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1 ClashofEmpires R. Scott Stephenson It would require a greater philosopher and historian than I am to explain the causes of the famous Seven Years’ War in which Europe was engaged; and, indeed, its origin has always appeared to me to be so complicated, and the books written about it so amazingly hard to understand, that I have seldom been much wiser at the end of a chapter than at the beginning, and so shall not trouble my reader with any personal disquisitions concerning the matter. William Makepeace Thackeray, The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq., Written by Himself, 1844 It has been more than a century and a half since Thackeray’s roguish character , the Irish upstart Redmond Barry, reflected on the seemingly impenetrable complexity of the Seven Years’ War. The far-flung clash of arms that spread from North America to Europe, West Africa, Asia, the Caribbean basin, and the seas between would later inspire British statesman and historian Winston Churchill to dub it the first “world war,” but unlike the world wars of 1914–18 and 1939–45, a universally accepted title remains elusive. In India, the fighting is known as the Third Carnatic War, while the campaigns in central Europe are often designated the Third Silesian War. In North America, where hostilities erupted in 1754, two years before formal declarations of war by Britain and France, and major fighting ended three years before the peace treaty of 1763, the conflict is known among Francophone Canadians, whose cultural and political memory of it remains vivid, as La Guerre de la Conquête (War of the Conquest). In the United States, the American campaigns of the Seven Years’ War have come to be known as the French and Indian War (Churchill 1956:148; Bandyopādhyāẏa 2004:49; Snyder and Brown 1968:124; Desbarats and Greer 2007:146). Inspired in part by recent 250th anniversary commemorations, there has been renewed public and scholarly interest in the conflict that historian 10 · R. Scott Stephenson Fred Anderson has called “the most important event to occur in eighteenthcentury North America” (Anderson 2000:xv). Long overshadowed by the American Revolution, the French and Indian War and the global conflict it sparked and that influenced its course and outcome are now widely understood to have altered profoundly the balance of power on both sides of the Atlantic. Creating conditions without which it is difficult to imagine the revolutionary forces that arose to sweep British North America in the 1770s and France in the 1790s, the wide-ranging conflicts of 1754–63 have also drawn the interest of historical archaeologists. The North American campaigns of the Seven Years’ War are traditionally viewed as falling into several distinct phases. From the outbreak of armed conflict in 1754 through the end of 1757, French and allied Indian forces inflicted a series of defeats on their more numerous Anglo-American enemies. William Pitt’s rise to leadership in 1758 marked a shift in British strategy and a stunning reversal in France’s position. Dramatically increasing Britain’s overseas military and naval forces and the nation’s indebtedness , Pitt oversaw a string of successes so remarkable after the dismal failures of recent years that 1759 could with justice be celebrated in Britain and its American colonies as the annus mirabilis (year of miracles). Canada fell to British forces in September 1760, and with the exception of a failed French attempt to seize the British outpost of St. Johns on Newfoundland, major military operations shifted to the Caribbean, Europe, and finally the Philippine archipelago. Another way to view the French and Indian War, one that may serve historical archaeology as well as a purely chronological treatment, is to consider regional variation in the experience of war. The Ohio Valley Even though the roots of the Seven Years’ War are strikingly complex, as Thackeray’s hero mused, there is little debate over the spark that set the world on fire. By the late 1740s, British, French, and Iroquois leaders had become increasingly alarmed at the prospect that some power other than themselves would control the upper Ohio River valley, a region widely recognized to be a strategic key to North America’s Middle West. This three-way rivalry centered on the Forks of the Ohio River (modern-day Pittsburgh) and was complicated by the presence of several thousand Native inhabitants—often referred to collectively as the “Ohio Indians”—who [3.145.191.22] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 15:32...

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