The Global Seven Years War 1754–1763

Britain and France in a Great Power Contest

Daniel Baugh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000397345
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

In this new edition of The Global Seven Years War, Daniel Baugh emphasizes the ways that sea power hindered French military preparations while also furnishing strategic opportunities. Special attention is paid to undertakings – always French – that failed to receive needed financial support.

From analysis of original sources, the volume provides stronger evidence for the role and wishes of Louis XV in determining the main outline of strategy. By 1758, the French government experienced significant money shortage, and emphasis has been placed on the most important consequences: how this impacted war-making and why it was so worrying, debilitating and difficult to solve. This edition explains why the Battle of Rossbach in 1757 was a turning point in the Anglo-French War, suggesting that Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick's winter campaign revitalized the British war effort which was, before that time, a record of failures. With comprehensive discussion of events outside of Europe, the volume sets the conflict on a world stage.

One of the world's leading naval historians, Baugh offers a detailed, evaluative and insightful narrative that makes this edition essential reading for students and scholars interested in military history, naval history, Anglo-French relations and the history of eighteenth-century Europe.

1 Introduction

The Seven Years War has been called ‘the Great War for the Empire’.¹ It certainly was that, but the war for empire was part of a great-power contest between Britain and France. By the middle of the eighteenth century these great rivals, the two most advanced monarchies of Europe, had developed overseas interests and acquired possessions of significant commercial and strategic value. This fact made the Seven Years War a maritime and global contest as well as a European one. Sir Winston Churchill’s chapter on the war in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples bears the title, ‘The First World War’, which is an accurate name for it.² By the end, Britain held positions in North America and India that would have an enormous impact on modern world history, so looking back upon it the war is understandably seen as a contest for empire. But the ultimate object of statesmen in London and at Versailles was to maintain or increase security, power and influence in Europe.

1By Prof. Lawrence Henry Gipson; this is the title he gave to volumes 6, 7, and 8 of his fifteen-volume history of The British Empire Before the American Revolution.

2Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.

Any war’s history, but especially that of a great-power confrontation, ought to be viewed from both sides. Although the French army and navy relied extensively on supplies provided by private contractors (whose records have rarely survived), letters of various military, naval and administrative officers that may be seen in French archives often reveal the challenges and difficulties. But for revealing how high-level decisions were made – persons responsible and reasons why – the surviving letters in British archives are plentiful, while those in French archives are scarce. For the court of Louis XV we are limited to scattered surviving letters, some interesting memoirs (published decades later in most cases), and informative letters dispatched to envoys abroad. Considering that the king of France ruled over one of the most advanced and sophisticated societies of Europe, the degree of obscurity with regard to high-level decision-making is remarkable – in fact, quite unusual when compared with the practices of most other courts of Europe. The main cause of this scarcity is deliberate suppression at the time, not accidental archival destruction later.

War was formally declared in spring 1756, but British and French troops clashed in North America during 1755, and the British seized French ships at sea in that year. Indisputably, then, the war encompassed eight full years of organized Anglo-French hostilities. In America, the war is known as the French and Indian War, begun in 1754 (though the French began deploying military forces near the British colonial frontier in 1753). This book’s initial plan did not allocate much space to the origins of the war. The matter seemed settled; along the contested frontiers of New France and the British colonies, hostilities were inevitable. Nevertheless, the questions of why organized violence erupted when it did, and why a full-scale Anglo-French war resulted, ought to be reopened. Since neither London nor Versailles wanted war in 1755, the common assumption has been that the governments of the home countries were simply ‘drawn in’ by their governors in North America, as if helplessly. Yet this assumption, as will be seen, is falsified by strong evidence. Furthermore, it is puzzling that the principal dispute was focused on a wilderness region of the interior beyond the mountains about which statesmen in London and Paris knew almost nothing and had hitherto cared less. Equally puzzling is the failure of the attempt in early 1755 to negotiate a settlement of this dispute.

