I’ve always wondered this. The 7 Years war was fought on multiple continents and decided the world as we know it, just like both World Wars. I just don’t get why it wasn’t seen as a world war and I came here to ask why.
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It was a global war and it is seen that way. Are you just referring to the fact that it doesn’t have “World War” as a part of its name?
Someone better versed in history is free to correct me, but from my understanding it’s largely about the powers involved and how central they were.
Many wars have conflicts and participants not from the same continent in some capacity, and most of the powerhouses and main nations/conflicts were still Europe-centric for the 7 years war tmk. Powers based in the Americas weren’t really that relevant yet and it was more an Americas theater for European powers to fight in.
Meanwhile in the WWs, major powers from the Americas and Asia played a much bigger role in a more independent capacity, with many conflicts being entirely outside of European influence/theater/power involvement, but still rooted in the same war. E.g. USA v Japan.
Granted at the time, WWI wasn’t termed a world war, but The Great War. It didn’t become known as one of the world wars until afterwards/there was another conflict of a comparable scale.
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There were “only” less than 1 million casualties in the 7 years war and although there was fighting on multiple continents the actually fighting forces were almost entirely europian.
In WW1 there were just south of 20 million casualties and it was fought by every advanced nation of the planet, however mostly in europe so there might be an argument here.
WW2 however is a different beast entirely, nearly 75 million confirmed dead, every single continent on earth saw fighting, 75% of counties were directly involved, the rest were indirectly involved. Nukes.
Just as an extra point, given that growth…. We DO NOT want a third…..
Most likely because it simply predates the English term “world war”. The term “world war” originates around the middle of the 19th century, and World War I is generally described as the “first” since it occurred after the term was coined.
Note that some historians do consider the Seven Years’ War to be a “world war”, along with several other historical global conflicts (the Nine Years’ War, the War of Spanish Succession, the War of Austrian Succession, the French Revolutionary Wars, and the Napoleonic Wars).
But if we were to go back and rename all the global wars in order of occurrence, you would end up with non-historians having no clue which war you’re talking about. In order, you’d have:
* First World War – the Nine Years’ War (1689-1697)
* Second World War – the War of the Spanish Succession (1704-1714)
* Third World War – the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748)
* Fourth World War – the Seven Years’ War (1754-1763)
* Fifth World War – the French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802)
* Sixth World War – the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815)
* Seventh World War – World War I (1914-1918)
* Eighth World War – World War II (1939-1945)
So now when you say “World War I”, you’d have to clarify whether you mean the Nine Years’ War or the war that occurred at the beginning of the 20th century.
~~I think you are missing a big point.~~
~~World War 1, was not coined at the outbreak, nor at the end of that war.~~
~~The first world war was actually called The Great War. Because it was a huge increase in the lethality and really all aspects of the war.~~
~~Gone was the innocence and naivety of previous wars, war was now a generation destroying, terrible event.~~
~~Then when the next war happened that was even worse, they decided that The Second Great war was a bit weird. So they renamed The Great War as The first world war, and named the second one.. well The Second World War.~~
Turns out that is actually wrong and they were referring to the war as The World War, as early at 1914. You can read this in the Wikipedia Article about the term “World War”
>The term “first world war” was first used in September 1914 by German biologist and philosopher [Ernst Haeckel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Haeckel), who claimed that “there is no doubt that the course and character of the feared ‘European War’ … will become the first world war in the full sense of the word”,[^([4])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_war#cite_note-FOOTNOTEShapiroEpstein2006329-4) citing a wire service report in the [*Indianapolis Star*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Indianapolis_Star) on 20 September 1914.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_war](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_war)
Actually, the War of the Austrian Succession in the 1740s and the Seven Years War of 1756-63 are often considered the first truly world wars because they were fought in the European colonies as well as in Europe. By the time the Europeans had significant colonial holdings their conflicts spread across the globe. The First World War is quite similar to previous European conflicts in this regard. With perhaps the difference being the intensity of the conflict, its arenas in dozens of colonies (the sheer number of allies and co-belligerents), and the eventual direct involvement of the United States. Then the Second World War involved Japan too. So you could argue (and you’d get no pushback from historians) that the globalization of European war did not begin in the 20th century. Source: I’m an international relations prof, but you can look up these conflicts on Wikipedia.
At the end of the day, this is really a linguistics question more than anything, and the answer is that people don’t name things based on some logical scientific system. They didn’t make a list of all the wars and run statistics and mathematically classify them based on scale and casualties in order to determine the most objective naming scheme. That’s just not how language works.
People name things largely based on what feels right. That kid in the neighborhood who’s nicknamed “Slim”—did they measure all the neighborhood kids and determine he was objectively the slimmest? Obviously not. “Slim” just felt like the right nickname. Maybe someone else is actually skinnier, but that doesn’t matter, because Slim is Slim now.
WWI happened a century and a half after the Seven-Years war, so nobody was alive who had experienced both, and evidently people didn’t really consider it a second iteration of the Seven-Years War, so they just called it the Great War. You can make arguments that maybe WWI really was just Seven Years Part II, I dunno, you’d have to ask a historian… but that doesn’t matter, because that’s not what the people at the time decided to call it, and it’s not what stuck.
WWII happened only 30 years after WWI, and largely as a direct result of tensions created in the aftermath of WWI. It definitely felt like a sequel to the people of the time, quite a lot of whom were alive for both wars. So the one-and-two naming scheme stuck.
There are little logic in the naming of wars. For example the war of 1812 can refer to either the American war of that year or the Russian war of that year. Both were campaigns in the Napoleonic wars which also fits your definition of a world war. The names are made to help distinguish wars when they are being discussed, usually after the fact. People in different areas might call the war different things and talk about different parts of the war. So there is no common logic in naming the wars.
The 7 years war were part of a series of wars fought among European powers at the time. There were a number of succession crisis as kings and emperors died without any obvious hairs. And there were huge colonial disputes. The 30 years war was just a bit over a hundred years before and most countries had been at war more often then not. Some historians even name this period the second hundred years wars. What made the 7 years war different from say the war or the Austrian succession or any of the colonial boarder wars was the length of the war. So it got its name.
WW1 was initially called the Great War. A term that was nicknamed during the build up to the war. There were some wars between the European powers before the war but they were much smaller and contained. The solution to these had also been to form big alliances which meant that there were several decades of relative peace in Europe and among the great powers. The name of the war came from these alliances which forced the next war to be the Great War as opposed to a number of smaller wars. They were not comparing it to the 7 years war or the Napoleonic wars except maybe accepting those too as great wars.
The term WWI came at the end of the Great War during discussions of terms of peace. A lot of people were worried about a possible second Great War. But that does not sound as a good name for a war. Instead someone came up with the term World War 2 which sounded better. This name stuck. In the interwar period most people called it the Great War unless they were talking about a possible second war. It was first when WWII broke out that most people started calling it World War 1. The definition of it being a war fought on all continents were something that were made up later. This argument were used to say that WW3 had not started yet during the cold war as different minor wars between US and USSR backed regimes were going on, but not quite on a global scale at the same time.
The Seven Years War IS commonly described as world war in history texts. Virtually any meaningful study of it these days will describe both it and the Napoleonic Wars as world wars.
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