Royal Navy commanders and world-war planning

Edward Boscawen, Edward Hawke, and George Pocock carried Royal Navy power into a worldwide conflict. Their operations support the claim that governments entered the Seven Years' War thinking across theatres and retained that outlook through the peace. Fighting was still under way around the world as the war ended. Late nineteenth-century planners returned to this example because they expected their own next major conflict to span the world, even though its alliances remained unknown. The war provides the immediate historical bridge to the Jeune École theory discussed next.