The Seven Years' War

The Black Hole of Calcutta

In June the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah, captures the East India Company's Fort William at Calcutta. British prisoners are confined overnight in a tiny cell — the 'Black Hole' — where many die of suffocation and heat. The incident, magnified in the telling, gives the Company its pretext for conquest and brings Robert Clive north from Madras to avenge it.

Clive wins Bengal at Plassey

On 23 June, on the field of Plassey, Robert Clive and some 3,000 men defeat the Nawab's army of 50,000 — thanks less to arms than to the treachery of the Nawab's commander Mir Jafar, bought in advance. Bengal, the richest province of India, passes under the control of the East India Company. It is the beginning of British rule in India.

Frederick's twin masterpieces

Beset on all sides, Frederick the Great fights the two battles that make his legend. On 5 November at Rossbach he routs a far larger Franco-Imperial army in ninety minutes; on 5 December at Leuthen, using his famous 'oblique order', he destroys an Austrian force twice his size. Prussia, a kingdom of five million, has held off France, Austria, and Russia combined.

Napoleon would later call Leuthen 'a masterpiece of movements, manoeuvres, and resolution' and say that it alone would have sufficed to immortalise Frederick. Yet the Prussian king was fighting for survival, not conquest. For six years he would perform prodigies of defence against overwhelming odds, saved at the last by the death of the Empress Elizabeth of Russia and the withdrawal of her armies — the 'Miracle of the House of Brandenburg'.

The wonderful year — and the fall of Quebec

1759 is Britain's annus mirabilis, when 'our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for victories'. At sea, Boscawen wins at Lagos and Hawke smashes the French fleet at Quiberon Bay, ending all hope of invading Britain. In Germany the French are beaten at Minden. And on 13 September, on the Plains of Abraham above Quebec, General Wolfe defeats Montcalm; both commanders fall, and French Canada is lost.

The victory at Quebec, won by Wolfe's daring night ascent of the cliffs, decided the fate of North America. Montreal would surrender the following year, and with it all of New France. The war on the continent had become a global settling of accounts in which the Royal Navy, mistress of the seas, allowed Britain to pick off France's colonies one by one while Frederick held the line in Europe.

Havana and Manila fall to Britain

When Spain enters the war on the French side in 1762, Britain strikes at its empire around the world. In August a British expedition storms Havana, the key to the Spanish Caribbean; in October another takes Manila, capital of the Spanish Philippines, on the far side of the globe. The reach of British sea power now spans every ocean.

Britain becomes the first world power

On 10 February the Treaty of Paris ends the war between Britain, France, and Spain; five days later the Treaty of Hubertusburg confirms Frederick's Silesia and the European status quo. France cedes Canada and all its territory east of the Mississippi to Britain, and Louisiana to Spain. Britain emerges as the world's foremost colonial and naval power, dominant in North America and India alike.

The triumph carried the seed of its own undoing. The war had doubled Britain's national debt, and the attempt to make the American colonists pay for their own defence — through the Stamp Act and its successors — would within twelve years drive them to revolt. The removal of the French threat from Canada, meanwhile, freed the colonists from their need of British protection. The Seven Years' War made the British Empire; it also prepared the loss of its first and greatest colony.