The 1750s
A scrapbook of events happening 250 years ago.
Most Popular First Names
GIRLS BOYS
Mary John
Elizabeth William
Ann Thomas
Sarah Richard
Jane James
Margaret Robert
Susan Joseph
Martha Edward
Hannah Henry
Catherine George
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Fashions in the 1750s. Few people would have been able to dress as elegantly as most of the people shown here.
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THE MID-1700S WAS an unusually interesting period. It was just prior to enormous changes that would reshape the world. Most of Europe was still suffering a slowly falling standard of living for ordinary people, a trend that had been continuous for 300 years. Britain was an exception to this. From about 1700, prices had been falling, albeit slowly, and wages were increasing.
The 1750s were also an age of elegance. Men's fashions reached a peak of extravagance that has never been equaled. Architecture was changing as the neoclassical style, which remained popular for 150 years, gained popularity.
The English colonies in North America were prospering and their combined population exceeded 1.5 million during this decade.The North American colonies were now an important market for English goods (25 percent of all exports in 1752) but the colonists, especially in New England, were beginning their own industries to supply their own markets.
In Europe there would also be great changes. The general prosperity in Britain meant that the century ended with the Industrial Revolution: in continental Europe it ended with the French Revolution.
When Halifax, Nova Scotia, was founded by Col. Edward Cornwallis in 1749, one of the trades it lacked was printing. In January 1752, John Bushell was appointed King’s Printer and on 23 March published the first edition of the Halifax Gazette, Canada’s first newspaper. The Gazette began as an organ for publishing government proclamations and laws, but it also carried foreign and domestic news, and occasionally criticized British and local authorities, as when it opposed the Stamp Act. Advertising and job printing were undertaken for local merchants. In the illustration, Bushell’s daughter Elizabeth, a skilled compositor with type stick in hand, receives an official document from a military secretary, while her father shows the day’s paper to a townsman. Standing by the screw press is a “beater” holding a leather-covered ball used to ink the plates. Painting by Rex Woods, reproduced courtesy of Rogers Cantel.
The Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), pitted Austria, France, Russia, Sweden and Saxony against Prussia and England. Some historians have called it the first world war as it involved so many nations and there were major conflicts on three continents. The Thirteen Colonies experienced this conflict as the French and Indian War and in India as the Carnatic War but essentially it was the same conflict. The outcome had enormous consequences. The Thirteen Colonies had been surrounded by French territory from the mouth of the Mississippi to the St. Lawrence. The final struggle between France and England for colonial supremacy in America would be settled.
For the Prussians (whose struggle was limited to Europe), victory led to the leadership of the numerous states which made up Germany. For England the victory led to control of India and Quebec and the formation of the British Empire.
"The First World War"
(chapter title in Winston Churchill's A History of the English-Speaking Peoples)
THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR (1756-63) began when Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, seized the Austrian province of Silesia. He started a series of wars which eventually involved most of the great powers of the time. It was fought in America, India and, above all, Europe.
In the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48), Austria had tried twice to regain territory captured by Prussia. In 1756, having won new allies, Austria decided to try again but before the alliance could strike, Prussia invaded neutral but unfriendly Saxony. Austria, Russia, Sweden and France opposed England, with its navy, and Prussia, with its well trained army.
This map shows the threat to the Thirteen Colonies from the French drive to connect
their colonies in Quebec to their colonies in Louisiana.
In North America the French and Indian War had begun two years previously, in 1754. The French had started to build a chain of forts from the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi, land that was claimed by Virginia. The governor sent a small force under young George Washington to capture the French post, Fort Duquesne (the present site of Pittsburgh). The expedition failed and withdrew for the winter. In 1755 General Braddock, who had been sent from England with a strong force of British regular soldiers, was heavily defeated near Fort Duquesne. General Braddock was mortally wounded and his troops were only saved by the skill of Washington, who was still stationed in the area.
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| General Braddock was heavily defeated by the French and their allies the Indians in his first attempt to capture Fort Duquesne (left); the 40th (Hopson’s) Regiment of Foot (circa 1759), one of several reenactment groups who commemorate the Seven Years’ War (right). |
Initially the American colonies were hard pressed by well-led French armies and their Indian allies but in 1758 the tide turned. The English Prime Minister, William Pitt (the Elder), sent a well-equipped army and fleet which, with the assistance of the colonial troops, broke the line of French forts. Louisbourg, a strong fort on Cape Breton Island, was captured on 26 July 1759. On 13 September 1759, Wolfe captured Quebec City. Both Wolfe and Montcalm, the brilliant French commander, died in the battle, known afterwards as the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. Within a year Montreal was captured and practically all Canada was in British hands.
In India too, things went well for Britain. The East India Company had founded trading settlements, but France, jealous of her rival, tried to take control. Dupleix, the able French governor of Pondicherry on the east coast, captured the British settlement of Madras, but was undermined by a corrupt French government, which sent him no support and by the genius of Robert Clive, the English commander. The tide was turned by Clive's victory at Plassey (23 June 1757).
The British navy fought and defeated the French and Spanish fleets in European, American, West Indian, and Indian waters. The most famous victory was over the French at Quiberon Bay (20 November 1759), where for the only time in history the British navy completely destroyed an enemy fleet.
The war in North America and in India ended in the Peace of Paris, a few days before the treaty which ended the conflict in Europe (10 February 1763). France ceded Canada, together with various islands in the West Indies, to England. Spain, which had been drawn into the war on the side of France, surrendered Florida to England while France compensated Spain with the cession of Louisiana territory west of the Mississippi.
Prussia emerged from the Seven Years' War as the major power in Germany. France lost nearly all her colonies and with diminished prestige in Europe, headed for revolution. Britain had acquired a world empire but the colonies in America had a new concept of their own power and place in the British Empire, which was soon to lead to independence.
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