The conflicts pitting Britain against France from the Glorious Revolution to the fall of Napoleon are sometimes dubbed the Second Hundred Years War. Anthony Page, however, makes a case for a different label and an alternative periodization, proposing that we see the Anglo-French conflicts from the War of Austrian Succession to the War of the Sixth Coalition as a single Seventy Years War. Page's Britain and the Seventy Years War is not an international history of this extended struggle, but a study exploring the impact of war on British society, politics, and culture. Page offers a synthesis of secondary work—including much recent scholarship—rather than original research. His goal is to be accessible to students while offering perspectives useful to fellow academic historians. He succeeds on both counts. The prose is clear and readable, the analysis is enlivened with well-chosen examples, and Page offers much helpful contextual material. Though experts may find little that is new, the book will be valuable to researchers and teachers who will find here a scholarly, up-to-date introduction to the “war and society” theme in eighteenth-century British history.

A long first chapter narrates the history of the wars, with occasional commentary on the merits of particular British strategies. There follows a discussion of what Page calls the “fiscal-naval state,” a term he prefers to the “fiscal-military” formula popularized by John Brewer. In this chapter he describes the role of Britain's financial system in sustaining war and endorses Patrick O'Brien's thesis that war and preparation for war stimulated economic growth and the industrial revolution. (The counterarguments of Peter Temin and Hans-Joachim Voth are not addressed.) In a chapter on the armed forces Page tracks the growth in size and professionalism of the navy and the army under the stimulus of the French wars. The following discussion, “Enlightenment, Evangelicalism and War” (chapter 4), makes a case for conflict as “both subject and setting of the British Enlightenment and the rise of evangelical religion” (138). Drawing on scholarship that construes the British Enlightenment as a moderate movement posing little challenge to crown, Parliament, or established church, Page discusses ideas of improvement and politeness in the armed forces. As for religion, the services fostered small subcultures of Methodists, while evangelical Anglicanism appealed to naval officers. The recruitment of large numbers of Irish Catholics during the revolutionary wars turned the army into a laboratory for religious toleration. Ultimately, however, Page fails to show that Enlightenment or religion would have developed along substantially different lines in a more peaceful Britain. Less forced and more persuasive is a final chapter arguing that the pressures of war fostered a new popular politics.

Where Page goes beyond synthesis is in his arguments for the coherence of the Seventy Years War as a concept and in the often repeated claim that the outcome of the struggle was contingent. These positions are worth considering more closely. The idea of a Seventy Years War has the merit of acknowledging the generation of peace that followed the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, but its coherence depends on a narrowly British perspective. For the inhabitants of the new American Republic, as for the French and most other European peoples, the international history of these seven decades surely encompassed more rupture than cohesion. Even as a device for thinking about war and society in Britain, the notion of a Seventy Years War is rather imperfect. It may be meaningful to view this as a discrete era in the history of the British armed forces; religious change aligns to a degree with the proposed chronology, popular politics somewhat less neatly, and the history of Enlightenment not at all. For the development of the fiscal-naval state, which had its origins in the financial revolution of the decades after 1688, a traditional periodization is preferable.

Page insists that the outcome of this long struggle was contingent, that down to the very end Britain might have been defeated. Yet the evidence he presents on the resilience of the British political system, the relative efficiency of its financial arrangements, the quasi-permanence of its naval superiority, and above all its economic lead over France by the early nineteenth century, does not readily support the view that France could have triumphed. A case can be made that a stalemate was possible if the French Republic had been governed more cautiously and if Britain, chastened by public debt, saw no prospect of final victory. But only a fuller comparison could sustain such an argument. Contingency and structure operate together to shape the outcome of historical events. This much is obvious. Simply to assert that things might have turned out differently is an empty truism unless—giving structural constraints their proper weight—one considers the “what-if” moments more substantively.