America Before 1787: The Unraveling of a Colonial Regime examines the events and psychology that led to the division between Britain and its thirteen North American colonies and the subsequent creation of the American constitution. This is the second installment in a three-volume set by Jon Elster on French and American constitutional politics. His first volume analyzed the events leading up to the French constitution. The upcoming third installment will directly compare the creation of the two constitutions. In this American centric volume, Elster begins with a list of psychological reasons for why British political leaders and American colonists found themselves at an impasse: they viewed the world so differently.

The British government cared more for the national honor of the empire, while colonists were more concerned with personal honor and felt slighted at the political and economic regulations that the British Parliament imposed. According to Elster, the different perspectives from both sides of the Atlantic created an atmosphere of fear and anger, as each side interpreted the facts of the situation. Colonists feared that Parliament's new laws and taxes would become worse and more damaging in the future. To avoid a fate of complete submission, colonists acted on their fears by organizing collective action movements through boycotts and pressured fellow colonists into joining them. Elster demonstrates that the colonists directed their fear and anger not only at British officials but also at colonists who remained passive or supportive of Parliament's regulations, whom they shamed and treated as enemies. British officials likewise feared that giving into the colonists would only encourage them to demand more in the future. Parliament lashed out and punished the colonists, especially through the Coercive Acts, or, as the colonists viewed them, the Intolerable Acts. Elster details the policies and problematic communication hazards that plagued all attempts to compromise or deescalate the tensions. Colonial agents in Britain did not have the authority to compromise with Parliament beyond stating their demands, and the months needed to confirm negotiation tactics with their colonial patrons caused colonial agents to fall behind in parliamentary debates. British officials wanted to control the colonies by divide and rule to keep them from communicating and severing the bonds that could be used to threaten the British Empire. Elster emphasizes how different each of the thirteen colonies was in its political organization, economy, and other values; these differences thus make it surprising that the colonies could unite in the first place to confront Parliament, let alone defeat the British military, and create a constitution.

Elster's analysis is a comprehensive and in-depth look at most of the psychological turmoil between the colonists and British officials leading up to the American Revolution. I say most, because there is a lack of psychological interpretation of women and people of color during this time. Elster's interpretations come from primary sources based on the founding fathers and contemporary historian David Ramsay, which leads to a reliance on secondary sources for colonists who were not literate white men. Elster mentions enslaved people in the context of a general psychological phenomenon, for example using the master/slave dynamic as another example of divide and rule that the British government used on the colonies. He does not analyze those who were enslaved or free people of color in terms of how they affected the psychology of the tensions or how they could have added another layer of psychology from their own agency. This absence could stem from Elster's main goal of wanting to focus on what contributed to the making of the constitution, as the writers of the constitution were not as concerned with the rights of women and the enslaved, but this leads to the biggest disconnect of the monograph: Elster spends more time discussing issues that established the break of the colonies from the empire than on the issues creating the constitution. Unlike the case of the French constitution, which was created during the French Revolution, and which Elster could easily connect to the downfall of the absolutist monarchy in his first volume, the American constitution came years after the war. While the impact of British policies still had weight in its creation, the constitution occurred as a response by Americans to correct their mistakes as an independent nation. Elster minimizes the lessons that the Americans learned from the Articles of Confederation after their break from Britain. Instead, the book reads as a build-up to the war and British defeat and not as a precursor to the constitution. Though Elster admits in the preface that this volume omits post-war context for the constitution in order to save this discussion for the third volume comparing the American and French constitutional assemblies, he states, “The aim of this book is to help us understand the choices made on both sides of the Atlantic in the run-up to the Federal Convention of 1787,” which the book cannot do without the full context of the later years (126).