CRUCIBLE OF WAR: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766.

• Author: Ricks, Thomas E.
• Position: Review

CRUCIBLE OF WAR: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 by Fred Anderson Knopf, $40.00

THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR, dimly remembered by Americans as a prelude to their revolution, is usually portrayed by historians as a struggle between the British and French empires for control of North America. Subsequently, it is sometimes seen by 20th-century writers as part of "the first world war," the conflict between the two empires that began in southwestern Pennsylvania and spread over seven years to the Caribbean, West Africa, India, and the Philippines.

The military historian John Keegan captures this conventional view in his introduction to the Modern Library's recent re-issue of Francis Parkman's 1884 account of the French and Indian War, Montcalm and Wolfe. Keegan writes that, "The story of the struggle between Britain and France to control the continent of North America is one of the great dramas of history." It is indeed a great story--how the French, holding most of the continent, from New Orleans to the Great Lakes and out to the Atlantic, managed to lose it to the British and Americans, who only controlled a thin strip along the Atlantic seaboard.

But it isn't as simple as conventional history tells it. Fred Anderson's terrific new history of that war goes a long way toward correcting the traditional view--but not quite far enough. I think it is a far better history than Montcalm and Wolfe, Parkman's supposed classic, which I find nastily anti-Catholic and mindlessly pro-American. As related by Anderson--a University of Colorado historian who, despite his academic perch, writes readable narrative history--the half century that followed 1750 was a four-way brawl for control of North America, not simply a contest between two empires. It began with two of the parties, the French and Indians, allied against the other two, the British and their American cousins.

In Anderson's version, the French lost because their strategic alliance with the Indians broke down. Most histories would end there, with James Wolfe taking Quebec in September 1759. But for Anderson, Wolfe's victory is only the halfway point, told in the 36th of his 74 chapters.

As Anderson tells it, the next phase of the struggle began almost immediately, with the Indians taking on the remaining two parties, the British-American alliance. First came the Cherokee War in the Carolinas and Tennessee, soon followed by "Pontiac's War," a name that...