Seven Years’ War (1756–63)

Britain and France, along with their North American colonies and Indigenous allies, fought the Seven Years’ War between 1756 and 1763. The war inaugurated a new phase in the history of warfare in North America. It was characterized by the large-scale intervention of regular military forces from Europe. On the British side particularly, there was a great deployment of military power in America, which for the first time was Britain’s main theatre of operations.

In 1758 the governor of New France, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, had contrasted the colonial regular troops’ attitude towards the war with that of the French regulars. For the Canadians, he wrote, the colony was their homeland; it was there that they had their families, lands, resources, and aspirations for the future. The French troops, on the other hand, being expatriates, wanted only to return home with their honour intact, without having suffered a defeat, caring little for what wounds the enemy inflicted on the colony, not even about its total loss.