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This chapter explores the complications arising to Halifax’s administrators due to the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War. It examines the creation of the role of commander-in-chief, and considers the first three appointments (Edward Braddock, William Shirley, and Lord Loudoun), examining their respective challenges as well as those between Halifax’s board in London and the rival Southern Department. The chapter offers a brief overview of the shifting political landscape in Britain, and the growth in support and influence of a rival political interest to Newcastle’s ministry, led by the duke of Cumberland. It concludes by exploring the relationship between Loudoun, Governor Shirley, and Halifax’s client Thomas Pownall, and the interpersonal conflicts challenging Halifax’s interest.

This chapter looks at colonial attitudes to British foreign policy during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–8), the brief peace of 1748–57, and the Seven Years War (1757–63). It touches on themes including the balance of power, the Hanoverian connection, the Austrian, Prussian, and Dutch alliances, the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756, and the Treaties of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) and Paris (1763). It follows how colonists understood struggles with France and Spain in the Americas within these larger conflicts, from the capture of Louisbourg by the Massachusetts militia in 1745 to events in the Ohio Valley in the mid-1750s, and came to view the colonies as part of the European geopolitics system. And it explores how colonial and metropolitan sentiments about European warfare began to diverge during these conflicts.

Symbolic representation is a relatively under-studied concept amongst feminist political scientists. Most existing research on women's symbolic representation in politics has tended to adopt a more wide-ranging approach to analyse the media's representation of women and the impact of women politicians as role models. This chapter illustrates various examples where, in common with both Labour and Conservative women MPs, Liberal Democrat women MPs have been subjected to trivialisation and objectification by the media. It also explores instances of representation where the descriptive and symbolic meet and questions whether the low number of women MPs impacts upon identification of role models. Prior to the 2010 election the Liberal Democrats had the youngest MPs in England, Scotland, and Wales, all of whom are women: this resulted in mixed press coverage. The women MPs had varying attitudes towards the media, some found it hurtful, whilst others identified it as a ‘necessary evil’. The intersection between women's symbolic and descriptive representation peaked during the infamous 2001 debate on the all-women shortlists. The most commonly identified role model was Baroness Shirley Williams.

From the end of Father Rale’s War in 1727 to the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, Wabanaki political interests fractured along generational and regional lines as sagamores in Massachusetts and Acadia struggled to navigate increasingly disparate geopolitical contexts. To perpetuate the gains secured in Father Rale’s War and enshrined in Dummer’s Treaty, Penobscot leaders embarked on a course of nonviolent diplomacy with the English in the late 1720s and 1730s. Warriors and hunters found themselves caught between an ocean declared off limits by their own leaders and an interior stripped of its resources by a nonsustainable fur trade. By retiring the old way of the sea for a future of imagined prosperity ashore, headmen ultimately jeopardized the economic viability and social cohesion of Wabanakia. Hastening the collapse of their Native dominion was the collapse of their French ally’s North American empire in the Seven Years’ War.

This chapter explores the broader underlying tensions between Britain and France over the unsettled control of America before the Seven Years’ War. The chapter explores the influence upon the British government of the board’s governors, in particular Dinwiddie and Shirley. The chapter examines the negative effect upon the Southern Department of the appointment of Sir Thomas Robinson, and his susceptibility to the testimony of these prominent governors, whose vested interests in turn affected government policy. The chapter then explores the ramifications of the subsequent collapse of the Covenant Chain between Britain and its Iroquois allies, demonstrating that the cumulative effect of these disparate factors was to offer the misleading sense of a military escalation. The chapter concludes in examining the role Halifax played in stoking these tensions for his own interest.

Benjamin Franklin was America’s first Atlantic world intellectual. Inquisitive, energetic, and competitive, he learned about and was proud of his British family and intellectual heritage, British political history, and British culture. From the time of his youth, Franklin embraced a set of values that he attempted, across his long life, to speak about, refine, and implement. Franklin originally conceived of himself a loyal Briton, but beginning in the 1750s, he began to see the futility of gaining a fair hearing and representation for Americans in Parliament. From the 1750s onward, Franklin began to conclude that the colonies could do without the complicated system of British politics and political intrigue, without a system of taxation depriving Americans of their rights of representation, not to mention their productivity and commerce, and without the demeaning and begrudging subjection so frequently thrust their way. If any American could have gained the colonies a fair hearing, Franklin was the man to do so. That he did not succeed in gaining the attention of Britons in England only confirmed what he had known for many years: British Americans could make it without Britain.