Most people know the Great War. But how well do we really know the first world war? The answer may not be where you expect.
[00:00:03] When we dig up the first of history, the signal is often weak. The oldest music ever recorded for playback is nearly impossible to hear, but its significance is deafening. It's the first scratch in time, the mark that lets us find all the others that followed. But sometimes, what we think is the first isn't after all. This is The Digressor.
[00:00:40] Most stories about firsts have a clear beginning, but wars don't work like that. Wars bleed into each other. Old grudges become new battlefields. Alliances crack and reshuffle in different shapes. A conflict ends and its aftermath quietly lays the foundation for the next one.
[00:01:05] So when we talk about the First World War, there's a strange kind of irony to the question. Because by the time history gives a war a number, World War I, World War II, it's already acknowledging a pattern. A pattern humanity didn't learn from the first time. Or the time after that.
[00:01:25] Most people point to 1914 as where it began. A shot fired, empires mobilizing, and a chain reaction that ignited half the planet. And for good reason. World War I was massive and catastrophic. It reshaped the world in ways we still feel today. However, believe it or not, it was not the first World War.
[00:01:52] To find that, we have to look backward. To muskets and wooden ships. The Seven Years' War. A conflict so widespread, so interconnected, that historians now look at it and realize this is where the world first went to war. If World War I was the Great Industrial War, the Seven Years' War was the Great Imperial One. It began in 1756, though fighting had already simmered years before.
[00:02:20] Europe was a powder keg of alliances and rivalries. Britain and France hated each other on a practically professional level. Prussia and Austria were locked in a grudge match over territory. Russia, Spain, Sweden, Portugal, Hanover, Saxony. Everyone had a stake. But this wasn't just a European feud. Not even close. The Seven Years' War sprawled outward. Across North America is the French and Indian War.
[00:02:50] Across Africa. Across the Caribbean. Across India and the struggle between the colonial companies backed by their empires. Across the oceans that connected them all. This was a world war before anyone had the vocabulary for it. Battles were fought in forests, on coastlines, in cities, on rivers, and at sea. Armies marched thousands of miles. Navies clashed from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. Alliances snapped and reformed.
[00:03:19] Entire regions changed hands. And when it finally ended in 1763, the world was a different place. Britain emerged as the dominant global superpower with vast new territories, especially in North America and India. France lost so much that resentment began building in ways that would later help ignite the French Revolution. Indigenous nations in North America were devastated.
[00:03:46] Their fates now tied to an empire that didn't understand, nor care about, the promises France had made. And the enormous war debt Britain carried would lead it to tax its American colonies. Which, in case you've heard anything about 1776, didn't go over particularly well. The Seven Years' War reshaped the world, as well as set the stage for the next two centuries. Revolutions, colonization, the rise of Britain, the fall of France, the formation of the United States,
[00:04:16] the expansion of European empires, tensions that would eventually help fuel World Wars I and II. Every global conflict that came after was living in its wake. So yes, World War I may be the one that textbooks call the First World War. But the real first global conflict, the original war that truly involved the world, was fought 15 years before America even declared independence.
[00:04:45] The Seven Years' War. The world's first world war. But I digress. The Rambler Network.