THIS is not an academic monograph. For sources, Theodore Draper has found that "published material was quite good enough" - and there is indeed a lot of it. The result is very readable general history, scholarly in its way, supported by many quotations. There were more causes of the American revolution than taxation without representation - though this was very important - and in his narrative Draper allows his varied case to speak their own words on all these causes, and they do it extremely well.
Quotations from pamphlets, rarely vituperative, during the period 1755-61 down to descriptions of mob violence in a later generation record the progress of event leading to that great revolution in human affairs - the central event in American political history.
Benjamin Franklin, then agent of Pennsylvania in London, produced some of the earliest and most famous of the pamphlets. He wrote as a loyal British subject, and this he remained almost until the eve of the revolution.
The pamphlets were skilful, if ambiguous, essays in propaganda. They presented America as a mercantile empire expanding demographically. Franklin expected the population to overtake Great Britain's within a century and tilt the balance of power with it.
In 1759, David Home was predicting that, "after draining the mother country of inhabitants", the colonies, formed from settlements, would achieve independence, in Draper's view a calculus of power rather than of rights and grievances was already leading towards the end of the first British empire a century before the American revolution. Meanwhile, the republican thought of Milton, Sydney and Locke was enriching the minds and vocabulary of the Founding Fathers.
The settlements were financed by joint stock companies whose primary concern was profit. These settlements began as an extension of trade, the Crown authorising the expeditions of "merchant adventurers" by the grant of charters. The charters provided for elected assemblies with total power in the raising of money. Governors appointed by the Crown provided the link with the homeland.
Unlike some other historians, Draper finds coercive arguments for the economic inevitability of American independence, and in this quest he has no truck with any mindless determinism. On both sides of the Atlantic, ideas evolved into ideologies deriving from the British need for more reliable administrators in American and the American desire for more freedom from a distant but protective mother country.
Invoking the authority of Paul, Langford, editor of the Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Draper has a footnote: "There is no satisfactory text of Burke's speeches." This is probably true. Nevertheless, he quotes freely, if not copiously, from these speeches.
If he had sought the support of Conor Cruise O'Brien's magisterial study of Edmund Burke he might have taken more seriously Burke's preoccupation with America and relied less on the astigmatic insights of the "noted" historian Sir Lewis Namier. According to Cruise O'Brien, the Namierite historical tradition dismissed Burke as a "trivialised opportunist".
When the Mayflower arrived in 1620, the American quest for independent power had already begun. Sir Fernando Gorges was one of the earliest voices seeking it after Plymouth pilgrims had been settled on territory already granted to him. But such complaints from America mattered less in London than did the profits of British exporters. The colonists, Draper writes, were not yet ready to take advantage of this policy of "salutary neglect", as Edmund Burke later called it. British politics reacted on the colonies long before the colonies reacted on British politics. Moreover, the diminishing influence of the Board of Trade on American affairs hurt the colonies in the two decades after 1724.
In 1772, Arthur Young, no supporter of American independence, asserted that as soon as their economic potential was realised, the colonies would cease to remain colonies. Young knew all about American objections to the stamp tax and other duties, but Draper insists, and I think rightly, that his eye was on the long run.
In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith declared that the American shopkeepers and tradesmen had now become statesmen and legislators "contriving a new form of government for an extensive empire which will become . . . one of the greatest and most formidable that ever was in the world". Yet, almost to the end, the colonists remained attached to the mother country. In 1774, the first Continental Congress, quoted by Draper, insisted that our connection with Great Britain we shall always carefully and zealously endeavour to support and maintain". A year later, with George Washington commander in chief, Congress was still claiming that "we do not mean to dissolve that union which has so long and so happily subsisted between us".
Once again, however, a pamphlet played a part in January 1776, Thomas Paine's Common Sense seems to have been influential in the popular turn towards republican independence.
Theodore Draper's new version of the remarkable story of the American Revolution is lucid and fluent; his quotations are well chosen and he is particularly good on the telling detail to enliven his general history.