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Hostilities between Britain and France began in North America in 1754. British expectations were initially that the French would be contained by the troops of the thirteen colonies. Early reverses for the British-American forces, however, brought about a great increase in the deployment of regular British troops. Ultimately, French Canada was subjugated, and French and Spanish settlements in the West Indies were taken. Throughout the war the British were critical, not always with much justification, of the level of the contributions being made by the American colonies. Attempts to coerce them into providing men and money were not pressed, and Americans ended the war seeing themselves as equal partners in a great war for empire. Misgivings in British official circles remained, however, and led to new policies after the war to strengthen British authority.

This chapter reconstructs debates about foreign affairs and Britain's participation in war during the mid-18th century. It explores the ways in which the country's shifting military and international fortunes were registered in public debate in this period, as well as the ways in which different elements of the political nation responded to these wars. War and rivalry with France became an unfolding drama on to which Britons projected their hopes and anxieties not just about the standing and identity of their nation, but also deeper-lying concerns about the state of society, the political system, overseas trade, popular morals, and religion. The Seven Years War was not just about whether Britain would remain, or fulfil her destiny as, a great power; it was also a war in which fears about the morals and courage of the landed elites pressed hard on contemporary perceptions of the conduct of Britain's military forces; it was a war too in which Scotland particularly, but also Ireland, sought to demonstrate their value and contribution to the cause of Britain and British power overseas.

‘Empire’ in this book is interpreted as the imposition of rule by a state over territory and people overseas. In the mid-eighteenth century, the British state greatly increased its ambitions to make its claims to rule overseas effective. By then the British state was quite a formidable one by contemporary standards. It had a high capacity to raise money by taxes and borrowing to enable it to wage war on land and sea. Its ability to supervise the administration of overseas affairs was less developed. American and West Indian colonies were largely self-governing and British interests in India were in the hands of the chartered East India Company. The stresses of the Seven Years War brought about strong pressures for increasing the role of the state in the management of overseas possessions.

When during the French Revolution the deputies of the National Assembly pondered the reasons for France's decades-long decline as a world power, many attributed it to the Franco-Austrian alliance of 1756, which had allegedly produced the humiliating outcome of the Seven Years' War. This chapter demonstrates how, why, and with what political effects the alliance was represented by its critics from its inception as the work of a powerful pro-Austrian ministerial lobby willing to sacrifice the interests of the nation to those of the dynasty and the Habsburgs. Reinforcing this view was the repeated appointment of incompetent military commanders loyal to the lobby supporting the alliance. At a time of rising national consciousness, the tale of infidelity, defeat, and impotence told by the alliance's many critics helped convince the general public that France was in desperate need of a new, nationally centred foreign policy as part of its general regeneration.

Eighteenth-century armed conflicts have been identified by some historians as one of the ingredients which promoted a popular sense of Britishness. Linda Colley, in particular, has pointed to the ways in which war helped to bring together the various peoples of Britain, subordinating narrower patriotisms, and even papering over the cracks caused by social and political tensions. Britishness seems to have been embraced more readily in the Seven Years War than in the War of the Austrian Succession, suggesting a movement towards the adoption of a new and broader national identity. It would be a mistake, however, to assume from this a simple process of linear progression, reaching its culmination in the great struggles of 1793-1815. There was no relentless upward trajectory, but rather a jagged faltering movement forward.

Warfare dominates much of Scottish and Native American history. The British and the Americans considered tribal peoples to be “natural warriors,” and employed them and treated them as such. This chapter examines the experiences of Highland Scots and American Indians in fighting colonial powers and fighting alongside and against each other, especially in the Seven Years' War and the American Revolution. It shows how Britain, having defeated the Jacobites and tried to dismantle the militarism of Highland society, then encouraged and harnessed that militarism in the service of the Empire. The United States later followed similar policies in recruiting and employing Indian allies.

