| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Julie Flavell and Stephen Conway, editors. Britain and America Go to War: The Impact of War and Warfare in Anglo-America, 1754–1815. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 2004. Pp. x, 284. $65.00.
Julie Flavell and Stephen Conway have edited an intriguing volume that consists of eight original essays on the Anglo-American experience in three wars, the Seven Years' War, the American War of Independence, and the War of 1812. A ninth, and final, essay concerns diplomatic more than military history, yet it is not out of place. It serves as a capstone to the collection by scrutinizing the forging of a new Atlantic state system from the debris left by the two destructive wars that the British and Americans had fought with one another.	1
The bulk of the essays focus on British actions and thought in these wars. Only a provocative piece by Michael Bellesiles, who writes on the War of 1812, considers things from an American perspective. One of the essays, that by C. J. Bartlett and Gene Smith on Britain's naval campaign against the United States in 1814–1815, would be considered old-fashioned military history. The others are characterized by little or no shooting or bloodshed and deal instead with issues such as war's impact on national identity, aspects of army life, or how war allowed the British middle class to assert itself.	2
The editors, who would have readers believe that there is considerable continuity within the nine essays, proclaim that the scholarship in this volume fits hand in glove with the Atlantic scholarship now in vogue. This is mostly hooey, and unnecessary as well, for the essays are useful and illuminating in themselves. With greater merit, Flavell and Conway suggest that several of the essays underscore the "persistent tension between local and national loyalties," in turn demonstrating that war can both stimulate nationalism and provincial allegiance (p. 10).	3
The volume opens with an essay by Bob Harris that explores British thinking in waging the Seven Years' War. As Virginia, with London's backing, started the conflict in 1754 in order to drive the French from the Ohio Country, American historians have usually held that this demonstrated a mutual Anglo-American interest in imperial expansion. Harris sees things differently. Britain, he argues, was more concerned with the threat posed by France, which it feared both economically and militarily, and he discounts London's interest in gaining immediate hegemony in America's transmontane West. His essay takes issue with the widely accepted argument advanced by Kathleen Wilson, in The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715–1758 (1995), that Britain was in the thrall of important mercantile groups and the surging urban middle class, both of which were obsessed with the empire's expansion.	4
Peter Way's examination of women who accompanied the British army during the Seven Years' War largely covers previously explored terrain, although he offers fresh anecdotal evidence regarding gender expectations and the power of the masculine command structure. Above all, he convincingly demonstrates that women faced stiff punishments when they attempted to move out of their traditionally prescribed roles. He additionally establishes that in isolated instances women were physically assaulted by soldiers, but his unalloyed insistence that such incidents demonstrated that "violence against women was an important aspect of manliness"—an ingrained habit not of male soldiers, but of males in general—is unconvincing (p. 56). In recent years, many American historians have argued that the Seven Years' War produced such conflicts between the colonists and the imperial authorities that it helped produce the American Revolution, while other scholars have seen the same war as intensifying pro-British feelings among Americans. P. J. Marshall examines the feelings produced by the war among Britain's rulers and finds that they came away with less than reassuring feelings about the state of the colonies and a distinctly unfavorable impression of Americans. These views, he contends, helped shape their effort at postwar colonial reform.	. . .

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