When in 1754 the French built Fort Duquesne, a sturdy log fort at the Forks of the Ohio, the British perceived a deadly threat to their coast-hugging colonies.

But what seemed like French aggression to royal governors in Williamsburg and Philadelphia was more a panicky defensive move, according to historian Jonathan Dull.

Dull, who has been editing the papers of Benjamin Franklin for the past 27 years, was one of a dozen speakers recently at a French and Indian War seminar on "Cultures in Conflict." The event drew more than 100 history buffs, re-enactors, park rangers, historians and journalists to Shenandoah University in Winchester, Va. The location was appropriate. Winchester was where George Washington placed his headquarters for overseeing a chain of frontier forts built to protect British colonists from Indian raiders.

Overreacting to the presence of a handful of English traders in the area around modern-day Pittsburgh, the French government had concluded that the British were seeking to drive a wedge between its territories in Canada and Louisiana. They began to build a series of forts in the Ohio Valley. "France went to war to save Canada," Dull said.

And what a conflict it became. Eventually spreading to Europe, Asia and Africa as the Seven Years' War, it is often called the first world war.

Control of the land around what became Pittsburgh was a prime objective in the early years of the struggle, which began 250 years ago. At what is now called Jumonville Glen in Fayette County, Washington, wearing a British uniform and nominally commanding militia and Indian troops, killed or captured all but one member of a French force sent out from Fort Duquesne.

Understandably, that hostile act angered the French who sent out a larger army and forced Washington's surrender at Fort Necessity.

The classic, and maybe only, joke about the conflict is: "Who won the French and Indian War? The French or the Indians?" The reality, of course, is that the war in North America embroiled French and British regulars, French-speaking Canadians, Colonial militiamen and almost a dozen Native American tribes. And it was this larger cast of characters that were the subjects of attention in Winchester.

"Who won?" turns out to be a really complicated question.

At first blush it seems like the British won. They claimed Canada, Florida and some rich Caribbean islands as spoils of war. They gained nominal control of the Ohio Valley, although they had to make vague promises, never kept, to their Indian allies to keep white settlers on the east side of the Alleghenies.

What the British soon found was that protecting a worldwide territorial empire was very expensive. That meant new taxes, and those new taxes produced restive colonials. While American farmers and merchants saw themselves as full partners in a crusade to defeat the French, the short-sighted British government treated them as ungrateful, greedy subjects.

When the war started, the Iroquois Confederacy, based in upstate New York, controlled a huge swathe of North America. Its tribal council had a 150-year tradition of successful diplomacy with the British and French. For much of the war, its component tribes stayed neutral.

War's end found their influence in the Ohio Valley reduced but their own villages mostly untouched. With the departure of the French, however, they had lost much of their bargaining power. They became overly dependent on the English Indian agent Sir William Johnson for trade goods and gifts. "Not warfare, but welfare marked the end of Iroquois autonomy," explained Timothy Shannon, an associate professor of history at Gettysburg College.

If much of talk radio can be described as the credulous trading insults with the misinformed, the seminar at Shenandoah University might be its mirror opposite. Some of the presenting scholars had spent years researching their topics, and yet they remained hesitant to draw anything but tentative conclusions.

That's not to say passions were not sometimes raised regarding centuries-old disputes.

A Canadian historian and museum curator named Rene Chartrand discussed why French militia units, starting as early as 1670, were so successful in holding off their always more numerous British-American foes. Learning from their Native American neighbors, they were early adopters of Indian-style dress and tactics.

One element of Canadian tactics, however, entailed targeting non-combatants, including women and children, an audience member observed. Weren't those terror attacks on civilians "a dark stain" on the record of Canadian militia units?

Any dark stains were large enough to cover both sides, Chartrand replied. The Canadian militia units were formed following raids on French settlements by the Indian allies of the British, he said. "[The Canadians] found a way to turn the tables."

It was Fred Anderson, a professor of history at the University of Colorado and author of "Crucible of War," a prize-winning history of the Seven Years' War, who summed up some of the ironies and unintended consequences of the struggle for North America:

Pursuit of stability by the French combined with misreading of enemy intentions by the British led to a conflict that soon expanded beyond the dark forests of Western Pennsylvania. And when victory came, for the British and for the Iroquois, it set up the conditions for the next war: the American Revolution. Within 20 years both great powers would be forced from territories they had lately won or held at such great cost.