Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 | 
 enlarge | Author: Fred Anderson
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  89 reviews
Sales Rank: 117318
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 912
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 1.8
ISBN: 0375706364
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.26
EAN: 9780375706363
ASIN: 0375706364
Publication Date: January 23, 2001
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Amazon.com Review
Histories of the American Revolution tend to start in 1763, the end of the Seven Year's War, a worldwide struggle for empire that pitted France against England in North America, Europe, and Asia. Fred Anderson, who teaches history at the University of Colorado, takes the story back a decade and explains the significance of the conflict in American history. Demonstrating that independence was not inevitable or even at first desired by the colonists, he shows how removal of the threat from France was essential before Americans could develop their own concepts of democratic government and defy their imperial British protectors. Of great interest is the importance of Native Americans in the conflict. Both the French and English had Indian allies; France's defeat ended a diplomatic system in which Indian nations, especially the 300-year-old Iroquois League, held the balance between the colonial powers. In a fast-paced narrative, Anderson moves with confidence and ease from the forests of Ohio and battlefields along the St. Lawrence to London's House of Commons and the palaces of Europe. He makes complex economic, social, and diplomatic patterns accessible and easy to understand. Using a vast body of research, he takes the time to paint the players as living personalities, from George III and George Washington to a host of supporting characters. The book's usefulness and clarity are enhanced by a hundred landscapes, portraits, maps, and charts taken from contemporary sources. Crucible of War is political and military history at its best; it never flags and is a pleasure to read. --John Stevenson
Product Description
In this vivid and compelling narrative, the Seven Years' War–long seen as a mere backdrop to the American Revolution–takes on a whole new significance. Relating the history of the war as it developed, Anderson shows how the complex array of forces brought into conflict helped both to create Britain’s empire and to sow the seeds of its eventual dissolution.
Beginning with a skirmish in the Pennsylvania backcountry involving an inexperienced George Washington, the Iroquois chief Tanaghrisson, and the ill-fated French emissary Jumonville, Anderson reveals a chain of events that would lead to world conflagration. Weaving together the military, economic, and political motives of the participants with unforgettable portraits of Washington, William Pitt, Montcalm, and many others, Anderson brings a fresh perspective to one of America’s most important wars, demonstrating how the forces unleashed there would irrevocably change the politics of empire in North America.
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 A masterful account of an often overshadowed conflict August 21, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Though long overshadowed in the traditional historical narrative by the American Revolution, the Seven Years' War, as Fred Anderson argues, is the most important event in the eighteenth-century North American history. Fought in the untamed wilderness which both France and Britain claimed, the struggle brought an end to the French empire in North America. Yet ironically in doing so, it sowed the seeds for the eventual collapse of Britain's own empire in the Americas by expanding it beyond a manageable size and creating pressures that ultimately led the thirteen colonies to rebel. This war and its legacy is the subject of this superb book, one that offers a complex and inter-layered narrative of the origins, conduct, and consequences of this often-ignored conflict.
Anderson begins by examining the interaction between the British, the French, and the Iroquois in the Ohio Valley. Sandwiched between the two European empire, the Iroquois Confederacy played one off the other successfully for many years. Yet land concessions to the British in the 1740s soon paved the way for growing encroachment of the Ohio Valley by British colonists, prompting the French to assert their own claims to the region. When war erupted in 1754 (as a result of a clash between a French force and a party of Virginians and Indians, one carefully reconstructed and dramatically retold by Anderson), it expanded gradually into a general conflict between Britain and France, with fighting taking place on nearly every continent.
The war is the dominant focus of Anderson's book, and he supplies a readable and insightful narrative of the course of the war. While his focus is predominantly on the political and military struggles in North America, he also provides an description of the relevant British politics and a summary of the war in Europe. Particularly notable is his coverage of the Native Americans, which he depicts not as opportunistic savages but as canny political operators who saw themselves as free agents involved in a web of relationships with each other as well as with the colonial powers. Though the book bogs down in his subsequent examination of the postwar adjustments to British victory, these chapters make for fascinating reading by demonstrating just how close the link was between the problems posed by Britain's triumph and the protests that ultimately would lead to rebellion.
By the end of the book, it is hard to deny the merits of Anderson's argument. Through his expert analysis and deft interweaving of people and events, he succeeds in restoring the Seven Years' War to the pivotal place it deserves in American history. Clearly written and supplemented with numerous images and maps, it is a masterful study of the war, one unlikely to be surpassed in its breadth of coverage or quality of its analysis. For anyone seeking a history of the war and its legacy for American history, this is the book to read.
