Peripheries

Abstract

The Seven Years War was the most dramatically successful war the British ever fought. They conquered Canada. They drove the French out of most of their Indian, West African and West Indian possessions. They tore Manila and Havana from the Spanish. Their navy devastated its European rivals. And they assumed for themselves the reputation of being the most aggressive, the most affluent and the most swiftly expanding power in the world. ‘Look around’, declared the young and still conventionally chauvinistic Charles James Fox to his fellow MPs: ‘. . . Observe the magnificence of our metropolis–the extent of our