The World in Flames: A Global History of the Seven Years' War (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780231202404)

In the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), two European rivalries--between England and France and between Prussia and Austria--collided to spark a global conflagration. In the United States, it is known as the French and Indian War, a precursor to the Revolutionary War. In India, by contrast, it marked a new stage on the path toward British colonial rule. The war saw Spain's decline and Russia's rise; territories from Quebec to the Philippines changed hands. From Europe to the Americas, Africa, and South Asia, people across continents were swept up in clashes that began in faraway places and spread like wildfire.

The World in Flames is a bottom-up history of the Seven Years' War, exploring this epochal conflict from the perspective of contemporaries around the globe. Drawing on hundreds of eyewitness accounts, Marian Füssel offers a sweeping portrait of warfare and everyday life during the cataclysm. He vividly narrates battles and sieges from the viewpoints of bakers, generals, and everyone in between, tracing the roles of mercenaries and trading companies as well as regular troops. Füssel emphasizes how contemporaries perceived and understood the global nature of the conflict. At once a media war and an economic war for commodities such as sugar and fur, a war of emerging nationalism and a last religious war, the Seven Years' War was a laboratory of modernity, combining the old world and the new. A groundbreaking, world-spanning microhistory, this book shows us the first truly global military conflict in a new light.

Author: Marian Füssel
ISBN-10: 0231202407
ISBN-13: 9780231202404
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Language: English
Published: 12/02/2025
Pages: 728
Format: Hardcover