Patrick GRIFFIN. America's Revolution

Patrick Griffin's book tells a familiar story in an unfamiliar way. His focus on the lives of individuals great and obscure, and their experiences during the period of the American Revolution, brings the process of change alive—but that is not the principal reason for seeing his study as novel. Many historians have endeavored to recover the impact of the revolution on different kinds of Americans: poor as well as rich, black as well as white, loyalist as well as rebel. Nor can we label as groundbreaking Griffin's use of contemporary paintings as launching points for his discussion of key themes. While the artistic frame of reference works well as a literary device, it can hardly be counted as new. Griffin's true claim to freshness arises—ironically—from his engagement with old-fashioned constitutional arguments about the nature of the American Revolution. In Griffin's account, the revolution was essentially a struggle for sovereignty—a struggle caused by the British state's attempts to make America “British.” He views the revolution, in other words, as a reaction against a process of British state formation, which began in the sixteenth and seventeenth century with the English conquest and subjugation of Ireland and was furthered by the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707. For Griffin, the next stage of the expansion of Britain came in 1763, when after the Seven Years' War successive London governments sought to reassert their authority in North America and make colonial Americans more British. He recognizes that this political process built upon foundations created by increasing integration in other spheres—commercial, cultural, and religious—that had already transformed English colonies into British provinces. But he still sees the political project as doomed to failure, since British authority in the colonies was simply too weak, and local autonomy too entrenched, to sustain the pretentions of ministers and their advisors in Whitehall and of parliamentarians at Westminster. As British authority was challenged and then collapsed, Americans were free to make their own arrangements, and the infant United States experienced a period of great turmoil as rival conceptions of new bases for political authority competed for ascendancy

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