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

By Fred Anderson. With illustrations from the William L. Clements Library. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Pp. [xl], 862. $40.00, ISBN 0-375-40642-5.)

Fred Anderson's magisterial new study of the Seven Years' War begins with the bold assertion that the conflict, known in this hemisphere as the French and Indian War but also fought on three other continents, "was far more significant than the War of American Independence" (p. xvi). Although often treated "as little more than a footnote," from a global perspective the Seven Years' War looms as "[t]he most important event to occur in eighteenth-century North America" (pp. xvi, xv). The British and Anglo American victory wrested control of Canada from the French, inspiring "a desire for revenge that would ... shape European affairs" for decades, and "the scope of Britain's victory enlarged its American domains to a size that would have been difficult for any European metropolis to control" (p. xvi). Anderson argues that "[w]ithout 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 Napoleon, 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" (p. xvi). While some of Anderson's counterfactual claims are extravagant, none are implausible, and all are bolstered by the richly detailed and superbly written chronological narrative that follows.

Throughout, contingency is the favored methodology. To be certain, Anderson does not ignore events such as the colonies' rejection of the 1754 Albany Plan of Union, which "would have been doomed in England" even if provincial legislatures had embraced its provisions (p. 85). But he bravely avers that "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" (p. xviii). Moreover, "a lucky accident" in 1760 provided Brigadier General James Murray with knowledge of French troops advancing on British-held Quebec, allowing him time to muster his men to stall the enemy's progress and then engage in a spirited if hapless field defense (p. 392). The French pushed forward as Murray's force withdrew behind the city's walls, but a decisive 1759 British naval victory at Quiberon Bay, off the coast of France, had already determined control of the water and virtually guaranteed the H.M.S. Vanguard safe passage up the St. Lawrence. Its arrival at Quebec spurred a French retreat and sealed Britain's North American victory. (As one French officer said, "A single ship of the line and the place would have been ours!" [p. 395].) Had the war never happened, British regulars might have never learned to aim at adversaries and take cover in trees, American provincials might have never had the luxury to view English-speaking redcoats as outsiders, and George Washington might have never developed the professional expertise that served him well in subsequent conflicts. At nearly every crucial juncture, Anderson hints at the presence of the past in what would be the future.

Not surprisingly, he extends his coverage beyond 1763 to consider the war's aftermath. While conquered francophones and native American Indians desired Britain to serve as "a powerful patron to protect their communities from the vastly more numerous, aggressive Anglo-Americans" (p. 741), victorious colonists chafed at measures that pushed imperial powers beyond the prewar status quo. Oblivious to their debt-ridden parent country's financial troubles and political fissures, these British Americans resisted new taxes, criticized policy toward Quebec, resented the imposition during peacetime of regular troops, and flaunted seemingly arbitrary limits to their territorial expansion. Ultimately (but not, Anderson insists, inevitably), the victorious imperialists and colonists would come to blows.

This simultaneously accessible and masterful account, which consists of seventy-four short chapters and contains nearly one hundred pages of citations, will make for excellent reading for students taking courses on the American Revolutionary period. But this compliment also suggests a criticism. Anderson aims to portray "the years after 1763 ... as a postwar era" instead of as a prologue to the War for Independence (p. xvii). Readers learn much more about what the Seven Years' War caused, however, than what caused the Seven Years' War. Coverage of the Glorious Revolution, the Great Awakening, provincial population growth, and prewar politics in Britain and its colonies is less concerted than treatment of the Sugar, Stamp, and Quartering Acts.

Caveats aside, Anderson's meticulously researched account supplants previous studies by Francis Parkman and Lawrence Henry Gipson as the work of first resort for all who wish to know more about a crucial world war that not only shaped the course of empire in Europe, Africa, and Asia, but also set the stage for a new imperial regime in America.

ROBERT M. S. MCDONALD
United States Military Academy