The
Second Hundred Years' War is a
periodization used by some
historians to describe the series of military conflicts between the
Kingdom of England (later
Great Britain) and
France that occurred from about 1689 to 1815. The term appears to have been coined by
JR Seeley in his influential work
The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (1883).
Like the
Hundred Years' War, this term does not describe a single military event but a persistent general state of war between the two primary belligerents. The use of the phrase as an overarching category indicates the interrelation of all the wars as components of the rivalry between France and Britain for world power. It was a war between and over the future of each state's
colonial empires.
The various wars between the two states during the
eighteenth century usually involved other European countries in large alliances; but except for the
War of the Quadruple Alliance when they were bound by the
Anglo-French Alliance, France and Britain always opposed one another. Some of the wars, such as the
Seven Years' War, have been considered
world wars and included battles in the growing colonies in
India, the
Americas, and ocean shipping routes around the globe.
The series of wars began with the accession of the
Dutch William III as
King of England in the
Revolution of 1688. The later
Stuarts, as converts to
Roman Catholicism, had sought friendly terms with
Louis XIV.
James I and
Charles I, both
Protestants, had avoided involvement as much as possible in the
Thirty Years' War; they, too, had sought peaceful terms with France during the seventeenth century.
Charles II and
James II had even actively supported Louis XIV in his
War against the Dutch Republic. William III, however, sought to oppose Louis XIV's Catholic regime and styled himself as a Protestant champion. Tensions continued in the following decades, during which France protected
Jacobites who sought to overthrow the later Stuarts and, after 1715, the
Hanoverians.
After William III, the opposition of France and Britain shifted from religion to economy and trade: the two states vied for colonial domination in the Americas and Asia. The
Seven Years' War was one of the greatest and most decisive conflicts.
The military rivalry continued with British opposition of the
French Revolution and the ensuing wars with first the
new Republic and then the
First Empire of
Napoleon. His defeat in 1813 at the
Battle of Leipzig, followed in 1815 by the
Hundred Days and the second defeat at the
Battle of Waterloo, effectively ended the recurrent war between France and Britain. The recurrent rhetoric used in each country shifted from references to a "natural enemy" to an agreement to tolerate one another. Common interests led the two to cooperate in the
Crimean War. A century after fighting one another, the two were able to establish the
Entente Cordiale, demonstrating that the "first" and "second" Hundred Years' Wars were in the past; cultural differences continued, but violent conflict was over.
"Carthage" and "Rome"
Many in France referred to Great Britain as "
Perfidious Albion," suggesting that it was a fundamentally untrustworthy nation. French people compared Britain and France to ancient
Carthage and
Rome, respectively, with the former being cast as a greedy imperialist state that collapsed, while the latter was an intellectual and cultural capital that flourished:
The republicans knew as well as the Bourbons that British control of the oceans weighed in Continental power politics, and that France could not dominate Europe without destroying Britain. "Carthage"—vampire, tyrant of the seas, "perfidious" enemy and bearer of a corrupting commercial civilization—contrasted with "Rome", bearer of universal order, philosophy and selfless values.
Wars included in the extended conflict
See also
Footnotes
