Contemporaries regarded the Peace of Paris, which concluded the Seven Years' War in 1763, as a diplomatic event of the first importance, if only because it transferred vastly more territory between European empires than had any previous treaty. Modern historians, by contrast, have accorded it little attention. Although every general account of the Seven Years' War, of course, mentions the treaty, few accord it more than cursory attention. Indeed, since 1950, the Peace of Paris has been the subject of a single monograph and only a handful of scholarly articles. The Peace of Westphalia, by contrast, has occasioned at least a dozen scholarly books and editions since the mid-twentieth century; the Congress of Vienna has been the subject of at least ten; and the Treaty of Versailles, somewhere between forty and fifty. Mere slothfulness among eighteenth-century scholars cannot explain so great a disparity. Rather, it reflects the prevailing view among diplomatic historians that the Peace of Paris simply had less enduring significance than those other great treaties, which, after all, appear to have constructed, restored, and undermined the modern European state system.

This chapter argues, however, that there is still something to be learned from the Peace of Paris. When seen in the context of the war it ended and the events that followed, it reveals much about the assumptions of peacemakers in the mid-eighteenth century, the effects of the Seven Years' War as a transforming event, and ironic interrelationships between peace making in the century's greatest imperial war and the wars of the revolutionary age that followed.