The Global Seven Years War, 1754–1763: Britain and France in a Great Power Contest (review)

This impressive piece of scholarship serves as a fitting capstone to the career of Daniel Baugh, Professor Emeritus at Cornell University. It hearkens to an earlier style of historical writing, exhibiting little of the frills of most contemporary literature on the 18th century – no overarching models such as the Atlantic World or navel gazing on identity – but should not be devalued, for much current writing needs empirical intervention. At once solid and stolid, Baugh’s book focuses on great (white) men in history and, to invoke Clausewitz, war as merely the continuation of policy by other means. It arrives on an ebbing tide of scholarship marking the 250th anniversary of the Seven Years’ War and will draw comparisons with Fred Anderson’s Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York: Random House, 2000). Where that text concentrated on military history within the American sphere, Baugh’s focus is diplomatic and Eurocentric. One could query the need for yet another study of the conflict but its revisionist arguments merit attention.

First, while much has been written on British policy and that of France pertaining to North America, Baugh argues French decision-making as a whole has received less attention. By thoroughly consulting the French sources, he seeks to reconstruct their policy formation, no mean feat given the randomness of Gallic record keeping, then pairs these to British records to develop a fuller picture of wartime diplomacy. To do so he focuses on a number of key statesmen: the powerful but vacillating Duke of Newcastle; William Pitt, his ministerial partner and brilliant but irascible architect of Britain’s war effort; the Earl of Hardwicke, their astute political advisor; the Duc de Choiseul, the cunning leading minister in France from 1758; and Lord Bute, favourite of King George III, whose handling of peace-making robbed Britain of the full fruits of war. Baugh’s concentration on political heavyweights captures the war from the metropole but leads to a narrow reading of the conflict. Diplomacy creates a morass of ulterior motives, and the peacemaking for the Seven Years’ War became a swamp of deceit that Baugh documents minutely. If he had spent less time parsing seemingly every policy shift and more in surveying the global theatre of war, a more rounded account may have resulted. Moreover, while using elite figures as lenses to more clearly focus the distorted past is a tactic as old as history, it results in a loss of peripheral vision. Actors such as soldiers, sailors, indigenous peoples, and slaves appear but only as bit players, hence the social historian’s critique of traditional history still obtains.

Second, Baugh addresses the casus belli by disputing the common argument that Americans hungry for Ohio Valley land dragged Britain into war, instead blaming France. The French, perceiving Britain’s expanding colonies and growing colonial trade as threatening their American possessions, adopted a policy of containment and hardened their claims to the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys as well as the Lake Champlain corridor and Atlantic maritime region. The 1749 expedition under Céloron de Blainville to the Ohio country, where he buried metal plates proclaiming French sovereignty, and the 1752 attack on British traders at Fort Pickawillany resulted. This ‘invasion of the Ohio Valley’ (59) provoked war, not the almost nonexistent flow of British settlers to the region. This interpretation could invite argument from historians of the French empire and Native American scholars alike who hardly characterize the British as blameless.

Third, Baugh addresses the related questions of why it took so long for peace to be secured with France virtually bankrupt in 1759 and all but defeated in 1760, and why war with Spain proved necessary. Pitt’s desire for amassing more territory and securing a punitive peace has been commonly held responsible. Pitt may have dealt with the Bourbons less than...