The Introduction lays out the contextual background to the themes and elements that are brought together to shape the monograph’s arguments. It positions the monograph within the existing literature on the Seven Years’ War and the history of neutrality in order to establish how it builds upon these bodies of work to incorporate law as a necessary element of strategic analysis. The core hypotheses and arguments of the book are also established. First, that neutrality was a dynamic role for maritime nations such as Spain and the Dutch Republic which had as much of an influencing effect on British strategic thinking as did affairs with belligerent nations. Second, that the Court of Prize Appeal played a critical role within the three-pronged maritime strategy of maintaining foreign confidence in British maritime law and its court system; balancing the interests of British privateers and neutral carriers of commerce in the prize court system; and destroying French seaborne trade through commerce predation. Third, that British maritime strategic concerns shaped and created new legal rules, norms, and precedents within the prize court system that would then serve to clarify and cement British, Spanish, and Dutch understandings of neutral rights and international maritime law.

This chapter delves into Anglo-Dutch relations and negotiations in the period before the Seven Years’ War and during the war itself. It provides the background for the first two Dutch cases to come before the Court of Prize Appeal, that of the Maria Theresa and the America. The main thrust of the chapter is that, in order to understand Anglo-Dutch relations during the war, it is important to examine the interpersonal relationships between the members of the British government, the government’s relationships with the representatives of the Dutch Republic, the government’s relationships with the privateers who helped carry out commerce predation, and the government’s relationship with the Court of Prize Appeal. Through an examination of these interpersonal relations, the chapter argues that they were critical to the successes and failures of Anglo-Dutch negotiations over neutrality and critical to being able to influence decisions taken by the Court of Prize Appeal.

The Conclusion delves into the strategic and legal legacies of the Seven Years’ War. It ties the Seven Years’ War and the unresolved tensions around maritime neutrality to the outbreak of Anglo-Dutch and Anglo-Spanish hostilities during the American War of Independence. It does so by examining the peace treaty of 1763 wherein no new significant arrangements were made about neutral rights between the Spanish and the British. The argument is made that the ambiguity of existing treaties left both governments room to continue negotiations whilst the Rule of the War of 1756 would provide an understanding of how British prize courts would treat neutral ships in future conflicts. The chapter examines the legacy of the Court of Prize Appeal and the thinking behind the rule. It discusses how the court and the rule were used in subsequent conflicts through the Napoleonic Wars and the role that individual judges took in making the rule a critical or underplayed element of British maritime strategic thinking. The rule loomed large in British maritime law for many wars after Hardwicke created it and it is, perhaps, one of the best illustrations of the link between law, sea power, and strategic thinking.

British military institutions embraced a hierarchy backed by cruel physical punishment. The defiant soldier could face gauntlets, brandings, wooden horses, floggings, hangings, and firing squads. In certain places in British North America, though, White male colonists in militias and provincial armies enacted a more egalitarian organization - one that tilted authority toward the common soldier and curbed the most egregious aspects of military discipline. Such egalitarianism structured the Massachusetts Army in the American Revolution. But the supposed democratic rebellion would not feature a more democratic fighting force. When George Washington assumed command of the Massachusetts troops (soon known as the Continental Army), he made sure that hostile differences and bodily reprimand shaped the inaugural institutionalization of American state violence. “Every one is made to know his place and keep in it,” said the Reverend William Emerson of Washington’s army, “or be tied up and receive thirty or forty lashes according to his crime.”

This chapter describes theatrical responses to France’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), often described by historians as the first global war. This is achieved through a close reading of the dramatic text and performance history of Pierre-Laurent de Belloy’s Le Siège de Calais (1765), which was pitched by its author as France’s “first national tragedy” and used by government officials to rally French subjects around their country and their army. The play was vital in creating through theater a new relationship between French subjects and the nation’s armed conflicts. De Belloy’s success was predicated on his manipulation of new forms of “bourgeois” and “sentimental” drama, and the play went on to inspire more soldier plays and war dramas. The chapter concludes with an examination of the tragedy’s reverberations throughout the French empire by way of parodies and public readings of Le Siège de Calais in fairground theaters and military garrisons.

Saint-Domingue was at the center of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, because people enslaved in this French Caribbean colony launched the Haitian Revolution, which ended slavery, defeated French colonialism, and created Haiti, the second independent nation-state in the Americas. Beyond this extraordinary achievement, the factors that helped bring about the Haitian Revolution were also important in other aspects of the Atlantic revolutionary age. Saint-Domingue had the largest enslaved population in the Caribbean and developed a white superiority ideology that was unique in the region. It had an unusually large free population of color, with leaders who tried to claim their civil rights. The colony’s planters had a unique preoccupation with slave poisoning, which they traced to an escaped slave named Macandal. The colony experienced unique environmental stresses, including an anthrax outbreak that killed thousands of people. Saint-Domingue’s sugar and molasses tempted North Americans to break British colonial trade laws, which helped produce the American Revolution. The colony also led the Caribbean in the capitalistic production of sugar and coffee, which were at the heart of Europe’s consumer revolution. Saint-Domingue’s indigo dye and cotton helped launch industrial textile manufacturing.

