In the immediate pre-Revolutionary period the largest American city, Philadelphia, probably had a population of no more than forty thousand people. But despite being small by modern standards – indeed barely more than large towns – and existing in an overwhelmingly agrarian society and economy, they were nevertheless intense, energetic places; they were essential communication centres and hubs of commerce and exchange. American cities thus represented important nodal points for political activity and the creation of political movements, and in Rebels Rising Benjamin L. Carp has set out to examine them and their political significance in detail.

By examining political mobilization he hopes to reveal how and where the Revolution unfolded, not just when and why, and in this aim he is largely successful; it is a book about place as much as about time. He does so by examining a different aspect of each city pertinent to it: Boston's waterfront, New York's taverns, Newport's religious meeting houses, Charleston's town houses and Philadelphia's State House, the different cityscapes exemplifying the processes of mobilization that took place in the years preceding the war for independence. Yet in so doing, he says, the cities rendered themselves obsolete. If so, it was not for very long.

Rebels Rising is really a collection of essays rather than a single coherent narrative, and as such is not as successful as a book as each individual chapter is when considered alone. With a colossal range of characters, a great many of whom flit by with barely a “how d'ye do” (which can be disconcerting for anyone not thoroughly au fait with American personalities of the period, and, I suspect, even for many who are), the flow of the book does seem to wander at times. But it remains a superb piece of scholarship, covering a vast landscape in literal and temporal terms. He makes persuasive arguments, or rather a series of persuasive arguments, for in an age before mass communications cities were far more stand-alone than they are today.

The book covers a period of about 1740 to 1780, but its focus is mostly on the 1760s and early 1770s, a period of intense political flux and agitation; Dr. Carp's point is that the cities were much more significant than realized, either at the time or since. By the end of the war, Americans were starting either to forget or to overlook the contribution made by the cities to the success of the Revolution. The Founding Fathers framed the Constitution and chose the location of the capital during a time when Americans regarded the cities with distrust and distaste, Revolutionary forces having been largely forced to abandon them during the war. They served a different function in the early republic/late colonial era, yet they would go on to prove to be revolutionary dynamos in more ways than one, and within fifty years would help a restless country create everything Republicans professed to loathe: a strong government, a strong military, high taxes, booming cities and finance capitalism.