ohio Valley.' As was to he expected, the expansionist plans of the recently formed Ohio Company of Virginia2 had collided with those of the French to establish a permanent presence for themselves and their Indian allies in the vast area of territory between their settlements in Canada and in the Mississippi Valley, and so to block British expansion into the interior. Washington's crushing defeat at Fort Necessity was followed by the despatch in 1755 by the Duke of Newcastle's ministry of Irish infantry regiments under the command of Major-General Edward Braddock - `two miserable battalions of Irish', as William Pitt described them in a speech to the House of Commons; - to expunge the chain of French forts. His expedition, like that of Washington, ended in disaster at the hands of the Indians and the French.

The Duke of Newcastle hoped to confine the conflict to North America, but the dramatic reversal of great-power alliances in Europe created the conditions and the opportunities for a struggle that was to be global in scale. England declared war on France in May 1756, as French warships sailed up the St Lawrence with troops for the defence of Canada under the command of Montcalm.4 Montcalm's energetic direction of military operations forced the English and colonial forces on to the defensive, and it was only after William Pitt was entrusted by a reluctant George II in 1757 with the effective running of the war that vigour and coherence were injected into the British war effort, and the run of defeats was succeeded by an even more spectacular run of victories.

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