Jeremy Black focuses on British policy and strategy in the so‐called ‘long’ eighteenth century, beginning with the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and ending with the battle of Waterloo in 1815. Chapter 7 provides a contextual debate on the relationship between policy and strategy, discussing the dynamics between strategy and dynasticism, the complexity of strategic culture, the character of British imperialism, and the concept of power, with the associated challenges of reach and overreach. These factors collectively explain what the author refers to as the limitations to strategic planning. Black next describes the dynamics between strategy and policy in three case studies—the Seven Years War (1756–63), the American War of Independence (1775–83), and the French Revolution (1789–99)—and briefly analyses the Napoleonic Wars. Each conflict exhibited important geopolitical and strategic continuities as well as important political differences, and was shaped by Britain's domestic conditions and priorities.

The accession of Frederick the Great as king of Prussia in 1740 has been regarded as the start of Austro-Prussian dualism and the beginning of the end of the Reich. The years 1740-1763, culminating in the Seven Years War, were dominated by Austria's unsuccessful efforts to regain Silesia, but these conflicts strengthened the Reich. After the short and disastrous rule of the Bavarian emperor Charles VII, the princes turned to the Habsburgs again and elected Maria Theresa's husband as Francis I; he restored equilibrium in the Reich. Joseph II's efforts to reform the Reich and plans to exchange the Austrian Netherlands for Bavaria aroused intense opposition. A league of princes (Fürstenbund) opposed him but Prussia was unable to exploit this. The Reich's central and intermediate institutions (Reichstag, Kreise, law courts) functioned well; this inspired S.J. Pütter to define the Reich as a state ‘composed of other particular states’.

This chapter considers the strength of the British state as a war-waging force, and its working with other groups beyond its complete control. Partnerships of various kinds were forced on, or engaged in willingly, by the British state in order to raise the necessary quantities of human, material, and financial resources for war.

Soldiering—war work—constituted a peculiar form of labor in the 18th-century Anglo-American world. These troops straddled the worlds of free and unfree labor. Army recruits encountered wage work with labor processes in which the army is an employer, its officers are managers, and troops are workers, yet they yielded control of their bodies and lives. Often bound for life, housed, provided for, and subjected to, brutal military discipline, military labor can also be viewed as unfree labor. Martial labor was not slavery, being for many a voluntary occupation, but it comprised a form of servitude. Soldiers occupied a marchland of labor relations due to the unusual nature of “production” in warfare. A soldier's bondage enabled his deployment on the periphery of acceptable human conduct, performing the “black” service of spilling blood in the interests of the state in return for “white” money. Despite much attention to the slave factory, plantation, merchant ship, craft shop, and household, the military garrison has largely been ignored by other than military historians. This chapter examines the British regular army in the Seven Years' War, where soldiers' labor, at once paid and coerced, secured an American empire at a heavy price in human life.

The partnerships explored in this book — between the state and private and local interests; between Whigs and Tories at the height of the Seven Years War; between the different Protestant denominations; between the different nations of Britain and Ireland; between Britain and its North American colonies; and between Britain and its continental allies to check the French in Europe — nearly all weakened, or even broke down completely once the wars ended, and especially once the Seven Years War was over. All of this suggests that the impact of the wars of 1739-63 was of short duration, and so limited. Similar conclusions about the limited impression made by these wars on Britain and Ireland might arise from considering again other areas explored in earlier chapters.

Anglo-French worldwide rivalry extended to India, where both nations traded through their East India companies. This rivalry, which had led to almost continuous warfare since the 1740s, merged into the rivalry of the Indian powers that were emerging as independent successor states from the breakdown of the Mughal Empire. The Europeans formed alliances with Indian princes. These alliances gave the British and French a potentially commanding influence over some of the Indian states. This influence led to total British control over Bengal in the events that followed the overthrow of the local ruler at the battle of Plassey in 1757. In the south, the British were able to defeat the French, but their position was weaker. Even so, by the end of the war the British East India Company had become a major territorial power in India, closely allied to the British state.

This chapter presents a brief and broadly chronological account of military and naval operations. In the interests of manageability, it focuses on the areas of British involvement; however, as campaigns elsewhere were widely reported in the contemporary press, and seem to have excited much interest, reference is also made to the Austro-Prussian struggles in Central Europe that were at the heart of the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War, to the Russian intervention in both conflicts, and to the fighting in Italy in the 1740s, which mainly revolved around the competition between the Austrians and their French and Spanish enemies.

