Resources

The Seven Years’ War saw fighting across the globe, but in fiscal-military terms, Europe remained the epicenter and was the source of most of the manpower, ships, weaponry, and other war materials. Non-European resources were important in campaigns elsewhere; these operations nonetheless always depended on European input, whereas non-European resources played only a minimal role in the fighting in Europe. This chapter assesses the character, mobilization, and employment of war-making resources, and evaluates the relative efficiency of the belligerents in finding and deploying what they needed, and how they responded to their experience through postwar reform. It argues that the superior ability of Britain and Prussia to mobilize, procure, and employ resources played a significant part in determining the war’s outcome.