Review by Choice Review
Taylor's sequel to his sweeping, continentally focused American Colonies (CH, Jun'02, 39-6024) is a masterful and important reconceiving of the American Revolutionary era. As this book's subtitle indicates, Taylor employs continental history to situate the American Revolution in a wider temporal and geographic context than this period's typical narrative. The result is a synthesis that gives depth, nuance, and a global perspective to the seemingly familiar story of independence and the launching of the "republican experiment." Here, readers see the impact of other European colonial powers, particularly France and Spain, in the North American struggle for empire that produced the initial stirrings of the British colonies' revolt. Native American and enslaved peoples are actual agents, as opposed to tacked-on supplements to the "real" narrative. Taylor presents the Revolutionary War as the global struggle it actually was, with pivotal moments in India, Canada, and the Caribbean. Many historical syntheses strive to balance a large scope with narrative coherence. Few succeed, but Taylor's is one that does. Gracefully written and informed by the latest scholarship, this accessible yet comprehensive study is one that scholars and students of the American Revolution must read. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. --Kevin M. Gannon, Grand View University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
IN 2001 ALAN TAYLOR, one of America's most distinguished historians and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, published a well-received book entitled "American Colonies," which he regarded as "a half step toward a more global (and less national) sensibility for our place in time." That book challenged the traditional focus on the English and British contributions to American colonial history by including the other cultures - Native American, African, Spanish, French, Dutch and even Russian - that were involved in the settlements that eventually became the United States. Taylor says "American Revolutions" is "a sequel" to that earlier work. Most books on the Revolution, he writes, "focus on the national story of the United States....That approach demotes neighboring empires and native peoples to bit players and minor obstacles to inevitable American expansion." In this volume, Taylor seeks to set the American Revolution in the broadest possible context - not only involving it in all the struggles of the rival European empires in the New World, but making the native peoples and the African slaves more important, indeed, even central, to it. It was not just the Eastern Seaboard's protesting taxes that explains the Revolution. Conflicts in the trans-Appalachian west, Taylor contends, need to be linked "with resistance to parliamentary taxes as equal halves of a constitutional crisis that disrupted the British Empire in North America." The several small uprisings that took place in the Spanish Empire in the early 1780s may not have greatly affected the course of the American Revolution, but the slave rebellion on the French island of Saint-Domingue in the 1790s certainly did; indeed, Taylor seems to have selected the end date, 1804, in his subtitle in order to include the creation of the second republic in the Americas, Haiti. Still, the American upheaval was so gory, so violent and above all so consequential for the world that it necessarily overwhelms all these other revolutions. Taylor really wants to show that the Revolution was anything but the "good, orderly, restrained and successful" event usually depicted "in popular history books and films." By broadening the context, he aims to desacralize the Revolution, to explode popular myths about it and to rip aside the mantle of nobility, dignity and heroism that he believes has too long covered up its sordid and bloody reality. It certainly was bloody. Twenty-five thousand Americans in the military died in the war, 1 percent of the population, more deaths proportionally than in any other war in our history except for the Civil War. The war went on for eight years, the longest in our history until Vietnam, and it touched all parts of the country, including its western regions. It was also a civil war, "rife with divisions, violence and destruction." About 20 percent of the population remained loyal to the British Empire. These half-million Loyalists suffered greatly for their devotion to the king. The Patriots, the term Taylor prefers to use for the supporters of the Revolution, intimidated them, tarred and feathered them and confiscated their property. "In the name of liberty," Taylor writes, "Patriots suppressed free speech, broke into private mail and terrorized their critics.... Patriots believed only in the liberty of their press." In the end, at least 60,000 Loyalists fled the nation for other parts of the British Empire. In a prodigious display of historical research, Taylor has drawn on nearly a thousand books and articles, listed in his 55-page bibliography. Because he has expanded the chronology of the Revolution into the 19th century and has included so much beyond the well-known headline events, he has some difficulty fitting everything in. He often packs so many incidents into each paragraph, with actions succeeding and crowding in upon one another, that there is no space to expand and develop any one of them. Consequently, they tend to get bunched up and leveled, and the narrative often comes to seem unusually compressed and flattened. Insofar as anything is highlighted in Taylor's narrative, it is the many Patriot hypocrisies and contradictions. Southerners, Taylor suggests, engaged in the Revolution principally to protect their property in enslaved Africans, but "implausibly blamed the persistence of slavery on the British." The Patriots' talk of liberty was very limited. They "defended freedom for white men while asserting their domination over enslaved blacks." Occasionally the