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The French and Indian War gets enough attention that I wasn’t sure I was in need of a book just on that part of the Seven Years War.

Boy, was I wrong.

Narratively, the focus is around events over several hundreds of miles of indifferently-settled tracts of North America, and the personalities surrounding that. Just as a history of the main campaigns of the French and Indian War, this book has a lot to recommend it. Anderson also goes deep into the forces that shaped all of this. For example, he spends a fair amount of time looking at the differences between British regulars, and provincial (largely New England) soldiers. Commanding officers generally distrusted the provincials, finding them to be horribly insubordinate. Americans tended towards a world view of contracts, and saw military service as such (including a term of service, after which the contract was void), instead of pure subordination to authority. Moreover, the poor, underemployed, class that British soldiers generally came from did not really exist in the North America; there wasn’t enough population to have spare workforce lying around.

In addition, there is a very welcome focus on Indian relations. One of the overall focuses is how the Iroquois Confederacy managed to undermine its own position (largely while trying to strengthen it), and the shift of circumstances broke their ability to hold the Ohio watershed free of Europeans. There’s some very good looks at the internal politics of the major colonial states, and just how dysfunctional they could be (to the point that I’m wondering where to find good books on Colonial Pennsylvania and Virginia).

And, it’s largely aimed at showing how all the effort put into winning a war in North America caused the dissolution of the empire that existed before the war. The war tested the United Kingdom’s abilities to the utmost, and brought a lot of attention to a part of the world that had been somewhat allowed to drift along. The pressures of the war got the various colonies working together for the first time, and also came with a greater realization of how much there was to administer. The book continues on directly with Pontiac’s War, and the economic downturn that came after the peace. It effectively finishes up with the Declaratory Act, and shows how the Sugar Act was a finely-crafted bill meant to stimulate the New England economy at the same time it raised revenue.

There’s a lot of things going on in this book, and they’re all handled well, and at reasonable length. I don’t know that he entirely succeeds in his prime goal of showing just how the act of gaining a large chunk of North America from France led Great Britain to lose that part it had started with, but the through lines are there, and it is all well handled.

Frederick II of Prussia is considered one of the great generals of history (which is why we usually just call him ‘Frederick the Great’), so a book looking at his military achievements is an excellent subject.

Of course, it’s not hard to find problems with myth vs reality with him. Running off the field of battle in two battles that Prussia won, doesn’t sound very “Great”. And overall, Showalter is fairly critical (in both senses of ‘fair’ here), of Frederick’s performance overall. There’s a nice section at the end that talks of Prussia after the Seven Years War, and how both the army and myth were fashioned as a means of deterrence. (I wish he’d done more than just allude to the myth-making in that period; but no details are given.)

Of course the events of the Silesian War/War of Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War are the main rocks the book is structured around. However, along the way, Showalter takes time to take a look at how well other European armies were operating, and how Frederick’s various ideas worked out in that context. Much of the focus is fairly operational, with the marches and countermarches of armies being the dominant themes of the narrative. However, the battle descriptions themselves are well done, and each battle focused on is well presented, with Frederick’s (often overambitious) plans in context.

The biggest shortcoming of the book is a lack of operational-level maps, that can make the flow of events hard to follow. The battles get fairly simple standard maps that do the job, though they usually show up at the end of the battle instead of near the beginning. On the other hand, there is an excellent run down of other worthwhile books at the end, that moves from biography, to more general works, to Osprey’s more specialized volumes.

The early going is made very rough with some remarks on the theory of military history that are self-obscuring with inobvious allusions. Once past that, the book settles in for a fairly bumpy ride, that is valuable for being all-too-rare look at the methods of war over the course of a few decades, and how it worked in that context.