Rethinking America: From Empire to Republic By John M. Murrin

Abstract

Throughout this volume, Murrin argues that the American Revolution was a crisis in “imperial integration” which the British governent could not handle. The eighteenth century was a time when the colonies were bound to the mother country with multiple ties: a transatlantic religious awakening, expanding trade, effective royal governors in every colony save New York from 1720 to the 1760s, the shared notion of an Englishman’s rights, and even the language itself. Victory over the French in the Seven Years War represented the culmination of this integration. And yet, the failure to learn what worked under the leadership of William Pitt during that war created a series of imperial crises in the 1760s and 1770s that produced what Murrin called the “countercyclical event” of American independence. Murrin argues that “America” was a British idea (that became a nightmare) long before the colonists were forced to make it a reality in the wake of the Revolution.