Chapter 17 - War and Empire

Summary

War and Empire’ examines Goldsmith’s commentaries on colonial and national conflicts, wars of expansion and disasters in foreign fields, exploring two related concerns: the falling status of the ‘event’ in the historiographical and political imagination, and the decline, as he saw it, of ‘great men’. The chapter provides clear details of the major conflicts which occurred during Goldsmith’s lifetime: the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–8; including the War of Jenkins’s Ear); the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), by far the most important; and finally the mounting crisis in the American colonies, its final trajectory discernible even when Goldsmith died in 1774.