Book Review

The starting point of Richard Buel Jr.'s sweeping narrative is familiar: that despite steady colonial economic growth, revolutionaries experienced near collapse of the economy, and their army nearly starved. But Buel's reasons why this happened depart from many standing interpretations. In the first place, he argues, it was not the corruption of public officials or the greed of local producers that lay at the heart of persistent provisioning difficulties, but rather some real shortages of wheat and flour. Second, those shortages were not due primarily to farmers marching off to war, or to the mountains of depreciating state and Continental currency. Rather, revolutionaries' woes can be traced to a host of international commercial difficulties that held them "in irons": British blockades, reduced American shipping, the occupation of port cities, and the high costs of marine insurance, which in turn reduced importation so much that farmers who could have been producing provisions had no incentive. Without imported goods to buy, at prices farmers could afford, why take grain and flour to market, patriotic duty notwithstanding? Nor, if Buel is correct, did the infusion of French silver provide sufficient means to turn the economy around—as many scholars argue—for farmers were unable to plant, harvest, and market sufficient quantities of foodstuffs to meet the demands of moving armies anyway.

. . .