| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Fred Anderson. Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America 1754–1766. (A Borzoi Book.) New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2000. Pp. xxv, 862. $40.00.

Fred Anderson's book is an astonishing piece of historical synthesis and a magisterial account of the Seven Years War, which created a "seismic shift in Europe's alliance system and balance of power" (p. 11). The center shifted because of events on the periphery. The war, and the crises that followed, were in large measure the result of ambitions and enmities of a small group of colonials far removed from centers of power. Beginning in the woods of North America, the book's narrative stretches across eastern North America, Europe, and, briefly, West Africa and India. It is, not surprisingly given Anderson's earlier work, a brilliant military history and a compelling social history, but it also threads its way through the complicated dynastic politics of Europe, the parliamentary politics of Great Britain, and the factional politics of North America. North American Indian peoples were critical to this decisive conflict between the French and British empires in North America, and Anderson gives them full attention. The war was, as Anderson claims, "a theater of intercultural interaction" (p. xx). Befitting the "epic" history that Anderson aspired to write, it is a large book, but by the standards Lawrence Henry Gipson set for the Seven Years War, the book's heft is modest. . . .

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