The Seven Years' War Begins

MAY 17 1756 · 12:00

Frederick the Great after the Battle of Kolin, 1757, by Julius Schrader. Place: Atlantic Ocean; Saxony; the Ohio Valley; Bengal; Senegal; the Philippines Figures: Frederick II of Prussia, opening the continental front · William Pitt the Elder, British war minister from 1757 · Robert Clive, in Bengal · the Marquis de Montcalm, in Canada The First Truly Global War Skirmishes between French and British colonial forces in the Ohio Valley have been running since 1754, where a young Virginian named George Washington fires the opening shots at Jumonville Glen. The diplomatic revolution at Versailles in May 1756 (see [[diplomatic-revolution-1756]]) turns a colonial scuffle into a continental alignment. Britain declares war on France on 17 May. Frederick II, anticipating attack from the new Franco-Austrian-Russian coalition, invades neutral Saxony on 29 August to seize its army and treasury preemptively. Within a year the war has theatres in Europe (Saxony, Bohemia, Westphalia, Pomerania), North America (where the colonists call it the French and Indian War), the Caribbean (Guadeloupe, Martinique, Havana), West Africa (Senegal), India (Bengal, the Carnatic), and the Philippines (the British capture of Manila in 1762). Naval engagements run from the English Channel to Quiberon Bay to Lagos to the Coromandel Coast. Westphalia Goes Intercontinental Roughly a million people die. The cost is borne by states whose tax base is the Westphalian sovereign's domestic subjects: Britain's national debt doubles; France's chronic fiscal crisis becomes terminal and produces, by 1789, the conditions for the Estates-General; Prussia survives only because Tsarina Elizabeth dies in January 1762 and her successor Peter III withdraws Russian forces from the war out of personal admiration for Frederick (the so-called Miracle of the House of Brandenburg). The war demonstrates that the Westphalian sovereign-state model, with its standing armies, its centralized treasuries, its tax and credit machinery, is now scalable to the planet. A war fought in Saxony has consequences in Pondicherry. The Peace of Paris (see [[treaty-of-paris-1763]]) will redraw the map of three continents. From this war forward, European peace treaties are also intercontinental treaties; the sovereign state's reach is, by demonstration, oceanic. Video: John Green on the Seven Years' War as the first truly global conflict, fought across four continents from 1756.