Undergirded by the now vigorous tradition of Atlantic history, the pages of Defying Empire are laden with lively descriptions of the connectivity and movement that made New York City an integral cog of the early modern Atlantic world. In the mid-eighteenth century, New York City was a small city, but with its bustling port and strategic location, it served as an important military headquarters and supply center during the Seven Years' War (1756–63), the imperial struggle between the French and British for control of much of the North American continent and the West Indies. Although the city itself never came under direct attack, commercial shipping and naval operations based in the city were a critical part of the war. Thomas Truxes reveals the contradictory activities undertaken by city merchants during the war. New York merchants provisioned British forces and contributed to a massive privateering effort that, by 1757, had effectively “swept the French merchant fleet from the sea” (55). Simultaneously, many of the same city merchants rushed to fill the commercial gap. A group of roughly 125 New York merchants participated in illegal trade with the enemy, transporting supplies to French buyers at neutral Dutch, Danish, and Spanish island ports in the Caribbean. They used a variety of strategies to hide their activities, including bribery and issuing falsified documents, flag trucing (commercial trading disguised as prisoner exchange), and staged privateer capturing of their own ships. A dramatic cat-and-mouse chase ensued as harassed British military and customs officers tried to keep pace with the tactics of the ever-resourceful merchants and their wily sea captains. A final showdown took place as New York's resolute attorney general, John Tabor Kempe, finally brought a number of the merchants to trial in 1762.

Truxes has delivered a captivating and informative study. The book highlights the geographical extent and political repercussions of the commercial activities that connected traders and merchants in ports in Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. The free-flowing, if sometimes covert, trade that these merchants enjoyed in the years leading up to the war demonstrates the inextricable links in the imperial economies of the eighteenth-century Atlantic. Smoothly integrating his account of commerce with a narrative of political and military developments, Truxes ultimately contends that the war created a sudden clash between conventional trading arrangements and imperial loyalties. As merchants devised innovative strategies for evading the strictures of wartime imperial policies, this clash fostered a “spirit of resistance” (190) in New York that would come to fruition in the city's participation in the American Revolution.

Truxes narrates his tale superbly, creating a memorable assemblage of settings, scenes, and characters. A long-vanished world is brought to life as Truxes transports his readers from the docks and the coffeehouses of the port towns, to the decks of ships as they traversed dangerous seas or slipped in and out of Atlantic harbours, and into the tense courtrooms of New York. Truxes achieves this sense of immediacy through his impressive use of a wide range of primary sources. Building on his previous work on the Irish merchant trading house Greg and Cunningham (Letterbook of Greg and Cunningham, 1756–57: Merchants of New York and Belfast [Oxford, 2001]), he draws extensive additional evidence from court records and official documents, merchants’ and officials’ business papers and correspondence, ships’ logbooks, and newspapers. A generous range of maps further situate the locations and events. His portrayal highlights a number of interesting features of the Atlantic trading community, such as the role and integration of Irish merchants, as well as the participation of women in transatlantic commercial activities.

But although Truxes has succeeded in bringing the extended boundaries of the Atlantic world into sharper focus, his depiction of New York City is, in certain respects, surprisingly limited to blurred sketches. In particular, the institutions and activities that created a civic and trading community in Manhattan are never clearly defined. Truxes asserts that illegal trade was “not the work of a few reckless souls” (6) but represented a citywide effort that drew together the resources of a wide range of city merchants and tradesmen. Unfortunately, these connections within the city are not amply described. Merchants had “friends in high places” (7), and Truxes identifies some of them, but readers are left guessing about the structures and processes that maintained merchants’ links with the lower ranks of city workers. In addition, entities such as “the civil administration” and “the legal establishment” are repeatedly referred to but not defined or set into a wider context of city, provincial, and imperial governance. Truxes suggests that merchants’ loyalties were shaped by “a powerful commercial impulse synonymous with the great metropolis” (1), arguing that it was eighteenth-century New York City itself, and not the merchants as a distinct entity, that defied empire. Discussion of the social extent of the trading community, the links that bound it together, and the institutions and activities that governed the town could have provided substance for this enticing claim. But as the book does not openly engage with debates about the cultural construction and shaping of cities and empires that have marked recent studies by scholars such as Kathleen Wilson and Daniel Hulsebosch among others, Truxes has missed an opportunity to contribute to some of the conversations that are making Atlantic history such a fruitful scholarly venture.

Overall, Truxes has sidestepped interesting questions about the loyalties of city merchants and New York City's role in the construction (and later destruction) of empire. Instead he leaves his readers to “choose sides” (8). But Truxes has paved the way for other historians to take up these unanswered questions with the fascinating evidence he has garnered vividly etched onto the pages of this book. Readers will undoubtedly be drawn in. Full of interesting detail and written with such impressive style, Defying Empire deserves and will engage a wide readership.