"The Death of General Wolfe" by Benjamin West, 1771.
The Seven Years' War was a conflict fought between Great Britain and France from 1754 to 1763. It was known in North America as the French and Indian War, in India as the Third Carnatic War, and in Prussia and Austria as the Third Silesian War.
In June 1754, at the beginning of the conflict, representatives from seven British colonies met at Albany, New York Province, where they approved Benjamin Franklin's Albany Plan of Union, which later gave rise to the Britannic Design.
After initial victories by the French at Oswego and Fort William Henry, British and American colonial forces succeeded in taking Louisbourg and Fort Duquesne in 1758, Fort Niagara and Quebec City in 1759, and Montreal in 1760. These British victories in North America resulted in the loss by France of nearly all her American colonies, as by the 1763 Treaty of Paris she ceded Quebec to Britain and the Louisiana territory to Spain, retaining only two islands near Newfoundland and two in the Caribbean.
The Seven Years' War was the fourth in a series of five conflicts between Britain and France ranging over more a century, collectively known in North America as the "French and Indian Wars". The war nearly doubled Britain's national debt, and the effort by Parliament to collect taxes from the colonies to relieve this debt was a proximate cause of the North American Rebellion.