Wars by Era
7 major conflicts, 74 battles, and an estimated 6,954,000 dead.
Charles II of Spain died childless in 1700 after naming Philip of Anjou, Louis XIV’s grandson, as heir. Louis accepted the will, while rival powers backed the Habsburg Archduke Charles and feared Bourbon domination despite formal barriers to union of the French and Spanish crowns. The resulting war ended with Philip V recognized as king of Spain but renouncing succession rights to France, while Spain’s European possessions were redistributed.
11 battles · 1,600,000 dead
Charles VI died in 1740 without a surviving son, and his daughter Maria Theresa inherited the Habsburg hereditary lands under the Pragmatic Sanction. Her succession was challenged by several powers, while Frederick II of Prussia invaded and retained most of Silesia. Maria Theresa preserved the core Habsburg monarchy, but the imperial title went first to the Bavarian Charles VII and then to her husband Francis Stephen.
11 battles · 1,200,000 dead
The North American theater of the wider Seven Years’ War grew from competing British, French, and Indigenous claims in the Ohio Valley. Native nations pursued their own strategies to defend land, sovereignty, trade, and communities rather than serving simply as European auxiliaries. Britain’s victory ended most French territorial rule in mainland North America, transformed Indigenous diplomacy, and helped create the imperial debt and policies that preceded the American Revolution.
8 battles · 200,000 dead
A global war connected the Anglo-French imperial struggle in North America, the Caribbean, West Africa, and India with a European conflict in which Prussia and Britain faced Austria, France, Russia, and their allies. Scholars often describe it as the first global war, though that label is interpretive rather than a settled chronological fact. Its peace settlements expanded British imperial power and left Prussia in possession of Silesia.
8 battles · 2,400,000 dead
The American Revolution began as a crisis within the British Empire and became a war in which thirteen colonies secured independence with decisive French aid and wider Spanish and Dutch participation. Patriots, Loyalists, enslaved and free Black people, and Native nations made different choices under coercive conditions. The new United States adopted republican institutions while preserving slavery and expanding claims to Indigenous lands.
14 battles · 75,000 dead
The Haitian Revolution was the largest and most successful uprising of enslaved people in modern history. Beginning in Saint-Domingue in 1791, shifting coalitions of enslaved rebels, free people of color, French republicans, royalists, Spanish, and British forces fought through emancipation and civil war to independence. Haitian forces defeated Napoleon’s expedition, and on January 1, 1804 Haiti became the second independent state in the Americas and the first modern state founded through the abolition of slavery.
11 battles · 229,000 dead
War between revolutionary France and successive European coalitions began in 1792. Emergency mobilization, including the levée en masse of August 1793, expanded French forces and tied military service to revolutionary citizenship, while coercion, conscription, professional soldiers, and requisition remained central. French armies survived invasion and then expanded the Republic’s power; their campaigns also elevated Napoleon Bonaparte.
11 battles · 1,250,000 dead