Volume 47, Number 8 · May 11, 2000
How the French Lost America
By Edmund S. Morgan
The Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766
by Fred Anderson
Knopf, 862 pp., $40.00
Thus Fred Anderson begins his account of the war that began (two years early) in America when young George Washington rashly opened fire on a detachment of French troops in western Pennsylvania in 1754 and that ended with the elimination of French power on the continent in 1763. But for the war, Anderson argues, the American Revolution would not have occurred when it did, if at all, or 'for that matter, the Wars of Napoléon, 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.' 'Why, then,' he asks, 'have Americans seen the Seven Years' War as little more than a footnote?'
Review, 3531 words
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