George Yagi's The Struggle for North America, 1754–1758: Britannia's Tarnished Laurels, is a study in failure. More particularly, it analyzes the failure of the British military in North America during the opening years of the Seven Years' War, when British military commanders were unable to capitalize on their superior resources and population against their French and Indian enemies. As such, the book retells the first half of a familiar story: the devastating battlefield defeats and political clashes that stymied the British war effort until William Pitt masterminded a turnaround of British strategy and fortunes in 1758. As Yagi notes in his introduction, the book has its closest intellectual kinship to Stanley Pargellis's Lord Loudoun in North America (1933), a classic study of how the Seven Years' War illuminated the differences between the British and colonial American ways of war. But Yagi's work also reflects more current scholarship, which has incorporated the experiences of Native Americans and common soldiers never considered by Pargellis. The result is a book that updates and expands on some well-worn truths.

Yagi tells his story from the British perspective, sympathetically detailing the travails, both natural and man-made, of the serial commanders in chief—Edward Braddock, William Shirley, and Lord Loudoun—who directed the war in America between 1754 and 1758. Yagi focuses on the intersection of civilian and military authority. While he incorporates material related to the British defeats at the Monongahela, Oswego, Fort William Henry, and Ticonderoga, he is less concerned with matters of battlefield leadership and contingency than with mobilization, logistics, and coordination. He is highly critical of the British ministry's initial reliance on American forces to fight this war, noting the poor condition of the independent companies of British regulars stationed in the colonies, as well as the lackluster performance of colonial provincial and militia troops.

In Yagi's view, the commanders in chief who led the American war effort before Pitt's rise to power were charged with an impossible task: creating an effective colonial union that would enable them to tap into colonial treasuries and direct colonial troops and materiel as they saw fit. Braddock and his successors were to act in the manner of viceroys, centralizing civilian and military powers and demanding the unquestioning obedience of their inferiors. Of course, the colonial governors and assemblies would have none of it. They insisted on maintaining their power of the purse and attaching strings to whatever troops and resources they committed to the war effort. According to Yagi, “the assemblies proved effective allies to the French, as they caused numerous delays for the army and created additional obstacles, which generated further turmoil” (37). While it is certainly true that some assemblies proved especially uncooperative with British commanders, others committed extraordinary resources and experienced an unprecedented degree of military mobilization. Calling the assemblies “effective allies” for the French tars with a single brushstroke a range of responses from the colonists to their new commanders in chief.

Yagi is equally critical of the colonial soldiers and Native Americans that British commanders recruited into the British cause. His description of colonial troops as undisciplined and poorly trained is nothing new, but he does shed some light on wartime profiteering by colonial merchants and smugglers who traded with the enemy. Likewise, his description of Native Americans as expensive and fickle allies echoes other historians, but he generally sympathizes with the frustrations expressed by the British officers charged with commanding these Indian auxiliaries. Yagi argues that British fortunes in the war changed when William Pitt decided to reverse his predecessors' reliance on colonial and Native Americans. Scottish Highlanders proved to be far more effective at striking terror into French troops than did their American cousins, and British soldiers organized into light infantry units succeeded where green American troops had failed.

Ultimately, Yagi attributes the British failures during the war's early years to factors beyond the control of the British commanders often blamed for them. Braddock, Shirley, and Loudoun were expected to compel compliance from colonial governments that had no tradition or precedent for giving it. They were also expected to recruit, provision, and transport professional armies in a terrain that lacked the roads and equipment necessary for doing so. The old adage about the want of nail applies here, only in North America it was usually the want of a wagon that proved to be the undoing of British campaigns. Yagi's analysis expands most usefully upon Pargellis's work when he considers the impact these difficulties had on common soldiers: reliance on salted provisions debilitated their health and encounters with Native American warriors eroded their psychological confidence. On these topics, he updates an old story with new perspectives that may not rewrite our understanding of the Seven Years' War but do broaden and deepen it.