H-NET BOOK REVIEW (September, 2001).
Published by H-Law@h-net.msu.edu

Fred Anderson, _Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and
the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766_.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000; Vintage paperback, 2001.
xxv + 862 pp.  Illustrations, Maps, Notes, Index.  ISBN
0-375-40642-5 (cloth: alk. paper), $40.00; ISBN
0-375-70636-4 (paperback), $20.00

Reviewed by Daniel J. Hulsebosch <hulsebos@slu.edu>, Saint
Louis University School of Law.

AN EMPIRE OF WAR AND LIBERTY

Fred Anderson's study of the Seven Years' War synthesizes
several lines of scholarship and offers many new insights
into that complex event and the decade that followed.  His
fundamental argument is that the war initiated a dispute
about the nature of the British Empire that continued after
the peace treaty and led directly to American Revolution.
Here Anderson picks up the venerable debate between
historians who argue that the Revolution was the
"aftermath" of the Seven Years' War and others who
emphasize the Stamp Act and regulations.[1]  The former
concentrate on the financial burden and the new western
migration that the War brought in its train.  Those who
finger the Stamp Act portray the Revolution as a conflict
over principle or at least ideology; they view the
Revolutionaries as deeply committed to the idea that the
central government was subject to principled limitations.

Anderson believes that these two interpretations can be
reconciled.  The key to his analysis is the effect that the
War had on metropolitan and provincial understandings of
the Empire.  Each side of the Atlantic drew different
lessons from the conquest of New France.  The colonists
thought that their participation in the imperial war had
finally shown them to be equal members in the Empire.  By
contrast, the War rigidified the metropolitan view of the
Empire as a pyramid of authority.  The Parliamentary
revenue acts were designed to raise money to support the
continuing presence of the British military in America,
forcing the colonists to pay in taxes what they previously
viewed as gifts due only in times of war.

In short, London ministers and American colonists had
"competing visions of empire" (746).  This exposition of
conflicting constitutional visions calls to mind the work
of John Phillip Reid and Jack P. Greene.[2]  They argue
that the colonists drew on a traditional English conception
of government as limited by the customary restraints of
consent and fundamental law, while at home that conception
had given way to one of an unfettered British Parliament.
These visions were irreconcilable, and the question becomes
why the rupture occurred when it did.  Anderson's answer is
that a decade of mutual misunderstanding accelerated the
two sides toward open conflict.  He also reminds us that a
lot of resonant constitutionalism, including much we still
hear today, sprang up as the first British Empire flexed
its "sinews of power."[3]

One limitation of this bipolar interpretation is that it
simplifies the constitutional situation on both sides of
the Atlantic.  Those in the colonies, for example, did not
all share the same vision of the Empire.  Different groups
had different perspectives, and it will not do to classify
the imperial agents serving in the provinces as
metropolitan.  For one thing, it was often those agents who
formulated what became at home the orthodox view of the
colonies.  In addition, they rested their theory of
imperial government on Crown power, not Parliamentary
sovereignty, and to them it mattered little if the Crown
enacted the policies they eveloped on the ground using its
prerogative, as with the Proclamation of 1763, or through
Parliament.  That choice was a function of metropolitan
politics.  Similarly, the colonial opponents of the new
imperial regulation were not a coherent bloc with a single
vision of empire.  Much divided urban merchants and
lawyers, for example, from frontier settlers.  They were
united in Revolution by their common opposition, and the
strains between them began to show soon afterward.[4]

Anderson leaves off in 1766, but by then, he argues, the
die was cast. He concludes that we should view "the Seven
Years' War and the Revolution together as epochal events
that yoked imperialism and republicanism in American
political culture" and then suggests that this perspective
on the founding era will help us understand "a national
history in which war and freedom have often intertwined"
(746). He even offers a tantalizing counter-factual
suggestion that a few changes in British policy would have
resulted not in revolution but rather in a commonwealth
structure coming much earlier than it did and including the
thirteen mainland colonies.  But to flesh out these ideas
would demand another volume, and perhaps Anderson is
writing it.

The one we have now opens with nine maps that set the stage
for what was truly a global conflict.  These are well done
and include a chronological map of key battles, one of
Native American nations, and another of Quebec and the
fateful Plains of Abraham.  There are also maps of the
Caribbean, continental Europe, and India, demonstrating
that by the 1750s the European empires had already moved
well beyond the Atlantic world.

But much of the fighting occurred in a small corner of
North America along the St. Lawrence River and in the
Champlain Valley: the early and, for a long while, lone
British victory at Lake George; the grisly siege of
Louisbourg that led to the expulsion of 5,400
French-Canadians from Acadia (which Anderson likens to
"ethnic cleansing" (114); and the storied siege of Quebec,
memorialized in Benjamin West's paintings of Major General
James Wolfe and the Marquis de Montcalm each dying on the
battlefield.

