The War of the Austrian Succession was the last great power conflict with the Bourbon-Habsburg dynastic conflict at its heart. It occurred from 1740 to 1748 and marked the rise of Prussia as a major power. Related conflicts included King George's War, the War of Jenkins' Ear, the First Carnatic War and the First and the Second Silesian Wars.

The raid on Lorient was a British amphibious operation in the region around the town of Lorient from 29 September to 10 October 1746 during the War of the Austrian Succession. It was planned as an attempt to force the French to withdraw their forces from Flanders to reinforce their own coast. At the same time, as Lorient was used by the French East India Company as a base and supply depot, its destruction would serve British objectives in the East Indies.

Around 4500 British soldiers were embarked, but the ships carrying them had to wait off the Lorient coast several days, allowing the town to organise its defences and call in reinforcements from other towns in the region. The British troops only arrived in the outskirts of the town on 3 October and negotiations for the town's surrender were ended on by the bombardment of 5–7 October. On 7 October the British force was ordered to retreat. The British engineers' incompetence and losses to disease and fatigue forced the commander to stop his offensive. At the same time, the French commander originally planned to surrender, believing his enemy to have an overwhelming numerical superiority and knowing the weakness of his defences and the poor training and weaponry of his own troops. He made a surrender offer on 7 October, shortly after the enemy's departure, and never received a reply.

John Penn (January 28, 1700 – October 25, 1746) was a proprietor of the colonial Province of Pennsylvania (later the American state – the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania after 1776). He was the eldest son of the colony's founder, William Penn (1644–1718), by his second wife, Hannah Callowhill Penn (1671–1726). Since he was the only one of Penn's children to be born in the New World, the Americas (in the Slate Roof House in Philadelphia), he was called "the American" by his family.

Penn was raised by a cousin in Bristol, England, where he learned the trade of merchant, specializing in linen. As a result of his father's will and by his mother's appointment, he received half of the proprietorship of Pennsylvania.

On May 12, 1732, John—with his brothers Thomas Penn and Richard Penn, as the proprietors of Pennsylvania—signed an order to create a commission. This order was directed to Governor Gordon, Isaac Norris, Samuel Preston, James Logan, and Andrew Hamilton, Esquires, and to the gentlemen James Steel and Robert Charles. The commission, which was to be made up of at least three or more of these individuals, was given full power on behalf of the proprietors for the "running, marking, and laying out" of any boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland. This was in accordance with the signed agreement between the Penn brothers and Charles Calvert, 5th Baron Baltimore on May 10, 1732.

He returned to Pennsylvania in September 1734 and attended the meetings of the Pennsylvania Provincial Council, but went back to England in 1735, to support the colony's rights in the boundary dispute with Maryland. The ultimate resolution of this dispute was the surveying of the Mason–Dixon line. Penn, his brother Thomas, and their agents were responsible for the infamous "Walking Purchase", under which the Penn family acquired more than one million acres (400,000 ha) of Pennsylvania land from the Lenape Indians.