Dust-jacket blurbs are best taken with more than a single pinch of salt. But Gordon Wood's remark that “ten of John Murrin's imaginative essays are worth dozens of historical monographs” hits the nail on the head. Rethinking America is a collection of essays by legendary Princeton professor of early American history and unrivalled master of historical synthesis John Murrin. Murrin belongs to a now largely extinct breed of scholars who devoted their professional lives to reading and reflection, rather than research, and to the teaching of their students. He published neither monographs nor many journal articles. But Murrin did write a good number of highly influential essays, possibly as many as fifty. No one seems to know. They ended up in edited books that are sometimes hard to find. Bringing them together in a single volume is therefore a service to the profession. Originally published between 1973 and 2007, the essays have been selected and are expertly introduced by former Murrin student Andrew Shankman, himself no mean practitioner of the art of synthesis.

Although Wood exaggerates, there are enough ideas in Rethinking America for some three to four distinct monographs. They would all begin in the concept of the “anglicizing of America,” which Murrin first explored in his 1966 doctoral thesis on colonial Massachusetts. According to Murrin, seventeenth-century America and England were very different places. But in the eighteenth century the two started to converge as American colonists began to adopt British ways. The process was most marked in the socioeconomic and political elite but trickled down to the broader layers of the population, affecting social, political, military and cultural conditions broadly. Thus “British North America in fundamental ways became more European, more English, in the eighteenth century” (190).

Anglicization raises questions about the coming of the American Revolution. If convergence rather than divergence characterized American social development and if the colonists became more, and not less, British in the decades before the Stamp Act crisis, why did they rebel? Murrin's answer is that Britain's attempts at imperial reform clashed not with an incipient American identity but with the colonists’ sense of entitlement to British rights and privileges. Therefore, “the coming of the Revolution is mainly a story of growing popular disaffection” (176). Disaffection was caused by a failure of imagination on the part of British politicians and administrators who did not understand the dynamics of the British Empire. Their reforms undermined the popular affection that was the only real bond that kept the empire together. This argument has later been fruitfully developed by others, perhaps most successfully by Tim Breen.

But this explanation of the Revolution throws up a further, and no less challenging, question. If North America was set to become another Britain, how did independence create a society so profoundly different from the mother country? Murrin presents the American Revolution as a transformative event, disagreeing with scholars like Jack Greene, who sees continuity between the colonial and early national periods, and instead agreeing with the view of historians like Wood, who argues that the Revolution was a radical break with the colonial past. In Murrin's rendition, divergence emerged from the defeat of the Federalist attempt to fashion the United States into a version of Britain, complete with an expensive and powerful state and a hereditary ruling class, by a more democratic impulse. Jefferson's “Revolution of 1800” is therefore as important as 1776 in the chronology of the Revolution.

Murrin is fully aware of the limitations of that democratic impulse. The “Americanization” of the United States meant the resumption of territorial expansion, the perpetuation of existing patriarchal authority and the continued exploitation of slave labour, which taken together made the American republic an instrument by which white male household heads ruled women, servants and slaves, and deprived American Indians of their ancestral lands. Implied rather than explored is another outcome of the thwarting of “Anglicization.” In the nineteenth century, Americanization led to increasing concentration of wealth. But in contrast to Britain, the American social elite did not hold political power. By the end of the century, “a distinctive American pattern” had emerged of “enormous economic power without political accountability” (280). This disconnect between formal political authority and real economic power under liberal democracy and capitalism is a troubling legacy that the American century bequeathed to the rest of the world.

Readers will best appreciate Murrin's oeuvre by starting in the concluding essay of Rethinking America. This review of the historiography of the American Revolution, delivered in 2007, also serves as Murrin's self-reflection. The nine essays that precede it are elegant, informative and inspiring, for the most part nuanced and sometimes provocative. They stand as a fitting monument to one of the greatest historians of the American Revolution.