Anderson revises much of the conventional wisdom about
these battles.  Just one example is the death of Wolfe.
Anderson argues that Wolfe, suffering from tuberculosis and
taking opiates, felt overwhelmed by the grueling war and
sought an honorable exit.  His aides thought his plan to
attack Quebec directly was unwise, but Wolfe was
choreographing a heroic end for himself; he was not trying
to grab real estate for the Empire.  As it turned out, the
defense was more bedraggled that Wolfe expected, and
Montcalm, dependent on a Canadian militia for which he felt
little but contempt, could not match the disciplined
British army.  At the end of the day Wolfe got his heroic
death, and by the way the British Empire won Canada.

Anderson's first book analyzed the War's effect on
Massachusetts militiamen who served the Empire,[5] but
there is little social history from the bottom in _Crucible
of War_.  His focus on the larger players yields its own
rewards.  Anderson gleefully romps through successive
British administrations and the military hierarchy and has
a Namierite talent for sizing up individual ambitions.  As
Benedict Anderson notes, there was often a "stagey quality"
to elite affection for empire.[6]  You get that sense in
Fred Anderson's book as well.  Imperial war was a
theatrical exploit for many, a chance to make a mark and
win appointment to some remunerative post -- ideally at
home but more likely abroad.  Empire was opportunity, and
the difference between the diplomats and generals on the
one hand and the merchants in counting-houses on the other
may not have been quite as large as the Weberian
distinction between speculation and capitalism.  Renewed
attention to these rational mercenaries also sheds light on
the controversy about the essential character of the Empire
-- military or commercial?[7] -- and suggests that yet
another binary may be synthesized.

Older histories of the War end after the deaths of Montcalm
and Wolfe.[8]  But they die only midway through Anderson's
narrative, which helps demonstrate his principal argument
that the battles were only half the War, and that the War
defined future battles too.  Anderson's book also visits
Hanover, Bengal, and elsewhere. Correcting the usual
American-centered interpretation, Anderson declares that
"the Battle of Quiberon Bay," on the southwest coast of
France, "and not the more celebrated Battle of Quebec, was
the decisive military event of 1759" (383).  Again, "in the
end, it was Lagos and Quiberon Bay that proved decisive at
Quebec, and control of the Atlantic that settled ownership
of Canada" (395).  Now here is revisionism.  The reader
wants more on this, and wonders why Anderson writes so much
about the deaths of Montcalm and Wolfe but gives no other
reference to Lagos in these pages.[9]  Also curious is this
thick book's thin treatment of the Caribbean.  Why did the
War have one legacy for thirteen mainland colonies and
another for the additional thirteen British colonies to the
north and south?[10]

But this book focuses on mid-century North America, and
perhaps the greatest difference between older and newer
histories of this time and place is the role of the Native
Americans.  Here they share the stage with European and
provincial characters.  The index refers to 30 Indian
nations, and Anderson shows that there were divisions among
them, although the War itself encouraged a "nativist"
identity in the Ohio Valley (332).  On the advice of
imperial agents like Sir William Johnson, the Crown treated
the Indians within its territory as quasi-subjects to whom
it owed duties, not as savages barriers to expansion --
more or less the provincial view.  If Anderson follows this
volume with another, he will probably explore the way the
Empire finally cut its ties with those quasi-subjects,
leaving them to fend for themselves in a nation where they
were, legally, "domestic dependent nations,"[11] but,
practically, obstacles to be removed.[12]

Much more is in this book.  There is grist for those
interested in the tension between European and American
styles of warfare, the problems of supply, the role of the
British military in America between the War and the
Revolution, and other important issues.  For the number of
topics canvassed, the geography covered, and the deft
sketches of leading figures, this book is a tour de force.
It's also quite handsome.  In addition to the maps,
paintings, and drawings, Anderson has broken his work into
eight parts that are further divided into many short
chapters, which keep the whole from feeling unwieldy.  It
is well-written, and it has an excellent index.  Anderson
wanted to write a book for "general readers" as well as
professional historians (xv).  He has succeeded.[13]  This
is a book you will keep in a prominent place for a long
time.

