From Europe to India and America, Britain's Colonial Wars relates empire to the fortunes of war. In less than a century, between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the settlement following the War of the American Revolution, the modern British state was born. The Dutch William III tended to treat his British realms as a unit. The Act of Union of 1707 under the very English Queen Anne merged England and Scotland into the United Kingdom of Great Britain. War was the midwife at its birth.
War rather than peace was the norm between 1688 and 1783. The War of the Grand Alliance at the beginning of the period ended with a peace of exhaustion. But the security of British interests remained precarious. For the next decade Britain and France fought the War of Spanish Succession, and even the general peace that followed was punctuated by Jacobite rebellion and clashes with Spain. The peacemaking Sir Robert Walpole could not prevent the War of Jenkins' Ear with Spain in 1739. Britain lost that war, and the conflict with France which grew out of it.
The Seven Years War of 1756 - 1763 was the only war of the entire period ending with a clear British victory, with spectacular imperial gains from Quebec to Bengal. But excessive triumph proved a poisoned chalice. Within a dozen years, the global monarchy of George III and the British identities it embodied were convulsed by the War of American Independence.
This penetrating new analysis questions the centrality of the colonial enterprise to Westminster policy-makers obsessed with European issues. Nevertheless it explains how the impact of their strategies necessarily shaped the destiny of a multi-national and incoherent empire beyond the shores of Europe.
Bruce Lenman is Professor of Modern History in the University of St. Andrews. He has also written England's Colonial Wars 1550-1688: Conflicts, Empire and National Identity.