Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 - Hardcover

Anderson, Fred

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375406425 ISBN 13: 9780375406423

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000

Synopsis

In 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.

About this title

About the Author

Fred Anderson is Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of A People's Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years' War (1984), as well as many articles, essays, and reviews.

From the Inside Flap

ossing 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 m

Reviews

From 1756 to 1763, the Ohio Valley was the site of a historic contest between the French and the English, both of whom wanted to add this fertile soil to their colonial holdings. In this elegant new account of the Seven Years' War, University of Colorado historian Anderson demonstrates that the conflict was more than just a peripheral squabble that anticipated the American Revolution. Not only did the war decisively alter relations among the French, the English and the Native American allies of the two powers, who for decades had played the English and French off one another to their own advantage, but just as critical, argues Anderson, the war also changed the character of British imperialism, with the mother country trying to reshape the terms of empire and the colonists' place in it. (It was the British victory of 1763, for example, that led the British to post a permanent, peacetime army in America and to support those troops with new taxes.) Indeed, Anderson shows that familiar events of the mid-1760s, like the Stamp Act and Tea Act crises, are better understood as postwar rather than prewar events: they did not "reflect a movement toward revolution so much as an effort to define the imperial relationship." This volume, then, will be of interest not just to Seven Years' War buffs, but also to those interested in the entire Revolutionary era. Anderson's magisterial study--like his earlier book, A People's Army--is essential reading on an often ignored war. 90 illus. and 9 maps.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Characters come brilliantly to life, and events, some awful and unbelievable, are vividly painted in this important and beautifully written history. Anderson (History/Univ. of Colorado) here earns his crown as the preeminent chronicler of what Americans know as the French and Indian War. Author of a previous work on the fighting men of that conflict (A People's Army, 1984), he displays massive erudition, deft command of a sprawling array of sources, familiarity with all the relevant written histories, and, happily, the ability to tell what amounts to an extended series of whopping good tales. Behind all the hundreds of arresting incidents lies his argument this 18th-century world war was not simply a precursor to the American Revolution but a coequal influence with it in creating the American republic. Anderson's way of getting to that claim ought especially to draw readers interested in the supposedly ``dead,'' traditional subjects of imperial politics, institutions, battles, and war. The continent's vast collection of peopleBritish, French, colonists, and natives from all walks of lifeplay their part. Most important, Indians occupy key roles in deciding the fate of the great imperial powers, and thus of the future American nation. George Washington is a principal actor upon the stage. A wonderful dividend is Andersons superbly captioned illustrations, some of them printed here for the first time; in addition, the maps put those in many other histories to shame. It will be a long time before the tale of this great war for empire in the New World needs to be told again. And it's unlikely that it will ever be told so well. A scholarly book artfully written for general readers who seek a rousing, epic yarn and the best sort of history. (90 illus., 9 maps) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The panoramas of the French and Indian War have commonly been considered mere preliminaries to the American Revolution. Anderson advances this consuming corrective that places the conflict, and the world war it ignited, within its own valences of imperial rivalry, colonial politics, parliamentary politics, land speculation and squatting settlers, and Indian diplomacy and resistance. The initiation of the war in 1754 illustrated its tangled causes and course: a Virginia squad with Mingo Indian allies asserting the British claim to the Ohio Valley, led by a land-speculating, soon-to-be famous George Washington, quasi-massacred a French detachment. Branded an assassin by the French, Washington barely escaped from their counterattack and returned the following year to be beaten a second time in Braddock's famous defeat. Each frontier ambush, siege, and occasional set-piece battle of the war is ably narrated, but better yet is Anderson's connection of the fighting to the political-diplomatic centers, be it the House of Commons, colonial assemblies, or the council fire. These in turn were embodied in the various flesh-and-blood actors whom Anderson vividly re-creates, not only the famous, such as Pontiac, William Pitt, or Montcalm, but many a soldier whose role may have been transient but significant. Eminently approachable by the avid American history buff, Anderson's complete, balanced, and fluid opus will doubtlessly be the best word on its subject for some time. Gilbert Taylor