Finally, _Crucible of War_ is a tribute to Lawrence Henry
Gipson's monumental, fifteen-volume history of the British
Empire in America.  That work is the single most cited
source in Anderson's footnotes, and he is among the few to
have read it all.[14]  Gipson conceived his project in 1924
and published the volumes between 1936 and 1970, but, with
their epic battles and diplomatic intrigue, they all seem
closer in spirit to the date of conception than completion.
 Imperial history fell out of fashion after the Second
World War and has only recently enjoyed a renaissance, of
which Anderson's work is a part.[15]  Gipson called the
Seven Years' War "the great war for the empire" and
Anderson must agree.  The difference is that Gipson saw the
American continent as the booty of imperial war, whereas
Anderson views empire less as an object than structures,
practices, and other legacies that were bequeathed to the
independent states.  Gipson's new nation was a young rogue;
Anderson's early republic is precocious and more
purposefully dangerous.  It was born an empire.

NOTES

[1.] Compare Lawrence Henry Gipson, "The American
Revolution as an Aftermath of the Great War for Empire,"
_Political Science Quarterly_ 65 (1950-51): 86-104, and
Theodore Draper, _A Struggle for Power: The American
Revolution_ (New York, Times Books/Random House, 1996),
with Edmund S. and Helen M. Morgan, _The Stamp Act:
Prologue to Revolution_ (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1953; 3d rev. ed., 1998), and John M.
Murrin, "The French and Indian War, the American Revolution
and the Counter-Factual Hypothesis: Reflections on Lawrence
Henry Gipson and John Shy," _Reviews in American History_ 1
(1973): 307-18.  _See also_ Bernard Bailyn, _The
Ideological Origins of the American Revolution_ (Cambridge,
Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967;
expanded ed., 1992).

[2.]  John Phillip Reid, _The Constitutional History of the
American Revolution_, 4 vols. (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1986-1993; one-vol. abr. ed., 1995); Jack
P. Greene, _Peripheries and Center: An Interpretation of
British-American Constitutional Development, 1607-1788_
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986).

[3.]  John Brewer, _The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the
English State, 1688-1783_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1989).

[4.]  See Daniel J. Hulsebosch, "Imperia in Imperio: The
Multiple Constitution of Empire in New York, 1750-1777,"
_Law and History Review_ 16 (1998): 319-79; Margaret M.
Spector, _The American Department of the British
Government, 1768-1782_ (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1940).

[5.]  Fred Anderson, _A People's Army: Massachusetts
Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years' War_ (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1984).

[6.]  Benedict Anderson, _Imagined Communities: Reflections
on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism_, rev. ed. (London
and New York: Verso, 1991), 111.

[7.]  Compare Stephen S. Webb, "The Data and Theory of
Restoration Empire," _William and Mary Quarterly_, 3d ser.,
43 (1986): 431-59, with Richard R. Johnson, "The Imperial
Webb: The Thesis of Garrison Government in Early America
Considered," _William and Mary Quarterly_, 3d ser., 43
(1986): 408-30.

[8.]  _See_, _e.g._, the final volume, _Montcalm and
Wolfe_, in Francis Parkman's epic _France and England in
North America_, 7 vols. (Boston, Little, Brown, 1865-92;
reprint in 2 vols., edited by David Levin, New York:
Library of America, 1983).

[9.]  Lagos is on the coast of Portugal, Britain's ally at
the time.  The British navy under Admiral Edward Boscawen
defeated a French force there in 1759.  Lawrence H. Gipson,
_The Great War for the Empire: The Culmination, 1760-1763_
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954), 14-15.

[10.]  For an exploration of the Caribbean in this era, see
Andrew J. O'Shaughnessy, _An Empire Divided: The American
Revolution and the British Caribbean_ (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).

[11.]  _Cherokee Nation v. Georgia_, 30 U.S. (5 Peters) 1,
17 (1831).

[12.]  See Colin Calloway, _Crown and Calumet:
British-Indian Relations, 1783-1815_ (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1987); Eric Hinderaker, _Elusive Empires:
Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673-1800_
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

[13.]  _Crucible of War_ won the 2001 Francis Parkman
Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians to the
book that "best represents the union of the historian and
the artist."

[14.]  As John Shy remarks, it's hard to think of any
modern historian who won more awards and had less influence
than Gipson.  John Shy, "The Empire Remembered: Lawrence
Henry Gipson, Historian," in John Shy, _A People Numerous
and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for
American Independence_ (New York: Oxford University Press,
1976), 109-31.

[15.]  Another sign is the newly re-written _Oxford History
of the British Empire_, ed. Wm. Roger Louis, 5 vols (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

        Copyright (c) 2001 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits
        the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit,
        educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the
        author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and
        H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses
        contact the Reviews editorial staff: hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.

Humanities & Social
Sciences Online

Copyright © 1995-2006 - Contact Us
RSS | Validate: XHTML | CSS