The final clash of the wars of 1739–1748 was the battle between the British and Spanish squadrons in the Caribbean, near Havana, sometimes called the ‘battle of Havana’. This may seem a suitable ending to a war which began with a quarrel between these two states over the powers of and abuses by the Spanish coastguard cutters. It implies that the War of Jenkins’ Ear was an Anglo-Spanish war, the latest in a series which began in 1702. And so, of course, it was, except that halfway through it became also an Anglo-French war (and from 1740 it had been a Franco-Austrian war and an Austro-Prussian war, amongst others). And it was in 1743/1744, when serious attempts were made by the French to invade Britain (a failed version of which actually happened in 1745 with the Jacobite rebellion), that the nature of the wider war shifted. Fighting France was a much more dangerous business than fighting Spain.

The shift from Spain as an enemy to Spain and France as joint enemies continued along that trajectory after 1748, so that within six or seven years a new war had begun in which France was the prime enemy, and Spain joined in only at the end; this was a process which followed in the next war, 1778–1783, in which France was heavily committed, while Spain, joining late, confined itself to its own concerns. In effect, the international contest which had been between Britain and Spain since 1702, shifted between 1739 and 1748 into one between Britain and France, and it remained like that for the next sixty years and more; and yet Spain was still involved, and the Caribbean also, since all three remained colonial neighbours there, notably with Spain scarcely abating any of its universalist claims to the whole area. There were further changes as well. Whereas the Anglo-Spanish conflict in the Caribbean had been restricted very largely to British raids on Spanish lands and disputes at sea, the conflict between Britain and France expanded from the colonies which each held in 1750 to engulf all the other lands and islands of the region, those which until then had been neutral, and developed from raids and sea fights to conquests and full-scale battles.