For scholars interested in the era of the American Revolution, Empire and Nation will be of great value. For scholars interested in the Atlantic World more broadly, this volume will be less helpful.

Empire and Nation contains fifteen essays, all of extremely high quality. Contributors include a good mix of established and early-career historians. None of the essays have been published elsewhere, so this is a collection of truly original scholarship. The essays are uniformly well written, vigorously argued, and based on impressive primary research.

Where the volume falls short is in its conceptualization. The introduction does not interrogate either of the key words in the book's title, nor does it explain the significance of the subtitle, “The American Revolution in the Atlantic World.” This subtitle sets up the expectation that the essays will explore what the editors call “the Revolution's global context” (2). Yet only eight of the volume's fifteen essays examine the American Revolution from an Atlantic perspective. As these eight Atlantic essays will be of greatest interest to readers of this journal, I will focus on them.

Several of the essays might be called transatlantic: focusing on one side of the Atlantic, they gain analytical power by paying attention to events on the other side. In “Fears of War, Fantasies of Peace: British Politics and the Coming of the American Revolution,” Eliga H. Gould covers ground similar to that covered in his pathbreaking book, Persistence of Empire. This is no criticism; for teachers seeking a shortened version of Persistence of Empire for classroom use, this essay will be extremely valuable. Gould's subject is British attitudes toward war, taxation, and empire, and his broad perspective allows him to connect events on both sides of the Atlantic. Ellen Holmes Pearson's focus, by contrast, is on the American side of the Atlantic in “Revising Custom, Embracing Choice: Early American Legal Scholars and the Republicanization of the Common Law.” Pearson shows how American lawyers and legal scholars owed a substantial intellectual debt to William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, even as they creatively adapted his work to American circumstances. Similarly transatlantic is “The Irish Immigrant and the Broadening of the Polity in Philadelphia, 1790–1800,” by Maurice J. Bric. Bric convincingly shows how “new Irish” immigrants to Philadelphia in the 1790s—many of whom were steeped in the political radicalism of their home country—helped expand the notion of legitimate political rivalry in the new Republic. This essay is evidence of the editors’ appropriately capacious definition of the American Revolution, by which they mean not just the war years of 1775–81 but also the decades leading up to the conflict, and especially the decades after the war in which the meaning of the new nation was worked out.

In “War and State Formation in Revolutionary America,” Don Higginbotham takes a slightly different approach from the three other transatlantic essays. His subject is the relationship between the American Revolution and the formation of the American nation-state, and his methodology is comparative. He deftly examines the American experience in light of the literature on state formation in early modern Sweden, Spain, Britain, France, and Brandenburg-Prussia. This methodology allows Higginbotham to discern precisely what is unique in the American case and what is not.

Four of the essays in this collection are fully Atlantic: they examine topics not tied to one side of the Atlantic or the other. Keith Mason's “The American Loyalist Diaspora and the Reconfiguration of the British Atlantic World” is an important contribution to our understanding of the British Empire in the wake of the American Revolution. The concept of “diaspora” can be overworked in Atlantic studies, but Mason's use of the term is convincing. Following Loyalists from America to Canada, the Caribbean, Great Britain, and Africa, Mason demonstrates this group's importance in “refounding the British Empire” (257). Likewise, in “The British Caribbean in the Age of Revolution,” Edward L. Cox adopts a truly Atlantic perspective to examine the connections between the West Indies and revolutions in America, France, and St. Domingue. Given their reliance on slave labor, whites in the West Indies endured excruciating anxieties as talk of revolution and rebellion filled the air. Trevor Burnard also examines the unfree and the free in “Freedom, Migration, and the American Revolution.” In this sweeping essay, Burnard boldly argues that “the Revolution advanced rather than retarded the cause of unfree labor in the United States” (295). By this he means that the creation of the American nation helped shore up the power of slaveholders in Virginia and especially South Carolina. At the same time, by contrast, British efforts to populate the Gulf of Honduras, Sierra Leone, and Australia in the 1780s demonstrate that in the decades following the American Revolution “freedom was an essential characteristic of British colonial settlement” (312).

A fourth fully Atlantic essay is nonetheless a curious choice for inclusion in this collection. James Sidbury's “Early Slave Narratives and the Culture of the Atlantic Market” is an impressive analysis of the meaning of “the market” in the narratives of Olaudah Equiano, Ottobah Cugoano, Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, and Venture Smith. Sidbury cleverly explores the tensions between the slave as property and the book as commodity. Yet how this connects to the Revolution is unclear; the phrase “American Revolution” does not appear in the essay.

Sidbury's essay thus shares the position of the seven non-Atlantic essays I have not discussed in this review: it is excellent on its own terms, but it holds a tenuous connection to the book's subject of “The American Revolution in the Atlantic World” in this collection, even if the pieces do not add up to a unified whole.