An Empire at War

Abstract Often seen as fragile and peripheral to the geopolitics of Louis XV’s monarchy, France’s Atlantic empire exerted a powerful influence on the mid-eighteenth-century wars that ultimately decimated it. Beginning with the relative international peace and rapid integration of France’s colonial economy that characterized the 1730s and 1740s, this chapter follows the resurgence of imperial conflict through the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). Central to its narrative are Indigenous actors such as