Smartly written, comprehensive history of a great global war July 27, 2008
I highly recommend Crucible of War to all history readers. The author Fred Anderson really does a brilliant job at covering this very broad and meaningful subject.
* Highly informative and very readable. For a 700 plus page book written by an authority on the subject, you would expect the book to be a difficult read but the author knows how to keep the subject interesting. The books contains many detailed maps and illustrations that challenge the reader to really understand the geography, logistics and tactics of the war.
* Changes one's understanding of history. A good book can really change the way you look at history. I came away with a greater appreciation of how the Seven Years War created the conditions that brought about the American revolution. Again, I think the author really shows how events unfold in surprising ways which have broad reaching effects.
5 stars July 20, 2008
This is the only book on the 7 years war you need.
Well written, packed with details and information!
 Excellent July 14, 2008
I won't try to restate what so many other reviewers have said in praise of this book, because they're right. Anderson explains more about the Seven Years War than I ever imagined could be told, and why it was truly a history-changing event for so many people. But he also notes how such results were never inevitable, even through the repeal of the Stamp Act which marks the narrative's end. Lots of individual events and people spiraled into the results we now take for granted, especially in the wake of what happened after the mid-1760s.
The book is long but not terribly difficult to read. Anyone who really wants to understand U.S. history and/or that of how the British Empire came to be, simply must read this book.
A fine, comprehensive, one volume account of the war March 24, 2008
Winston Churchill called the Seven Year's War the first world war, and it can be argued that it was the first, in a string of five great power wars over 190 years, leading to World War II. But for most students of the modern world, especially Americans, who may be unaware that a world war, a great power war was sparked just outside of today's Pittsburgh, PA. If it is thought of, the Seven Year's War is remembered as nothing more than a prelude to the American Revolution. Fred Anderson, of the University of Colorado, Crucible of War is an outstanding, comprehensive military history of that conflict. One of his main intentions is to reorient modern minds to where they can see that it was the Seven Year's War, and not the American Revolution, that became the great conflict of the age.
Until young George Washington, a Virginia militia colonel at the time, sparked a growing conflict between France and Britain in 1754, nearly the last 100 years had seen one colonial conflict after another between France and Britain, to the point where the wars blended together into just generational border and trading conflicts. In that sense, they followed the trend of nearly all European wars for centuries: small armies, fighting far from home, rallied against other principalities in short, bloody conflicts that did little but change some borders and decide a few trading or royal succession issues.
Anderson agrees with Churchill, in that the Seven Year's War was a paradigm shift in the way the modern world fought war. Large swathes of territory were exchanged, the conflict spread among other minor powers on multiple continents and in a sense it was an ideological struggle. And like just about every modern conflict, the peace became harder to win than the war itself, because ideas of order clashed with cultures not desiring wholesale changes in life.
So while the Seven Year's War began in back country Pennsylvania, it spread all along the British and French North American frontier, into the Caribbean, and later, in the second half of the war, among Prussia and other European states in Central Europe, through India, and eventually into the Philippines in the Pacific. Before it was over, several million had been killed or wounded, France was economically exhausted and Britain was nearly as broke, with a larger empire to maintain and an economic system incapable of operating it. Anderson treats his subject as much as epic as he does military history.
His military writing is well done, with proper reliance on strategy, command and control, supply chains, and attention to the effects of terrain on troop movement. But what makes this very readable is his attention to the human side of the conflict: the economic interests, the cultural pulls on Indian tribes, French, English, etc., for that is what shows what the motivation of the conflict was.
This is a comprehensive book, meant to tell the story of the war from the motivation of several vantage points. So it is not primarily the American colonial story, or the English or French or even Indian tribe story. Anderson writes so comprehensively that each side could have received their own book. Because he writes with such a wide scope, he seems to be successful in his attempt to show that history that we know now, with the United States and the successor great power to Britain, was not inevitable; that no one in 1754, least of all an ambitious man like Washington, who hoped to advance in the British military, could have foreseen the events that led to the whole world being turned upside down.
There probably is not as good a one volume telling of this war, that not only competently tells the story of the events, but places them it in the context as a world changing event that drove events for the next several hundred years. This is as good a history of its type as I can recommend.
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