A world war before the phrase
The war began, by a fair accounting, in the Pennsylvania backwoods in 1754, when a young Virginia militia colonel named George Washington ambushed a French party and lit the frontier; Europe formalised things in 1756 after a diplomatic revolution that paired Britain with Prussia against a France-Austria-Russia coalition. Fighting ran from Silesia to Senegal, Manila to Montreal — Winston Churchill later called it “the first world war,” and few historians quarrel.
The two theatres that mattered most were run on different logics. In Europe, Frederick the Great’s Prussia fought for survival against three great powers, winning tactical masterpieces (Rossbach, Leuthen) and losing attritional arithmetic until saved by dynastic chance: the Tsarina Elizabeth died in January 1762 and her Prussophile heir took Russia out of the war — the “Miracle of the House of Brandenburg” that a certain later German government, in a Berlin bunker in 1945, would pray in vain to see repeated. Overseas, Britain under Pitt the Elder waged the war as imperial acquisition, using naval supremacy to strangle French reinforcement.
1759 and the spoils
Britain’s annus mirabilis of 1759 delivered Minden, Quiberon Bay — the naval Trafalgar of its century — and Quebec, where Wolfe and Montcalm both died on the Plains of Abraham and French Canada effectively fell. In India, Robert Clive’s victory at Plassey (1757) — as much bribery as battle — had already handed the East India Company control of Bengal’s revenues: the seed of British India planted as a wartime side-effect.
The Treaty of Paris (1763) transferred an empire: France ceded Canada and everything east of the Mississippi (keeping the sugar islands it valued more), Spain swapped Florida for Havana’s return, and Britain emerged the world’s dominant colonial and naval power. Prussia kept Silesia and its new great-power rank.
The victory that unmade itself
The sequel is the famous irony. Britain’s crushing war debt led straight to the stamp duties and tea taxes levied on colonies that no longer needed British protection — the French threat being gone — and within twelve years the American Revolution had begun, with France bankrolling the rebels for revenge (and bankrupting itself toward its own revolution). The war that made the British Empire thus promptly cost it America: history’s neatest demonstration that the bill for total victory arrives later, with interest.