This chapter recasts America’s revolutionary origins as an imperial crisis brought on by changes in the Atlantic. It surveys Atlantic-wide developments over the course of the eighteenth century to suggest that the issues British Americans grappled with in the 1760s were not exceptional. The watery space was transformed by the movement of peoples, goods, and ideas for all. Slavery and the slave trade were the catalysts to systemic change. With these changes, the Atlantic became an entangled space. War heightened the stakes for domination of the oceanic system. Imperial reform was the result. All creoles throughout the Atlantic world experienced similar tensions over relations with their respective metropoles, and consolidation of the Atlantic created similar conflicts within all Atlantic societies. The chapter then explores how and why the British case diverged from the Atlantic-wide model and how a crisis over systemic consolidation became a civil war that fractured an empire. What we know as the American Revolution represented the fallout from these tangled dynamics.

Contra readings of Harlequin’s Invasion that characterize the play as a patriotic call to arms during the Seven Years’ War, this essay argues that David Garrick constructs a different myth for Shakespeare than the myths of bellicose nationalism, celebrating a Harlequin Shakespeare over a nationalist one. The play suggests that comedic variety is more crucial to Shakespeare, to his ability to draw a plethora of characters who all seem true to life, than any nationalist zeal rooted in an unruly masculinity. Just as the play calls attention to the fluidity of citizenship, it calls attention to other fluidities that valorize nature and Harlequin as polymorphous. Garrick’s myth is predicated on a celebration of difference that is united in the same way that natural fecundity is harmonious. While nationalist myths yearn for unity as a totality that regulates, suppresses, and subsumes difference via antagonism, Harlequin’s Invasion valorizes nature’s spontaneity, its transformations and improvisations, more so than glory or self-sacrifice. The play uses Harlequin and his marvellous transformations to restore theatrical play and the daily enjoyments of theatre as a force for national unity that can accommodate the many differences that exist in a nation.

This essay establishes a link between Garrick’s operatic adaptation of The Tempest, which opened at Drury Lane on 11 February 1756, and the imminent escalation of the French and Indian War (1754–63) into the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). In this essay, Massai argues that Garrick’s Tempest, generally dismissed as a flop and as an embarrassing misjudgement on his part, takes on greater topical significance and political resonance if reconsidered alongside the ‘Dialogue’ that Garrick wrote to be performed as prologue to the opera. By means of a close analysis of both texts, alongside Dryden and Davenant’s earlier adaptation of The Tempest (1667), Massai shows how Garrick’s opera and ‘Dialogue’ are in fact representative of wartime uses of Shakespeare, which, as this collection shows, often served as an important platform for the fashioning of current attitudes towards military conflict.

Marked military buttons were a distinct innovation introduced in the wake of the global Seven Years’ War that spread across the Atlantic world. On the smallest scale they physically embodied the reforms that characterize the period following that conflict. When considered at all, they are often used definitively by archaeologists to determine the presence of certain soldiers at specific sites. Although designed to function in this way, military buttons could not definitively identify personnel, given the realities of early modern military institutions, economic systems, and increasingly long distance imperial wars. As such, marked military buttons represent ideals of order and control rather than their actuality, exposing what military regulations and mandates alone obscure. This chapter explores the intention and reality of marked military buttons in the armies of France, Great Britain, and the new United States from the 1760s to the 1780s. These tiny artifacts reveal attempts to manifest systems of organization that, in fact, disclose their limitations to enact such systems, and thereby complicate their status as diagnostic artifacts in archaeological contexts.

The second chapter considers the use of chivalric romance tropes in Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin, an Armenian. Written in English by himself (1792). In Emin’s letters to his Bluestocking patronesses Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, and Catherine Talbot, he plays a humble knight errant or “Persian Slave” as a strategy to master British politeness. In doing so, he befriends patrons such as George Lyttleton, Edmund Burke, and William Augustus Duke of Cumberland, the youngest son of King George II and commander of a German army Emin had joined in 1757. His epistolary interaction with the Bluestockings who coproduced his romantic fantasies allows him to identify Persian-Islamic notions of chivalry with British liberty. His memoir records ironic episodes in which he affiliates with brotherly Muslim warriors during his Islamophobic quest to liberate his people in the Caucasus from Ottoman and Persian despots. Such affinities render him a patriotic English gentleman while his lady friends expand their civic roles by adopting cosmopolitan identities, an exchange that compensates for a British manhood scarred by military failures during the Seven Years’ War.