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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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.
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