Did the American Revolution matter? It probably did but less than one might expect and in different ways than those looking at the American Revolution from an American perspective might think. As P. J. Marshall explains in this masterful survey of how the British Atlantic was remade in the 1780s, Britons saw that the American Revolution was quickly reinterpreted in the immediate aftermath of Peace of Paris as an embarrassing national humiliation that in the end was not especially significant in geopolitical, economic or even cultural terms. Those people deemed responsible for the calamity of Yorktown and what seemed craven capitulation to the United States, France and Spain at the Peace of Paris were ditched (with the significant exception of George III, whose attitudes and postwar fate might have been explored more). But the loss of America was quickly swept aside. Britain embarked upon a period of unprecedented prosperity and political stability under William Pitt the Younger. There were some short-term difficulties, to be sure, in dealing with bumptious colonials turned republicans, mostly around questions of citizenship and maritime shipping. But most Britons felt almost glad to be rid of America. They thought America's new system of government, in ways that American historians enamoured of the greatness of the founders have insufficiently appreciated, to be old-fashioned, unworkable and likely to lead to disaster. Britons in the age of Pitt thought Americans had created a government as if Robert Walpole was still living. They were pretty sure that America would follow the example of other republics, notably the Netherlands, which by the 1780s was the example of a weak republic reduced from opulence to poverty by its form of government.

For American historians, Marshall's book will be valuable as a bracing corrective to notions of the United States being a beacon of liberty to the rest of the world. In the imperial world of the 1780s, becoming a republic was to condemn a country to poverty and irrelevance. The United States was hardly irrelevant to Britain in the 1780s but it was not very important. And in its determination to deal aggressively and duplicitously with Native Americans and its unwillingness to address the evils of maintaining slavery in a republic devoted to liberty, the United States showed itself to be hypocritical. Marshall shows that the most important change that occurred in Britain as a result of the American Revolution was a transformation of British attitudes to nonwhites and the development of what Marshall calls “an empire of righteousness.” Most significantly, this transformation was done within an imperial context. One lesson that Britain was determined not to learn from the American Revolution was to accede to colonists’ requests for more autonomy. Marshall argues that everywhere from the 1760s (he might push the date back further, to the late 1740s) Britain pursued increasingly interventionist politics, often ostensibly to advance humanitarian objectives. The loss of America did not encourage them to step back from such policies. Rather, imperial intrusiveness into colonial affairs only increased from the 1780s, much to the disgust of whites in the West Indies but not, significantly, to the same extent in Ireland or in India.

Marshall's main audience in this book, however, is not American historians but British and imperial historians who continue to insist that the American Revolution saw a break in British imperial policy. His main target is Vincent Harlow, from a previous generation of imperial historians. Harlow saw the British government as engaging in a “swing to the south” from the 1780s, actively looking for new markets and new sources of primary materials and neglecting older colonies. In short, Harlow argued that the British abandoned the West Indies for India and began to become interested in Africa and Australia. Marshall argues Harlow was wrong on two counts. First, there were more continuities than change in imperial priorities in the age of revolutions. Second, the British “continued to persist with strategies already in place before the American upheavals in order to maintain their hold on what they deemed to be the most important ones” (131). The implications are clear. Britain decided to alter its imperial concerns well before the American Revolution so that by the 1760s the British Empire differed greatly from that which had existed in the 1720s and 1730s. It felt confirmed in its actions by its great success in the Seven Years War. It was not deterred, by the temporary setback of the loss of thirteen Atlantic colonies, from continuing to work out long-term changes making the empire work for Britain. Now that the American Revolution is increasingly seen in an Atlantic and global context, Marshall's argument offers a powerful corrective to current orthodoxies. It provides the most significant intervention into the historiography of the troubled decade of the 1780s this century.