Matthew C. Ward

I found this to be a good survey of the impact of the Seven Years' War on Pennsylvania and Virginia, and how fragmented societies took steps towards developing effective political and military structures. One can only say steps though, as there was on one hand not enough wisdom to realize that the native Americans had not been quelled and needed to be taken seriously, nor was there enough determination to generate the power that would have been necessary to impose a definitive solution to the liking of American communities; that would come later.

What's impressive is how the author manages to cover so many disparate elements of the story, ranging from politics among all the players, to military affairs, to the impact of climate and disease on the course of the struggle up to the dawn of the final break between London and the colonies.

If there is a question that I would have liked to have seen answered a bit more explicitly, it's how the tribesmen of the frontier had such an impact out of all proportion to their numbers. The implication is that there was no colonial frontier society as such; merely disparate ethnic and religious communities that had little to do with each other, nominally ruled over a colonial elite with little real interest in frontier settlers with little in social structure binding colonial core with its hinterland. At that point velocity initially trumped dead mass, at least until a new social structure crystalized under pressure.… (meer)