The Culture of the Seven Years’ War: Empire, Identity, and the Arts in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World ed. by Frans De Bruyn and Shaun Regan

Reviewed by: The Culture of the Seven Years’ War: Empire, Identity, and the Arts in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World ed. by Frans De Bruyn and Shaun Regan Timothy J. Shannon Frans De Bruyn and Shaun Regan, eds., The Culture of the Seven Years’ War: Empire, Identity, and the Arts in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. 349 pp. $65.00. This collection of essays has its origins in two conferences held on opposite sides of the Atlantic in 2009 to commemorate the sestercentennial of 1759, the annus mirabilis (from the British perspective) or the year of the Conquête (from the French), a momentous year during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). Over the past decade, there have been many similar conferences, but the contributors to this volume are interested particularly in the war’s cultural impact in Great Britain. Although that means few of the essays address the American Middle West directly, the volume still brims with useful ideas and observations about an era that had a profound impact on the development of that region. The word “culture” as historians have applied it to the Seven Years’ War has different meanings. The Seven Years’ War has often been described as a clash of cultures involving European, colonial, and indigenous peoples around the globe. Social historians have studied the cultures of the war from military, civilian, and Native perspectives as well, comparing for example how Native and European military cultures treated captives or how colonial and imperial perspectives on military service diverged. The essays in this volume approach culture from another perspective, one concerned with the intersection of the arts, politics, and the public sphere. This is not a book, in other words, about the experience of British soldiers in the war’s American theater, nor is it one particularly concerned with colonial and Native perspectives on the conflict. Instead, most of the essays address in some form or another the war’s impact on British arts and literature, exploring the linkages that connected “empire, identity, and representation” in print and visual images, as well as the depiction of the war in Britain’s emerging middle-class marketplace for news and politics (6). Readers familiar [End Page 157] with the scholarship of Linda Colley, Kathleen Wilson, and M. John Cardwell will be well primed for this volume. A common topic in several of the essays is the “paper wars” associated with the British press coverage of the war (127). This term, which first gained currency in the early eighteenth century, was a product of Britain’s expanding print market and the public’s simultaneous engagement in political affairs. Nicholas Rogers’s “From Vernon to Wolfe: Empire and Identity in the British Atlantic World of the Mid-Eighteenth Century” addresses the elevation of two imperial heroes in the popular press. Likewise Douglas Fordham’s “George Stubbs’s The Zebra and the Spectacle of Fine Art at the End of the Seven Years’ War” examines the intersection of politics and art in London’s “exhibition culture,” where an artifact of imperial exotica—a zebra received as a wedding gift by Queen Charlotte in 1762—became an object of both high art and ribald satire. Essays by Robert W. Jones and Daniel O’Quinn focus on the public controversies that erupted over the court martial of two wartime military figures, Lord George Sackville and Admiral Augustus Keppel, respectively. Readers interested in approaches to culture that emphasize exchange across national or racial boundaries will be drawn to two of the essays. In “Colonial Disease, Translation, and Enlightenment: Franco-British Medicine and the Seven Years’ War,” Erica Charters explores the exchange of medical knowledge among French and British physicians, whose sharing of medical texts offered proof that “Enlightenment cosmopolitanism coexisted with military patriotism and national rivalry” during the Seven Years’ War (70). Shaun Regan’s “Olaudah Equiano and the Seven Years’ War: Slavery, Service, and the Sea” is an interesting exploration of how the war affected Equiano’s construction of self in his famous narrative, catalyzing his “sense of patriotic ‘English,’ or British identity” during his time on a naval vessel (240). Two other essays will stand out for...

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