North America’s emerging importance

Underlying geopolitical considerations had recently raised North America from a lower colonial priority to a continent worth fighting over. After the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle of 1748 which ended the war of the Austrian Succession, everyone expected another major war between Britain and France to occur before long, but no one predicted that it would be brought on by disputed claims in a scarcely mapped region west of the Appalachian Mountains of North America.

English settlement of North America, begun a century and a half earlier, was undertaken with government approval but with hardly any military or financial support, the land grants costing the king nothing. One significant exception was the conquest of New Amsterdam in the 1660s and 1670s, made possible by the Royal Navy. Renamed New York, the acquisition brought the entire seaboard between Nova Scotia and South Carolina under British rule. Otherwise, the Treasury did not spend money on founding new colonies or on promoting settlement in North America until a small government subsidy was provided for the foundation of Georgia in 1733 and parliamentary grants were made, beginning in 1749, for settling Nova Scotia. The population of British North America grew rapidly, both by natural increase and by an immigration policy – or non-policy – that permitted foreigners to pour in.

It was the British government’s aim throughout to keep the costs of territorial administration and defence low. During the long period of Anglo-French peace after 1714, colonial governors often asked London to help them develop frontier defences, but very little help was given. It is clear that the British government considered the wilderness frontiers of North America to be a nuisance. The few colonists who ventured to trade with Indians beyond the settled frontier were expected to provide for their own protection. Colonial assemblies seldom spent any money or effort on helping them. For its part, the British government simply wanted to keep the interior frontiers quiescent, hoping to ignore any problems.

Britain’s concern was not territory but commerce and shipping. By means of the Navigation Acts of 1651, 1660 and 1663, the British Atlantic colonies became linked in a maritime-imperial system. Successive British governments valued this system because it increased seaborne commerce, generated wealth that helped support public finance, and enlarged the British merchant marine, which provided a reserve of trained seamen that was essential to the navy. It was a system of ‘traffick’: that is, trade and shipping. The priority given to the latter is revealed by patterns of enforcement; those aspects of the Navigation Acts which concerned shipping were quite strictly enforced, while those concerning commodities were often revised or left unenforced in order to adjust to market demands and maximize traffic. French West Indian molasses, for example, went to New England without a prohibitory duty being enforced, but only British vessels could legitimately ship it. It was carried mainly in New England vessels, which accounted for almost a third of total British merchant tonnage. (American colonial shipping enjoyed the same privileges under the Navigation Acts as shipping of the home country.) Thus, the maritime-imperial system, though its trade was concentrated within the British colonial orbit, was open enough to stimulate economic growth and prosperity. To provide currency throughout the system, contraband trading with Spanish America to acquire silver coin was permitted, though deemed illicit by the Spanish authorities. Noting how an absence of regulatory rigidity had contributed to commercial success, Edmund Burke, in 1775, warned against uninformed legislative meddling and attributed the growth of British Atlantic trade and colonial prosperity to ‘salutary neglect’.³

3Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies, 22 Mar. 1775.

In the century preceding 1750, British policymakers accorded far less importance to the American mainland colonies than to the West Indies, where tobacco, sugar, coffee and indigo produced by slave labour, along with contraband trade with the Spanish empire, generated the most wealth. Yet during the first half of the eighteenth century, British North America became an important export market for British-manufactured goods. In 1700 its population was 234,000; in 1750 the figure was 1,206,000 (964,000 if the black population is not counted). Although in 1700 the West Indies purchased more of the home country’s goods (by value) than the mainland colonies did, by 1750 the mainland colonies were consuming more than double the West Indian figure. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith supposed that British goods sold well in America because it was a captive market, but by mid-century British goods would have outsold most European goods in America without one.

