In the US, the Seven Years War is taught as the French-Indian War, but it involved every great European power at the time and was a global conflict. Doing some more reading about it I got to wondering why it wasn't truly considered the first "world war". To my knowledge, The Great War was retrospectively changed to World War 1 after World War 2 had occurred, but knowing that, why wouldn't they have changed the title of the Seven Years conflict to "world war 1" and claimed The Great War as "world war 2"? So on and so forth. Is it just semantics, or were there defining factors that separate the conflicts from falling into a similar category? I hope this question makes sense, sorry if it doesn't.
More can obviously be said on the topic, but this answer from a now deleted user (and the follow-up comments) do a good job at illustrating why the 7 Year's War is not considered to be a "World War".
Another similar thread exists here (and I think the posts were by the same user).
“Everyone knows … that the turmoil that is agitating Europe has its beginnings in America, that the struggle that has broken out between the English and French about the cod fishery and unknown areas of Canada has given the impetus to the bloody war that sends our part of the world into sorrow.”[1]
Writing in 1757, Frederick the Great believed that the on-going Seven Years’ War had erupted in North America as a result of Anglo-French imperial encroachment. Whether this was a genuine statement on the global nature of eighteenth century warfare, or simply a form of apologia for his invasion of Saxony in 1756, there can be little doubt that warfare, and the desire for European hegemony, had gone global. Historians such as Winston Churchill and Daniel Baugh have described the Seven Years’ War as the ‘first World War’, however the roots of global conflict extended back into the seventeenth century.[2]
The periods of intermittent warfare in North America, known collectively as the Beaver Wars (1642-1698) and French and Indian Wars (1689-1763), exemplified the fusion of European geopolitics with colonial trade. These wars found their origins in the contestation for raw materials and trade, a concept David Hume (1711-1776) defined as ‘the Jealousy of Trade’.[3] As a result of the 1688-89 Glorious Revolution and eruption of the Nine Years’ War (1689-98), North American border skirmishes became encompassed under the general umbrella of European wars. The North American theatre of the Nine Years’ War, known as King William’s War, was yet another border conflict in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Lowlands.
However, William III’s declaration of war against France on 17 May 1689 (O.S.) marked a clear division between the Beaver Wars and the approaching global wars of the eighteenth century. While the Beaver Wars did overlap with King William’s War, the objectives of war had changed. The European theatre sought to establish a balance of power, curtail French expansionism and cement the reign of William. For New England, the objective became one of survival and the subjugation of New France that would be finally realised with the surrender of Montreal some seventy years later. This shift in objectives, from the disruption of Indian trade to global hegemony, has led historians such as Michael Laramie to describe King William’s War as the first true ‘contest for North America’.[4]
For me, the answer is absolutely yes. The Seven Years' War was a 'World War'. However, so was The War of the League of Augsburg, the War of the Spanish Succession, and the War of the Austrian Succession if you apply the same reasoning to them. Ultimately, how far back should we retroactively label the World Wars?
The Seven Years' War was certainly the biggest of these global wars; it was the only one with fighting in Europe, North America, India, South America, and Africa. The question is whether you want to make a distinction between what a 'World War' is and what an 'umbrella war' is, something I touched on just today in a blog post I wrote:
Put simply, an umbrella war is a very big war that encompasses a number of regional conflicts across the globe. The war will have an epicentre (usually European) as well as a number of different regional theatres, such as North America and India, which fall under the general ‘umbrella’ of the wider war.
Now we’ve come to the crux of the ‘Problem of the Seven Years’ War’. Historians from different countries within these global regions may refer to the war by different names:
The very fact that the terms ‘French and Indian War’ and ‘Third Silesian War’ became part of the English-language historical parlance shows that conceptualizations of the various regional conflicts continue to shape assumptions about the scope of the Seven Years’ War.[5]
[1] Frederick the Great, Die Werke Friedrichs des Grossen in deutscher Übersetzung (1913 edition), as quoted in Jürgen Luh “Frederick the Great and the First ‘World’ War” in Mark H. Danley and Patrick J. Speelman (ed.), The Seven Years’ War: Global Views (Boston, Massachusetts: Brill, 2012) pp. 1-22 p. 1
[2] Daniel Baugh, The Global Seven Years War, 1754-1763 (Oxfordshire: Routledge Taylor & Francis, 2014), p. 1
[3] “Nothing is more usual, among states which have made some advances in commerce, than to look on the progress of their neighbours with a suspicious eye, to consider all trading states as their rivals, and to suppose that it is impossible for any of them to flourish, but at their expense”; David Hume, “Of The Jealousy Of Trade” in Eugene F. Miller (ed.), Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund Inc., 1987), pp. 334-338, p. 334
[4] Michael G. Laramie, King William’s War: The First Contest for North America, 1689-1697 (Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2017)
[5] Mark H. Danley, The Seven Years’ War: Global Views (Boston: Brill, 2012), xxiv