The people of the British Isles participated in two wars during the mid-eighteenth century: the War of the Austrian Succession (1739–48) and the Seven Years' War (1756–63). This ambitious book treats the two wars as a single period of hostility and traces the effect of conflict on two areas of British history: state formation (the “machinery” of government) and the myriad aspects of communal life. Given the book's scope, readers should not expect a single overarching argument; the book's value lies rather in the perspective it brings to issues in numerous fields of eighteenth-century history.

The book's broad subject—two wars and a full quarter-century of comprehensive British domestic history—lends itself to analytical diffusion. Indeed, its serial organization into chapters on “war and…” the state, the economy, society, politics, religion, nationalism, and empire gives the book a kaleidoscopic feel. Conway's nuanced analysis enhances this impression. His attention to complexity prevents him from exaggerating the importance of warfare or ignoring other relevant factors, but it also leads him into forays from British history proper to military history and Continental European history. His sense of the particular prevents him from overstating war's importance. Instead, he presents war as a variable influence, significant and marginal by turns; its effects were often transitory but occasionally profound.

Conway attempts to mediate disputes about early modern state formation by using the notion of partnerships. Where John Brewer portrays an efficient, centralized state in eighteenth-century Britain, J. E. Cookson argues that power remained diffused among local agencies. Conway resolves the impasse by describing numerous dynamic partnerships between the central government and local and private institutions. The extent and nature of those partnerships varied with circumstances.

If there is a historical link between the question of state formation and the dynamics of wartime society, it is large-scale military mobilization. Conway carefully demonstrates that the era's wars drew up to 11 percent of British males into military and naval service, and this number included people from all regions and social classes. Since war led the state to disrupt society, the state was the primary conduit of war's domestic effects. This finding could perhaps have been parlayed into a unifying thesis for the entire book, but it is not. Instead, Conway uses it to contest the received stereotype of ancien régime warfare as limited and thus fundamentally different from post-1783 warfare. On the contrary, Europe's midcentury wars caused extensive upheaval precisely because lots of people from all levels of society fought and funded them. They differed from post-1783 warfare only in degree, not in substance.

In British society, war often intensified trends already in progress. The government bureaucracy continued to grow in size and efficiency as it waged increasingly extensive wars. The wartime environment reinforced widespread notions of exclusive gender roles, deepened already fraught class tensions, and, paradoxically, accelerated the long-term rise in social mobility. Wartime also enhanced the growing role of public opinion in British political calculus and fostered the decline of the old Whig-Tory party division.

War played a decisive role in a few areas. From an imperial perspective, the acquisition of non-British subjects in India, Canada, and trans-Appalachia altered domestic perceptions of and policies toward empire, and these changes were instrumental in the loss of the older North American colonies. At home, a short-term rise in anti-Catholicism was permanently weakened by the indispensable loyalty and military service of Irish Catholics. Similarly, because the war eliminated a serious Jacobite threat, it freed Protestant Dissenters to question Anglican privileges and dissolved any pretense of Protestant unity. At the same time, the experience of war militarized popular opinions, diminishing the traditional fear of standing armies.

War also had inconclusive social effects. Where one might expect warfare to have simply intensified British nationalism, Conway sees only a halting spread of British identity during the era. Britishness remained, in many important instances, subordinate to older local and national loyalties. Economic historians have presented Britain's midcentury wars as either a tonic or a retardant to industrialization, but Conway finds the evidence too mixed to render final judgment. Surprisingly, war may have been a neutral factor in the overall development of the British economy.

Conway concludes the book with three local case studies and two comparative analyses. Brief sketches of wartime Edinburgh, Cork, and Berkshire are interesting in themselves, but Conway does not connect them systematically to the book's previous generalizations. This curious lacuna may indicate that Conway's focus in this book is not entirely British. By comparing war's effects on Britain with those in Continental nations, Conway suggests that British history fell mostly in step with pan-European trends. In doing so, he undermines exceptionalist theses in British history and reminds us that it can be a subset of European history. He also takes special care to extend the logic of midcentury mobilization beyond British borders. Britain's extensive mobilization efforts mirrored Continental trends, and mobilization became increasingly more intrusive throughout Europe as the century progressed. The midcentury wars, then, marked the beginning of a trend that culminated in the levées en masse of later decades.

Taken together with similar assertions in his book on British society during the War of American Independence (1775–83), Conway's work seems to constitute a comprehensive—and controversial—historical claim. If mass military service and widespread dislocation caused by warfare was common in eighteenth-century Europe, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were not unique or especially modern. This would clearly undermine the way military historians have traditionally portrayed historical change. It would also affect broader accounts of modernization and the nature of modernity.

This book represents the work of a gifted historian in whom broad interests and enthusiasms happily coincide with disciplined research and judicious analysis. British and military historians will have to confront its claims, as will students of national identity and state formation. It will also interest scholars working in Atlantic history and eighteenth-century studies.