War of Jenkins' Ear

The War of Jenkins' Ear was fought between Britain and Spain from 1739 to 1748 over colonial trade rights in the Caribbean and the Americas, taking its name from an incident in which a Spanish coast guard captain severed the ear of British merchant captain Robert Jenkins in 1731, an episode Jenkins presented to the British Parliament in 1738 to help rally support for war. Fighting centered on the Caribbean and the borderlands of Georgia and Spanish Florida, and included the major British amphibious assault on the fortified Spanish port of Cartagena de Indias in 1741, which ended in a costly and decisive British defeat after disease devastated the besieging force. The conflict lost its separate identity as it merged into the broader War of the Austrian Succession, which drew in most of the major European powers, and it was finally closed along with that wider war by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, which restored the prewar territorial status quo between Britain and Spain.