Steve Pincus's The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders' Case for an Activist Government is an excellent example of how short books can be brilliant in that they shine with new insights without adding the leaden weight of what is often simply repeated narrative or scholarly footnotes masquerading as text. Pincus, an expert on British domestic history in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, applies insights he has developed on contrasting ideological and partisan approaches to the political economy of the British empire in order to throw light on the process by which the thirteen colonies sought independence. In doing so, he skillfully links discussion of specific economic strategies to the consideration of political thought. Moreover, the discussion on both sides of the Atlantic, he argues, with much reason, was a parallel one, albeit with differing outcomes.

In particular, in an argument that is deliberately and impressively revisionist as far as the modern United States is concerned, Pincus argues that the case that won out was that for an activist government. A thesis of symbiotic empire building pressed for the development of prosperity and consumption in North America as a driver for economic growth in Britain, and, Pincus argues, this required intervention and expenditure on the part of government. Contrasts are drawn with British ministers pressing for austerity, and thus cutting expenditure, as well as with interests in the New World focused on plantation economies and slavery who did not favor a system of high-paid free workers fostering a consumption-driven empire of economic development.

Effectively and economically written, lucidly argued, and supported by a characteristic feature of Pincus' work, a mastery of the relevant printed and manuscript material, this is by any standards a most impressive work and it beats into a corner the ponderous efforts of writers such as Bernard Bailyn.

Given the significance of the book, it is pertinent to note that differences are possible. For example, I cannot agree that the British in the eighteenth century were unique in their commitment to energetic government, either in the metropole or in the colonies. There is excellent recent work on other states that suggests otherwise. Secondly, Pincus overly downplays the continuing role of religious contestation. Thirdly, the account of Walpole's foreign policy is wrong: “Walpole pursued pacific policy because he valued West Indian sugar exports more highly than colonial consumption of British manufactured goods” (38). What about the nature of alliance dynamics notably after 1733, a tendency to caution, issues of government debt, and so on?

However, these issues simply show how stimulating Pincus' work is. He adds much to our consideration of the period and has also produced a genuinely important contribution to the debates on the evolution, character and consequences of what became American public doctrine. I hope he will take this book forward into a full discussion of the Federalist period.