score:11
The North American version of the Seven Years' War was the French and Indian War. And yes, it did set the stage for the American Revolution for at least three reasons:
Upvote:7
In Kevin Phillips' The Cousin's Wars he puts a slightly different spin on the influence of the Seven Years' War on the Revolution. After some false starts, the British Army and the Colonials achieved a relation of working together to win the war...the Army would ask the colonies for money, or supplies or troops directly to the legislatures and they would figure out the hows and whys and get it done. They assumed this responsible acting on their part would be rewarded by its continuation going forward.
Hence when Parliament, who was not involved in any of this, rejected this notion and started cutting out the Colonial Legislatures as middlemen with the finance bills, the powerful Colonials who made up these groups hit the ceiling. As a means of making money, these bills and taxes were trivial - as everyone has noted at the time and since. But they were very effective at signalling that the English legislature was going to deny powerful Colonials any say in how their part of the world would be run, which was very short sighted on their part. The two sides continued to talk past each other for the next few decades until the point of revolution was reached.
Upvote:15
There is an unobvious connection pointed out by Tarle: Before the Seven Years War the major threat for the colonists was the French in Canada who could conceivably mount an invasion and conquer the colonies (who hardly relished the prospect). The only sure protection against that was Britain. Once Britain had vanquished France and removed the ever-present threat of external invasion, it itself became the colonists' biggest problem.
Think of it as a Maslow-pyramid thing.
Where I differ from Tarle's analysis is that I don't think it was pre-determined from that point that the colonies should become independent. A touch of Burkean magnanimity and Britain might have kept America. But let's stop there, I am sliding into counterfactuals.