The central theme of Republic and Empire is the imperial character of the American Revolution. The Navigation Acts Britain imposed on the American colonies to help pay for the Seven Years’ War (1756–63); the military support France and Spain gave to Washington’s Continental Army; the experience of Canada, Ireland, Jamaica and the West Indies relative to that of the American colonists; the guns, rifles and ammunition from France and the Austrian Netherlands that American ships purchased from Dutch St Eustatius; and the ramifications of chattel slavery throughout the British Empire – all of these factors affected why and how the revolution unfolded. Trevor Burnard and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy revisit them with learned acuity to argue that no interpretation of the revolution can be tenable that does not take them into consideration.   

The book’s coverage of the British colonies that did not revolt is particularly striking. The West Indies would not follow the Americans because they feared it would jeopardise their lucrative sugar trade, even though it visited unspeakable torture and disease on West Indian slaves. The Irish, too, would not follow the rebels, because they feared for their trade with America and the British Caribbean in flaxseed, sugar, rum and molasses. Trade in these items was considerable: exports and imports each exceeded £100,000 (£26 million today). But once the revolution took hold, receipts plummeted. Money decided what happened next. As Robert Tombs says in The English and Their History, ‘there seemed no way of staying rich and powerful while keeping clean hands.’ 

On the lessons that flow from this, Burnard and O’Shaughnessy are trenchant. ‘The examples of Ireland and the British West Indies allow us to debate and prioritise competing explanations relating to the causes of the American Revolution,’ they write.  

In American Slavery, American Freedom, Edmund Morgan famously argued that