Patriots were not very patriotic. Following the surrender of the American forces trying to take Quebec in 1775, "a quarter of the captured Patriots switched sides to enlist with the British." Sometimes Taylor's emphasis on irony and contradiction slips into anachronism. Because the colonial legislatures denied women, free blacks and propertyless white males the vote, he concludes that "colonial America was a poor place to look for democracy." But where in the 18th century was there a better place to look for democracy? Despite restrictions on the suffrage, the colonies still possessed the most democratic governments in the world at that time. In his account Taylor tends to stress the bad behavior of ordinary white men, especially in their dealings with people of other races. Ignoring government officials and their own genteel leaders, they pursued their selfish interests without any scruples whatsoever. In the west, where fighting between settlers and Indians was especially bloody and vicious, whites tended to run amok and slaughter Indians freely in pursuit of their "genocidal goals." They wanted land and respected governmental authority only when they needed its protection from the Indians. "Only fear could trump greed on the frontier." In the end Jefferson's "Empire of Liberty" inevitably "favored white men at the expense of Indians and blacks." In Taylor's Revolution there aren't many heroes. Washington was one at Trenton, but even he, in secretly buying land in violation of the law, shaded the truth in pursuit of his self-interest. When the British invaded Virginia in 1781, Virginians rioted to resist Patriot drafts of militiamen. Depending on who was winning, many people flipped from one side to another and sometimes back again. With so much corruption, disaffection and selfishness among the Patriots, it is amazing that the Revolution was finally successful. Taylor himself admits that "the accomplishments of independence, union and republican government seem all the more remarkable given the grim civil war at the heart of the Revolution." A major legacy of the Revolution, he concludes, was the emergence of a society dominated by ordinary middle-class white men, the very people he has most criticized as patriarchal, racist and genocidal. In Taylor's mind their victory seems to have come at the expense of others. By focusing on common white men, he maintains, the Revolution worked against blacks, Indians and women. The question raised by Taylor's book is this: Can a revolution conceived mainly as sordid, racist and divisive be the inspiration for a nation? Popular myths, Taylor argues, have too long covered up the Revolution's sordid reality. GORDON S. WOOD'S edition of "John Adams: Writings From the New Nation 1784-1826" was recently published by the Library of America.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 18, 2016]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Taylor, professor of history at the University of Virginia and Pulitzer Prize-winner for The Internal Enemy, further cements his reputation with this comprehensive analysis of an American Revolution that was anything but the relatively decorous event of popular myth. The revolutionary era was a time of divisions and uncertainties. "Turmoil persisted after the formal peace treaty," Taylor writes. But that upheaval inspired political and cultural creativity that enabled a nation to emerge from "much cruelty, violence, and destruction." Stressing the importance of the trans-Appalachian west, Taylor suggests that the conflict between land-hungry settlers and restrictive British polices was just as important to sparking revolution as the resistance to taxation that inflamed the Atlantic coast. This expanded perspective frames Taylor's presentation of George Washington's understanding that "victory hinged on who could endure a long, hard, bitter struggle." Taylor analyzes "the cycles of invasion, exposure, and suppression" that convinced most Americans that "a Patriot victory offered the best prospect for restoring peace and stability." He also highlights the "broad and anarchic borderland" where "Patriots fought... to suppress the independence of native peoples" in the name of creating an "empire of liberty." Provocative and persuasive, Taylor's fine work demonstrates that on a continent "riven with competing allegiances and multiple possibilities," the newly independent U.S. by no means faced a secure future. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In his sequel to American Colonies, Taylor (history, Univ. of Virginia) considers the American revolutionary era, from the causes of the war for independence to the formation of a new nation. The author traces how the concept of nationalism developed in the latter half of the 18th century, slowly spreading from the Eastern colonies to the Western frontier as it cleaved the population in two, eventually pitting colonist against colonist and settler against settler as a small but increasingly influential and militant group of rebellious patriots raged war against not only Britain but also neighbors who were resistant to independence and remained loyal to Parliament. Taylor also examines the first two decades of American sovereignty, emphasizing the Founding Fathers' conflicting views on freedom, slavery, democracy, republicanism, and international relations, and clearly yet thoroughly explaining how the Constitution and Bill of Rights materialized within a hostile political climate. Included is a handy chronology of major events, an extensive bibliography, and a lengthy notes section. VERDICT This well-documented and thoroughly researched but also accessibly written book is recommended to readers interested in colonial and postcolonial American history, especially those who enjoyed Taylor's similarly impressive American Colonies. [See Prepub Alert, 3/21/16.]-Douglas King, Univ. of South Carolina Lib., Columbia © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
