| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Eliga H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf, editors. Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World. (Anglo-America in the Transatlantic World.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2005. Pp. viii, 381. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95.
The American Revolution sparked a series of transformations not only in the internal life of the new republic but in the wider Atlantic world as well. The latter context of the American Revolution has too often been neglected, and the editors of this volume have encouraged their contributors to address it. The result is a collection of scholarly essays that show how the American Revolution created challenges and tensions, at home and abroad, that required to be addressed. The essays remain, however, rather disparate contributions, despite the valiant effort of the editors in their introduction to make them appear more coherent and cohesive.	1
The first part of this volume explores the impact of the revolution on internal developments within the American colonies or states. Eliga H. Gould accepts that the British government desired peace after 1763 and did not seek to "enslave" the American colonies, but it nevertheless pursued policies to strengthen the military defense of North America that provoked unexpected American resistance against what was perceived as an oppressive standing army. David Hendrickson argues that the framers of the Articles of Confederation sought to create a federation of equal, sovereign states that would resist the domination of any one of the constituent parts. The states agreed to cooperate, but they found it difficult to agree whether they were creating a single national state or a more international union of distinct states. In his excellent essay, Don Higginbotham argues that it was the experience of war that led to the creation of an American national state. War created centralizing tendencies that at first strengthened the authority of the colonial assemblies in their relations with Britain, but then slowly encouraged a movement toward a stronger national state than the patriots had envisaged in 1776. In his essay on the political ideas of John Adams, Richard Alan Ryerson argues that this most conservative of revolutionaries deserves to be classed as a republican monarchist, the last major writer in the classical republican tradition. While Adams might have appeared a monarchist in his attitude to executive power, he did not fear democracy and was a republican when thinking about the whole structure and purpose of government. Ellen Holmes Pearson explores how the American patriots sought to preserve legal as distinct from political continuity in the midst of revolutionary change. She shows how the early legal scholars of the new republic followed English precedents (relying heavily on William Blackstone's Commentaries) while adapting this legacy to new circumstances. Each state took from the English legacy what it thought most appropriate and modified the English common law inheritance in ways that gave a greater role to popular consent and popular choice.	. . .

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