Matthew C. Ward, Breaking the Backcountry: The Seven Years’ War in Virginia and Pennsylvania, 1754–1765 (Pittsburgh, OH: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003, $34.95). Pp. x+329. ISBN 0 8229 4214 3.
Review first appeared in Journal of American Studies 39, no. 1 (April 2005), pp. 141-142.
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Breaking the Backcountry: The Seven Years’ War in Virginia and Pennsylvania, 1754–1765
Matthew C. Ward
Reviewed by Michael A. McDonnell, University of Sydney
The study of the Seven Years’ War in American has enjoyed something of a renaissance over the past few years, with an ever-increasing number of historians turning their attention to the cataclysmic conflict to explore its multi-faceted dimensions and crucial importance. Matthew Ward’s contribution to this literature pulls together several strands of this developing historiography to emphasize the centrality of the often overlooked Pennsylvania–Virginia backcountry, where the war began. Combining a well told narrative tale with fresh insights into the political and social history of the conflict in this region, Ward’s wide-ranging study illuminates the complex competing interests and struggles facing the people engaged in the conflict, and tells the tale from multiple perspectives. From backcountry settlers to provincial politicians via Native American diplomats and warriors, the book explores the grim realities of frontier war, and its consequences for participants and posterity alike. Indeed, at the heart of the book, based on extensive archival research, are stories of people’s struggles for survival in an escalating and increasingly brutal conflict. Amidst the larger tale he tells, Ward is particularly to be commended for his insistent focus on particular places and people, and for not reducing any of the various cast of characters to nameless, faceless, and irrational actors on either side of the border. Ward is especially good at drawing out the details of particular campaigns, the grievances of participants, and even the motivations of soldiers who joined the provincial forces. Crucially, too, Native Americans are central players in this conflict, and Ward aptly demonstrates the independence of various Indian groups from both English and French imperial officials during the conflict. As Ward shows, the diverse stories of these different peoples ultimately collided with catastrophic and transforming consequences. In making the Virginia–Pennsylvania backcountry central to the larger story of the Seven Years’ War, Ward is keen to point out the transformative nature of what amounted to a decade of conflict. If Ward ably explores the minutia of backcountry relations, he is unafraid of making connections between the so-called small politics of war and the larger geopolitical consequences of the conflict. Not only did the war greatly increase the powers and activities of the colonial governments, but it also forever changed the relationships between those colonies and Great Britain, and relationships between colonists and their Native American neighbours. It did all of this, in part, because the conflict also fundamentally transformed the backcountry itself, from an economically weak, socially fragmented, and culturally diverse area that had little in common with the coastal parts of the colonies, to a more integrated but troublesome region in which settlers were increasingly likely to protect their interests by lashing out at both provincial and imperial authorities, and friendly and unfriendly Native American groups. Ultimately, then, Ward’s book reinforces current interpretations that see the Seven Years’ War as the beginning of the end for many Native American groups who had maintained a modicum of independence until the middle of the eighteenth century, and the beginning of the end of the first British empire.