At mid-century, when it came to be realized that North American colonists were purchasing vast quantities of British-manufactured goods and that the trade fostered a large shipping traffic, influential members of the public began to think that these colonies of settlement ought to be allowed to expand. The French possessions to the north and west of them should not, therefore, be allowed to stand in the way of their growth. When land speculators in Virginia, among whom was George Washington’s uncle, put forward a petition for a substantial land grant on the western frontier in the name of the Ohio Company, George Montagu Dunk, Earl of Halifax, who was head of the Board of Trade, recommended royal approval. He noted that the petition spoke of founding new settlements and building a fort within seven years. He commented – this was in 1749 – that it ‘would be a proper step towards disappointing the views and checking the incroachments of the French, by interrupting part of the communication from their lodgements upon the great lakes to the river Mississippi’.⁴ Most British statesmen did not care in 1749 whether the Ohio Company would actually carry out this scheme.

4Quoted in Jennings, Empire of Fortune, pp. 12–13.

Canada’s utility for France

To explain why the Anglo-French Seven Years War began where it did, one must take note of the fact that there was a group of well-informed Frenchmen who had also become aware of the importance of North America at this time. Among these was Étienne de Silhouette, who had lived in London from 1734 to 1741 and developed an interest in political economy. His name is widely known because it describes an art form where a shape, often a head profile, is portrayed in solid black. Historically he is best known because in 1759 he was appointed contrôleur générale des finances, a high office in which he did not last long (see the end of Chapter 12). In the 1740s, he belonged to a circle of political economists surrounding Jacques-Claude-Marie Vincent de Gournay, a thoughtful and well-informed son of a Saint-Malô merchant. The knowledge of English politics that Silhouette gained in London resulted in his appointment, in August 1750, as one of France’s two Boundary Commissioners who were charged with negotiating disputes in America that had been left unresolved by the 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. The other commissioner was Roland-Michael Barrin, marquis de La Galissonière, the admiral who had recently served two years at Quebec as acting governor-general of New France. He was the author of a long memorandum, a ‘Memoir on the French Colonies in Northern America’, that was read before the king and council in December 1750.⁵ Silhouette almost certainly participated in writing it; he had written a memorandum in 1747 which concluded that America was the source of most of Britain’s wealth. The 1750 memorandum warned that Britain’s growing transatlantic trade would result in financial dominance so great that it would overwhelm France’s ability to maintain her preeminent position in Europe.

5In Lamontagne, ed. Aperçu structural du Canada, pp. 93–112.

The power of the British navy was seen to be the basic problem. ‘If anything can, in fact, destroy the superiority of France in Europe’, La Galissonière wrote, ‘it is the English naval forces; it was these alone … which caused France to lose the fruit of the entire conquest of the Austrian Low Countries at the close of this last war’. He saw no naval solution to the problem. France could not ‘long sustain the expense of a navy equal to theirs; therefore, the only recourse that remained was to attack them in their possessions’.⁶

6Ibid., p. 99.

It was here that La Galissonière saw an important role for Canada. Considerations of ‘honour, glory and religion’ would not permit Canada to be abandoned, although the cost of settling and defending it was not compensated by profits of the fur trade. Nevertheless, it possessed one great attribute: it provided ‘the strongest barrier that [could] be opposed to the ambition of the English’. It could employ harassment to limit the growth of the British colonies. Two factors enabled the French to do this effectively. The first was alliances wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of maps
• Preface to the second edition
• Preface to first edition
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Statesmen and regimes
• 3 Origins: the contested regions, 1748–54
• 4 Risking war, 1754–55
• 5 War without declaration: North America, 1755
• 6 Indecision in Europe: May to December 1755
• 7 French triumphs, British blunders, 1756
• 8 France’s European war plan, 1756–57
• 9 The tide turns, 1758
• 10 The Atlantic and North America, 1758
• 11 The West Indies and North America, 1759
• 12 The British victory at sea, 1759
• 13 Britain conquers afar; disunity looms at home
• 14 The chance of peace, 1761
• 15 Peacemaking 1762: concessions before conquests
• 16 Conclusion and aftermath
• Abbreviations and short titles
• Notes on sources
• Index