British colonists ran out of king names, so they named this war after enemies
The French and Indian War of 1754 to 1763 pitted Britain against France, each with Indigenous allies, across North America. Europeans fold it into the Seven Years' War, but Americans treat it separately, and its name exists only because the colonists had already used up King George.
Britain and France had been formally at peace since the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, yet trade rivalry in North America kept simmering. It boiled over at the Forks of the Ohio, guarded by the French post of Fort Duquesne. In May 1754 Virginia militia commanded by George Washington ambushed a French patrol at Jumonville Glen, and open fighting followed.
The early years went badly for Britain. Edward Braddock, the new commander-in-chief, planned four simultaneous offensives in 1755, and all of them failed; his own column was wrecked at the Monongahela on 9 July and he died of his wounds days later. Further setbacks in Pennsylvania and New York followed, softened only by the seizure of Fort Beauséjour on the edge of French Acadia, after which French settlers were driven out of Acadia over nine years and replaced by New Englanders. The fiascos of 1757, including the Louisbourg expedition and the siege of Fort William Henry, brought down the British government.
William Pitt, the new prime minister, poured men and money into America just as France chose to concentrate on Europe and let New France fend for itself. Between 1758 and 1760 the British campaign took Quebec in 1759 and Montreal a year later, effectively ending the North American fighting. Under the 1763 Treaty of Paris France surrendered Canada and its claims east of the Mississippi to Britain, while a separate Treaty of Fontainebleau passed Louisiana west of the river to Spain as compensation. France kept only Saint Pierre and Miquelon.
The name reflects colonial habit. Earlier conflicts had been called after the reigning monarch, as with King William's War and Queen Anne's War, but King George's War had already been used in the 1740s, so colonists labelled this one by its opponents, even though Native nations fought on both sides. Canadians call the whole thing the Seven Years' War, while French Canadians often say War of Conquest, a phrase championed in Quebec by Jacques Lacoursière and Denis Vaugeois, drawing on Maurice Séguin's view of it as a turning point for their identity. Rarer labels include the Fourth Intercolonial War.
Source: French and Indian War
