Britain at war

Since 1603 England and Scotland have been under the same monarchs. After the revolutions in 1688–89 and 1702–03, projects for a closer union miscarried, and in 1703–04 international tension provoked a dangerous legislative warfare between the separate parliaments of England and Scotland. On both sides of the border, however, statesmen were beginning to realize that an incorporating union offered the only mutually acceptable solution to a problem that had suddenly become urgent: Scotland’s need for economic security and material assistance and England’s need for political safeguards against French attacks and a possible Jacobite restoration, for which Scotland might serve as a conveniently open back door. England’s bargaining card was freedom of trade; Scotland’s was acquiescence in the Hanoverian succession. Both points were quickly accepted by the commissioners appointed by Queen Anne to discuss union, and within three months they had agreed on a detailed treaty (April–July 1706).

The two kingdoms were to be united, the Protestant succession was adopted, and trade was to be free and equal throughout Great Britain and its dominions. Subject to certain temporary concessions, taxation, direct and indirect, would also be uniform; and England compensated Scotland for undertaking to share responsibility for England’s national debt by payment of an equivalent of £398,085 10 shillings. Scots law and the law courts were to be preserved. In the united Parliament, Scotland, because of its relative poverty, was given the inadequate representation of 45 commoners and 16 lords. By separate statutes annexed to the treaty, the Presbyterian Church of Scotland and the Episcopal Church of England were secured against change.
The royal assent was given on March 6, and the union went into effect on May 1, 1707, assent that effected the union of England and Scotland under the name of Great Britain.

The Seven Years' War, 1756-63, was the first global war.  France, Austria, Russia, Saxony, Sweden and Spain were fighting against Prussia, Great Britain, and Hanover. Battles were fought in Europe, North America, Africa, The Philippines and India. Britain emerged from the war as the world's leading colonial power having gained a number of new territories at the Treaty of Paris in 1763 and established itself as the world's pre-eminent naval power.

The war arose out of the attempt of the Austrian Habsburgs to win back the rich province of Silesia, which had been wrested from them by Frederick II the Great of Prussia during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48). But the Seven Years’ War also involved overseas colonial struggles between Great Britain and France, the main points of contention between these two traditional rivals being the struggle for control of North America and India. Whether those two conflicts would be kept separate or would be merged together, and how, in the latter case, the Powers concerned would combine, were the great questions of the hour. Britain’s alliance with Prussia was undertaken partly in order to protect electoral Hanover, the British ruling dynasty’s continental possession, from the threat of a French takeover.