Fred Anderson's magniificent book, Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766, beautifully fulfills the author's intention of focusing on the war as "the most important event to occur in eighteenth-century North America"--a sharp contrast from the usual American historian's view of the war as a little more than a prelude to the Revolution (xv) .In Anderson's view the broader implications of the war for many kinds of people testify to its importance and he accomplishes a breadth of presentation (in what is, none the less, a strictly chronological presentation) by looking at it as a meeting of a variety of cultures: the French, the British, French and British colonials, and Native Americans who saw participation as a means to their own ends as well as those who chose to maintain a distance from the Europeans' struggles. The only departure from his chronological presentation is the switching back and forth between different locales as Anderson provides evidence regarding the attitudes and actions of people in various places. But his achievement is to knit all these strands into a narrative that compels the reader and makes the book's great length seem far less daunting that it appears at first.
Anderson seldom halts his narrative for analysis and, instead, weaves his points into the story as it moves rapidly along. His skill as a writer is manifest in the way he makes Pitt's reasoning about military methods and campaigns or the marquis de Montcalm's understanding of 'acceptable' European military practice part of the narrative rather than employing a lot of explanatory asides or stand-alone analyses. A good example of Anderson's method is his account of Montcalm's , attitudes and their effects, He quickly establishes not just the nature of Montcalm's app1oach to leadership but the general terms of the historical debate around the man, In the single paragraph in which Montcalm is...