Worldwide warfare might seem like a twentieth-century development, but the colonial empires of Europe fought wars around the globe in the eighteenth. With domains spreading to the Americas and across the Pacific Ocean to Asia, a great power such as France could find itself fighting simultaneously against England's Hanoverian king in northern Germany, in the waters of the English Channel, and on the grounds of what became Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Jeremy Black explains not just the wheres and whys of those wars, but also the hows.
- The Age of Enlightenment on the battlefield.
- Diversity of tactics and weapons used around the globe.
- After the death of Louis XIV, French hegemony yielded to French decline and the French Revolution.
- Shifting balance of power sets the stage for the rise of Prussia.
- The American Revolution witnesses the origins of guerilla warfare.
