ABSTRACT
In retrospect, many North Americans called those years of battle the French and Indian War. Within German territories, people remembered the Third Silesian War. Eventually, however, most Europeans came to think of the far-flung struggles from 1756 to 1763 as the Seven Years War. No matter what its name, Great Britain lay at the conflict’s center. By the end of the 1750s British armies and navies had been making war almost continuously for half a century. On the oceans as well as in Germany, France, Scotland, Canada, Ireland, and India they had broadcast British claims to primacy among the world’s nations. Victoriously violent and always alert for another fight on land or sea, British armed forces terrified their neighbors into a broad European coalition to contain them.
