Nick Bunker's An Empire on the Edge depicts British leaders stumbling into the Revolutionary War from 1770 to 1775, with particular attention given to the Gaspée affair, the Tea Act and its aftermath, and the views and actions of cabinet ministers. The two leading figures are Lord North and Lord Dartmouth, and yet a cast of characters are revealed in vignettes artfully inserted into the tale. Lord North emerges as a highly effective politician whose skills and personality traits made him a favorite of the king but also made him poorly suited to solve the crisis with America.

Organizing his accessibly written narrative into three parts—“The Empire of Speculation,” “The Sending of the Tea,” and “Down the Slope”—Bunker starts with the British experience of frontier failure at Fort Charters, which he claims foretells of the loss of empire. Yet British difficulties after 1763 in occupying newly acquired interior regions on the edge of the empire do not mean necessarily that the empire was therefore on the edge. Bunker argues that the British position in the colonies was fragile in 1770. As measured in terms of formal structures of power, and the number of royal officeholders and regular soldiers, that is reasonable, but one should not underestimate the importance of informal ties, of shared political and cultural values, and of the vibrant, expanding trade as unifying forces. Economic matters are important in Bunker's analysis, particularly the 1772 crisis and the impact of economic unrest on British domestic politics and foreign affairs, but he gives less attention to how British-colonial trade integrated the colonies with Britain. His argument of imperial decline does not reconcile itself with, or even acknowledge, the alternative view that on the eve of revolution the colonies were converging and anglicizing, becoming more attached to and more like England. For Bunker, the American Revolution was a long time in the making, since the disintegrating empire had never been robust. This may have been the view from the cabinet more than from the colonies.

Bunker's argument that the Gaspée incident needs closer analysis is well taken, and certainly the British were obsessed with smuggling which colored their opinion of New Englanders. Bunker's view that cabinet members interpreted the Gaspée attack and other events as proof of the rule of law's collapsing is more persuasive than his contention that the Gaspée, like the Tea Party, was a total rejection of the British Empire. Instead, the position of American revolutionaries evolved and radicalized over time; a denial of parliamentary authority at 1773 had not yet extended so far, for many revolutionaries, to complete disaffection with the king. Bunker notes that the British did not have a clear plan or policy, but neither did the American protesters. So their natural rights arguments, articulated in the Boston pamphlet, need not be interpreted as a declaration of independence, a step that required intercolonial cooperation and one that was still highly contentious among delegates to the Continental Congress even as late as the first months of 1776. Bunker implies the New Englanders had a goal, and he calls the Boston pamphlet a revolutionary manifesto. Yet this impression of unanimity might have been qualified with a more extensive examination of loyalism. Bunker mentions John Malcolm to indicate how news of his tarring and feathering angered cabinet members, and he noted that more than a hundred citizens thought a deal should be made to pay for the destroyed tea. These are clues that, despite being a hotbed of revolution, Massachusetts also had a large number of prominent loyalists.

What the book does particularly well is remind readers of how distracted from the American crises the British government was, facing recent financial panic in 1772, poor harvests and riots over food prices, the need to administer the valuable sugar colonies, general elections and John Wilkes's controversial victory in London, and various foreign policy concerns. Without clear European allies and fearful of a future French war, the king and cabinet were also preoccupied with events in India, Corsica, and Crimea. Likewise, the book aptly depicts the East India Company crisis and reactions in Britain, including debates about sending the tea to America and later responses to the Tea Party. Bunker draws such evidence from correspondence, speeches, and newspaper articles and captures many intriguing opinions about the meaning of these events and related disputes over the character of empire.

While Lord Dartmouth and Lord North are seen ultimately as captives of the class system, and so unable to innovate and solve the crisis, the royal governors in America, such as Thomas Hutchinson and Lord Dunmore, are depicted as more deeply flawed and personally blameworthy, even though they likely also saw themselves as part of this same imperial system. Bunker does not see Britain and her colonies as part of a shared British Atlantic world. He imagines that if British politicians had gone to America in the early 1770s, they would have seen a political culture that was radically different from that in England. To be sure, the importance of any local differences would be determined in events to follow. Yet Bunker does not examine the contention of American revolutionary leaders and citizenry that they were defending, not rejecting, British constitutionalism and their rights as Englishmen. Bunker does examine other New Englanders beyond Hutchinson, including John Hancock and Elbridge Gerry, but he limits his discussion to leaders.

Bunker argues that Americans (New Englanders mostly) began the revolution, but tragically Britain (by trying to impose direct rule on the colonies) started the war. Though well-meaning, Lord North and his colleagues had a narrow vision of empire that left them unprepared to deal with New England radicals. Looking at the coming of the American crisis from the view of cabinet members, as Bunker does, reveals its place among the complicated political concerns of the British government, the challenges of the global economy, and the difficulties with which overworked, under-informed British colonial administrators operated.