Anderson (history, Univ. of Colorado; A People's Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years' War), who worked on this massive book for ten years, tells a fascinating story of the events and personalities of the Seven Years' War, which he considers the most important military conflict of the 18th century. From the perspective of all of North America and of the world-wide empires of the major European nations, it was far more significant than the American Revolution, he argues. Anderson demonstrates that the events of the 1750s and 1760s need to be viewed on their own terms, not as mere preliminaries to the American Revolution. One of the great strengths of this book is its expert integration of the Iroquois confederation into discussions of North American and European diplomacy. Enriched by a plethora of excellent maps and illustrations, this book combines exhaustive original research with a wonderfully accessible writing style. This terrific book is highly recommended for all university and large public libraries.
-Thomas J. Schaeper, St. Bonaventure Univ., NY
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction: The Seven Years' War and the Disruption of the Old British Empire

Few reveries haunt history professors more insistently than the dream of writing a book accessible to general readers that will also satisfy their fellow historians' scholarly expectations. At least that dream has haunted me, and I must admit that I wrote this book because of it. What follows is a narrative intended to synthesize a sizable range of scholarship, which can (I hope) be read without specialized prior knowledge. Because my understanding of the period before the American Revolution differs from what I take to be the conventional one, however, it seems only fair to begin by sketching the broad outlines of the book's context, intent, design, and argument.


The most important event to occur in eighteenth-century North America, the Seven Years' War (or as the colonists called it, the French and Indian War) figures in most Americans' consciousness of the past as a kind of hazy backdrop to the Revolution. As citizens of a nation created by an act of collective secession from the British empire, we Americans have always tended to take as our point of reference the thirteen rebelling colonies, not the empire as a whole -- or the North American continent. This perspective has generally limited our ability to see the continuities between our pre-Revolutionary past and the rest of our history. Coming to grips with the Seven Years' War as an event that decisively shaped American history, as well as the histories of Europe and the Atlantic world in general, may therefore help us begin to understand the colonial period as something more than a quaint mezzotint prelude to our national history. For indeed, if viewed not from the perspective of Boston or Philadelphia, but from Montréal or Vincennes, St. Augustine or Havana, Paris or Madrid -- or, for that matter, Calcutta or Berlin -- the Seven Years' War was far more significant than the War of American Independence.

Unlike every prior eighteenth-century European conflict, the Seven Years' War ended in the decisive defeat of one belligerent and a dramatic rearrangement of the balance of power, in Europe and North America alike. In destroying the North American empire of France, the war created a desire for revenge that would drive French foreign policy, and thereby shape European affairs, for two decades. At the same time, the scope of Britain's victory enlarged its American domains to a size that would have been difficult for any European metropolis to control, even under the best of circumstances, and the war created circumstances of the least favorable sort for Whitehall. Without the Seven Years' War, American independence would surely have been long delayed, and achieved (if at all) without a war of national liberation. Given such an interruption in the chain of causation, it would be difficult to imagine the French Revolution occurring as it did, when it did -- or, for that matter, the Wars of Napoléon, Latin America's first independence movements, the transcontinental juggernaut that Americans call "westward expansion," and the hegemony of English-derived institutions and the English language north of the Rio Grande. Why, then, have Americans seen the Seven Years' War as little more than a footnote?

In part it has been the intensity of our focus on the Revolution as a seminal event, one that even professional historians have assumed determined both the shape of our national institutions and all the significant outcomes of our national development before the Civil War. With so much riding on it, scholarly discussion of eighteenth-century American history has necessarily been dominated by concern over the fundamental character of the Revolution and perforce its origins. In the mid-1970s, when I was in graduate school, much of what early Americanists debated in one way or another related to the motivations of the Revolutionaries: Were they fundamentally driven by material interests or by ideological concerns? It was a Big Question then and remains a powerful one even now that it has achieved a scholastic -- not to say sterile -- maturity. By the late 1980s, when I undertook this project, the question had generated distinctive lines of interpretation that framed the ways historians explained eighteenth-century America almost as decisively as Vauban's magnificent fortifications framed eighteenth-century military campaigns.

