This book attempts to widen the focus of both American and British eighteenth-century history, employing a transnational perspective to bring the finer points of the story of American independence into sharper relief. The author's publishing profligacy over the last three decades has established him as a stalwart authority in several areas of historical inquiry, and the arguments he presents here, although somewhat lacking in ambition, are valuable principally for their clarity and precision. Jeremy Black's motivation for writing Crisis of Empire appears to derive from his (perhaps overstated) assertion that mainstream histories of colonial America too often spin a triumphant teleological prelude to independence, lumbering blindly along a linear path toward a seemingly inevitable revolution. Not only are they liable “to underrate the Englishness … of early America” (45), but in ignoring the importance of British domestic society, they have generally left the story of independence only half told.
To complicate this picture and stress the contingent, uncertain, and unpredictable nature of this “crisis” as it unfolded, Black begins by telling two parallel narratives—one American and one British—and darts lucidly between them in an attempt to show where and how they intersect. He concisely covers as many angles as he can seemingly think of, spreading his approach over issues of race, religion, economy, and geography to show how “imperial politics were local at the same time as local politics were imperial” (67). Religions and ethnicities flowed and converged and heightened mobility and migration transformed both regional and global economies, as did an imperial slave-trading strategy that closely aligned Britain's interests in the Caribbean with its North American colonies. The slave societies that ballooned in the first half of the eighteenth century shaped agricultural landscapes and were forced to generate significant wealth for particular landholding classes, while Native Americans defined much of the commercial, imperial, and military activity along the fluid frontiers of white settlement. The book then concludes with what is essentially a climactic military history of the War of Independence.
This impressive spread of analysis, across social and political spectrums on both sides of the Atlantic, necessarily withers away somewhat in the second half of the book, while military history comes to the fore. Native American tribes were less important in the Revolution than French naval power, and British efforts to cultivate the South's loyalist tendencies precluded them from arming slaves for the war effort. Black's main concern is to impart a sense that American secession need not have happened, and it is difficult to fault a military historian of Black's ability on this point. It is the book's single strongest contention, and the author ably demonstrates the strategies, personalities, and compacted uncertainties that hampered decision making on all sides. To appreciate this further, Black would encourage us to consider counterfactuals. But for a chance shipwreck in 1711, for example, the Royal Navy would have been in a strong position to take Quebec; if Britain had held greater sway in Canada, the fiscal pressures of competing with France would not have fallen so hard on the colonies during the Seven Years’ War and beyond and could have eased the tensions that spilled over in the 1770s (35–36). Looking further ahead, we are also led to wonder how the colonies might have reacted to the slave trade's abolition, had they remained within the empire in 1807 (107).
Black's resolute sense of causation is systematic and to the point, and many readers (particularly undergraduates) will appreciate the author's unwillingness to get mired in what has become quite a complex historiography. Nevertheless, there is a distinct lack of engagement with much recent work, which is unfortunate given the support he might have drawn from other historians currently employing similar comparative approaches to the same historical space, often in more interesting ways and to greater interpretive effect. Essentially, Black's Atlantic remains divided and divisive, and it is only when he dons his maritime-historian's cap to argue the importance of port cities, naval technology, and overseas trade that this oceanic space achieves any sense of unity. While he shares the belief that there was a kind of commercially driven sense of liberty infusing “a potent trans-Atlantic ideology” (58), the book ultimately stresses the peculiarity of the American colonies’ association of liberty with virtue and their capacity for drawing on such an ethos in the face an increasingly alienating imperial government.
Given the book's tight chronology, a conclusion that stretches beyond the two pages provided could add a more incisive analytical dimension to the overriding argument. As it stands, the reader is largely left to make sense of the events presented here alone. In place of a detailed bibliography, we are given a three-page guide to further reading, which does not necessarily mark out the works informing the author's own assessment. Nevertheless, this is a clear illustration of how students might begin to approach such history without being overly deferential to teleological nationalisms and to understand the British Empire on its own terms and as a whole. Within the rising swell of transnational scholarship, this book's commanding simplicity is no bad thing. This is not a story of enlightened founding fathers unbinding the shackles of avaricious parliaments and obtuse monarchs; rather, Crisis of Empire presents us with a sober reflection on the interconnections of British and American history and successfully escapes acquiescing in the belief that the American Revolution was somehow preordained or that British society was somehow estranged from its empire.