This chapter provides a description on colonial wars and Imperial instability of the British Empire from the late 16th century to the late 17th century. It deals with the use of force overseas. The priorities of the 18th-century British army were at home or in Europe. Colonial wars were at first limited to ones largely waged by colonial forces, British Americans and such Indian allies as they could secure, or the troops of the East India Company. It was after the wars that began in 1793 that the British army and the new Indian army were able effectively to join with the navy in imposing ‘an extra-European Fax Britannica’. The unintended consequences of the Glorious Revolution are shown. The rising importance of colonial theatres of war and an Imperial war and its frustrations are also described. In addition, a discussion on the Seven Years War is given. This War ended with spectacular British gains in India and a total British triumph in North America. Britain’s apparent world-wide supremacy after the Seven Years War had been vulnerable and insecure.

This chapter introduces the themes and argument of this study. It highlights the ways in which disease shaped military policy and the amount of energy, time, and money devoted to troop welfare by officers and imperial administrators. Such war-time responses to disease reveal the role of the state in providing medical care and in promoting and directing medical research; they also illustrate that the state’s deployment of medical expertise and display of medical care were a means of establishing public support and legitimacy. This chapter explains the methodological approach to the study of disease and war, situates this study in the historiography of the Seven Years War, and examines the concept of expertise and its role in state formation. It points to the parallels between the global scope of the Seven Years War and the structure of the book, with each chapter focusing on a different theatre of operations and on a different challenge to troop health.

This introductory chapter briefly sets out the main arguments of the book. It stresses that new attitudes and policies towards all parts of Britain's overseas empire were powerfully stimulated by British and French involvement in the Seven Years War, which began in America in 1754 and ended in Europe in 1763. The war brought great victories for Britain but also an increased sense of insecurity. New policies were formulated in Britain, whose underlying assumptions about empire are examined. Imperial policy was not, however, made in isolation from the pressures of a wider public, who had some capacity to make their views known.

This chapter resumes the relationship between Tristram Shandy and specific poetic intertexts which had vogues of their own during the period of serialization, and which retain an ambient presence in the resulting text. Here the focus is on the intricate relationship between the Toby ‘under-plot’ and the Civil War poetry of Andrew Marvell (specifically Marvell's great poem about gardens and war, Upon Appleton House), which was enjoying a major revival in Whig political circles to which Sterne seems to have gained entry, including those of the republican ideologue Thomas Hollis. This last example also opens up an important sense in which Tristram Shandy engages, albeit with wry obliquness, in urgent topical concerns arising from the Seven Years War. In Sterne's ingenious reworking of Marvell's distinctive topos, literary intertext and political context converge on the vexed debate surrounding (in a formulation Sterne uses in a sermon) the ‘devastation, bloodshed, and expense’ of global war.

The British Empire before the Seven Years War – hence the ‘old’ empire of the chapter's title – was a miscellaneous collection of colonies and settlements loosely attached to Britain. The American and West Indian colonies were largely self-governing through their elected assemblies. British opinion accepted that representative government was appropriate for people of British origin overseas, but insisted that they must obey the authority of the Crown and of the British parliament. The extent of parliamentary power was highly contentious. In Britain few doubted that parliament was the sovereign power over the whole empire. Americans increasingly insisted on limits to that sovereignty and ultimately they were to reject parliamentary authority altogether. Both sides in these disputes invoked British liberty, but they disagreed profoundly on the limits of that liberty.

The Seven Years War brought Britain great gains but also raised acute anxieties, both for the future security of the colonies and about the nature of their connection with Britain. British governments introduced measures by which regular troops were to be kept in America in peacetime, trade regulation was to be more strictly enforced, the expansion of westward settlement was to be restricted, and Americans would pay taxes voted by the British parliament to contribute to the costs of their defence. The British did not intend any fundamental reordering of the colonial relationship, but Americans saw a direct challenge to their liberty. Taxation in particular was resisted. The British withdrew the hated stamp duty, but restated the claims of parliament to sovereignty over America.