On one hand (the left) ran the works of those scholars, descendants of the Progressive historians, who argued that the class interests of Americans stimulated both a movement for independence and an internal struggle over the forms of government to be imposed in the new United States. For Neo-Progressive scholars, the Revolution was an intensely human process rooted in the experience of social inequity and in a democratic striving against privilege. Concerned as they were with colonial social relations and economic conditions, the Neo-Progressives focused less frequently on the great men of the Revolution than on ordinary people -- farmers, artisans, laborers, women -- and such dispossessed or marginalized groups as blacks, Indians, and the poor. Looking to the opposite side of the field, one could see arrayed the intellectual fortifications of those numerous historians, sometimes called Neo-Whigs, who believed that republican political ideas determined the allegiance and the actions of the Revolutionary generation. Their Revolution, while not bloodless, was most importantly an ideological and ironic one: ideological because it followed from the shared belief that powerful men had always sought, and would always seek, to deprive their fellow citizens of liberty and property; ironic because in the conservative act of defending their liberties and estates, the decidedly elitist gentlemen who articulated the Revolution's ideals also liberated egalitarian impulses that would produce the most democratic, individualist, acquisitive society in the world.

Even in the late 1980s, of course, this military metaphor could hardly be said to depict with literal accuracy the range of scholarly opinion on the late colonial period and its relation to the Revolution. In fact, the positions of scholars fell along a spectrum that ranged from extreme materialism on one hand to an equally extreme idealism on the other. Few subscribed absolutely to a single kind of explanation, although most -- if pressed hard enough -- would have preferred one end of the spectrum over the other. No matter what their interpretative preferences, however, what most historians assumed without disagreement was a common starting point. And that was the problem I had in mind when I began this study.

Virtually all modern accounts of the Revolution begin in 1763 with the Peace of Paris, the great treaty that concluded the Seven Years' War. Opening the story there, however, makes the imperial events and conflicts that followed the war -- the controversy over the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act crisis -- into precursors of the Revolution. No matter how strenuous their other disagreements, most modern historians have looked at the years after 1763 not as contemporary Americans and Britons saw them -- as a postwar era vexed by unanticipated problems in relations between colonies and metropolis -- but as what we in retrospect know those years to have been, a pre-Revolutionary period. By sneaking glances, in effect, at what was coming next, historians robbed their accounts of contingency and suggested, less by design than inadvertence, that the independence and nationhood of the United States were somehow inevitable. With the assumption of inevitability came the desire to fix the original character of the Revolutionary controversies in radical or conservative impulses.

The more I thought about this problem, the more I became convinced that an alternative understanding might flow simply from beginning the story a decade earlier. Examining the period from a perspective fixed not in 1763 but in 1754 would necessarily give its events a different look and perhaps permit us to understand them without constant reference to the Revolution that no one knew lay ahead, and that no one wanted. To start in 1754 would be to begin in a world dominated by wars between the northern British colonies and New France: conflicts that had been frequent, costly, indecisive, and so central to the thinking of contemporaries that the colonists were all but incapable of imagining themselves apart from the empires to which they belonged. Such a story would begin when the greatest unity the British colonists knew came not from the relations of one colony with another, but from their common connection with what they thought of as the freest, most enlightened empire in history -- and from the enemies they also shared, the papist French and their Indian allies.

Given these assumptions, and the requirements that they imposed on any narrative that would follow from them, other historical factors and agents would take on greater significance. To begin the story in the 1750s would require the inclusion of many more actors, for Indians would be anything but the incidental players they seem in accounts that look ahead to the Revolution. The Seven Years' War could not have begun unless a single desperate Iroquois chief had tried to keep the French from seizing control of the Ohio Valley; nor could the war have reached the conclusion it did, and created the consequences it did, without the participation of native peoples. This in turn cast subsequent events in a different light, suggesting that an equally interesting way to understand the last half of the eighteenth century was in imperial as well as Revolutionary terms. Perhaps we would be able to understand the founding of the United States differently, I thought, if we explained it not only in terms of political conflict within the Anglo-American community or the working out of Revolutionary ideals, but as a consequence of the forty-year-long effort to subject the Ohio Country, and with it the rest of the Transappalachian west, to imperial co...

Edition details

• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375406425
• ISBN 13: 9780375406423
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 912