Conceived in Crisis

Christopher R. Pearl’s deeply researched, nuanced and compelling study of Revolutionary-era Pennsylvania pivots from the often-studied imperial crisis to illuminate an under-appreciated, transformational crisis in colonial governance. The book untangles state formation in Pennsylvania before and beyond the revolt against Britain. Pearl connects the formation of a far stronger state government to turmoil preceding, and then dovetailing with, growing opposition to imperial tax innovations; to hard-won lessons learned in the Revolutionary War; and to sustained advocacy of Pennsylvania’s broadening citizenry, before and after Independence. This is a complex but clear book, and historians of the American founding era and of eighteenth-century politics will want to grapple with Pearl’s reframing of revolutionary state formation and his persuasive conclusions. Pearl opens his study in early eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, as the colonial government—designed in the seventeenth century, as Pearl reminds us, to govern a small, homogeneous community—faltered as the coloniser population multiplied, diversified and

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