The Struggle For North America 1754 1758

"At the end of 1758, Britons could proudly boast of the numerous victories which had been achieved against the forces of King Louis XV. Although the Seven Years' War, or French and Indian War, was far from over, 1758 marked a significant turning point. Uniquely, this book provides an insight into the initial stages of the Seven Years War, and explains why Britain failed, despite the many advantages which it enjoyed. George Yagi employs an immense amount of varied primary material in order to provide the most thorough analysis yet of British failure during the early stages of the Seven Years' War. In doing so, it aims to dispel commonly held misconceptions and prove that the reasons for failure are much more complicated than has been assumed."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BEST FIRST BOOK CATEGORY OF THE TEMPLER MEDAL 2016 At the end of 1758, Britons could proudly boast of the numerous victories which had been achieved against the forces of King Louis XV. Although the Seven Years' War, or French and Indian War, was far from over, 1758 marked a significant turning point. Uniquely, this book provides an insight into the initial stages of the Seven Years War, and explains why Britain failed, despite the many advantages which it enjoyed. George Yagi employs an immense amount of varied primary material in order to provide the most thorough analysis yet of British failure during the early stages of the Seven Years' War. In doing so, it aims to dispel commonly held misconceptions and prove that the reasons for failure are much more complicated than has been assumed.

In this engrossing narrative of the great military conflagration of the mid-eighteenth century, Fred Anderson transports us into the maelstrom of international rivalries. With the Seven Years' War, Great Britain decisively eliminated French power north of the Caribbean — and in the process destroyed an American diplomatic system in which Native Americans had long played a central, balancing role — permanently changing the political and cultural landscape of North America. Anderson skillfully reveals the clash of inherited perceptions the war created when it gave thousands of American colonists their first experience of real Englishmen and introduced them to the British cultural and class system. We see colonists who assumed that they were partners in the empire encountering British officers who regarded them as subordinates and who treated them accordingly. This laid the groundwork in shared experience for a common view of the world, of the empire, and of the men who had once been their masters. Thus, Anderson shows, the war taught George Washington and other provincials profound emotional lessons, as well as giving them practical instruction in how to be soldiers. Depicting the subsequent British efforts to reform the empire and American resistance — the riots of the Stamp Act crisis and the nearly simultaneous pan-Indian insurrection called Pontiac's Rebellion — as postwar developments rather than as an anticipation of the national independence that no one knew lay ahead (or even desired), Anderson re-creates the perspectives through which contemporaries saw events unfold while they tried to preserve imperial relationships. Interweaving stories of kings and imperial officers with those of Indians, traders, and the diverse colonial peoples, Anderson brings alive a chapter of our history that was shaped as much by individual choices and actions as by social, economic, and political forces.

A compelling history of the British Army in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—showing how the military gathered knowledge from campaigns across the globe “Superb analysis.”—William Anthony Hay, Wall Street Journal At the outbreak of the War of Austrian Succession in 1742, the British Army’s military tactics were tired and outdated, stultified after three decades of peace. The army’s leadership was conservative, resistant to change, and unable to match new military techniques developing on the continent. Losses were cataclysmic and the force was in dire need of modernization—both in terms of strategy and in leadership and technology. In this wide-ranging and highly original account, Huw J. Davies traces the British Army’s accumulation of military knowledge across the following century. An essentially global force, British armies and soldiers continually gleaned and synthesized strategy from war zones the world over: from Europe to the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Davies records how the army and its officers put this globally acquired knowledge to use, exchanging information and developing into a remarkable vehicle of innovation—leading to the pinnacle of its military prowess in the nineteenth century.

The Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes contains twenty essays concerning not only military and naval operations, but also the political, economic, social, and cultural interactions of individuals and groups during the struggle to control the great freshwater lakes and rivers between the Ohio Valley and the Canadian Shield. Contributing scholars represent a wide variety of disciplines and institutional affiliations from the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. Collectively, these important essays delineate the common thread, weaving together the series of wars for the North American heartland that stretched from 1754 to 1814. The war for the Great Lakes was not merely a sideshow in a broader, worldwide struggle for empire, independence, self-determination, and territory. Rather, it was a single war, a regional conflict waged to establish hegemony within the area, forcing interactions that divided the Great Lakes nationally and ethnically for the two centuries that followed.

General John Forbes’s campaign against Fort Duquesne was the largest over-land expedition during the Seven Years’ War in America. While most histories of the time period include the Forbes Campaign as an aside, McConnell documents how and why Forbes and his army succeeded, and what his success meant to the subsequent history of the mid-Atlantic colonies, native inhabitants of the Ohio Country, and the empire he represented. A close look at the Forbes Campaign and its personnel reveals much about both British relations with native peoples and the nature of Britain’s American empire during a time of stress. Unlike other campaigns, this one was composed largely of colonial—not professional British—troops. In addition, individual colonies negotiated their role in the campaign and frequently placed their own local interests ahead of those of the empire as a whole. The campaign thus suggests the limits of imperial power and how Britain’s hold over its American frontiers was, at best, tenuous and helped lead to an eventual break-down of empire in the 1760s and 1770s.