There is a large library of histories and novels out there if you want to read about the American Revolutionary War. The Revolution provides a broad canvas for authors, who can choose to focus on the war or on individual battles, on the workings of the Continental Congress, on important civil documents like the Declaration of Independence, on the education and the lives of the various Founding Fathers (and one book, by Cokie Roberts on the Founding Mothers), on the loyalists, the spies, the traitors, and on and on.

And then there is An Empire on the Edge - the story of how the government of Britain reacted to events in its American colonies leading up to the Revolution.

In this book the focus is on events from 1771 up to the Battle of Lexington and Concord in 1775, as seen through the preoccupations and workings of the British Parliament. As discontent and rebellious sentiment builds in the American colonies, Parliament's attention is focused on the tea trade and the East India Crisis. Tea, and what to do about the tea trade play a large part in Bunker's telling.

The British economy in the early 1770s was driven by speculation. From China to India to America and the West Indies trade was well established. But over time the traders themselves had became speculators. In the case of the East India Company, the actions taken by its partners would today be classed as, at a minimum, insider trading and fraud.

The company controlled much of the legal British tea trade. The partners traded in its stock to keep the price up, while hiding accounting irregularities and their large overreach in stockpiling tea. It had also gained the right to control the collection of taxes in Bengal (roughly modern day Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal). Heavy-handed actions extracting taxes in Bengal drove many locals into poverty, leading to the deaths of up to 80 thousand Bengali as famine set in and food prices rose. This all led the Company almost to the point of bankruptcy, at which time the partners threw themselves at the mercy of Parliament.

Unwinding the East India Crisis and setting the governing of Bengal on more sound footing (meaning under Parliamentary control rather than that of the Company) took time, energy and political maneuvering. So much so that affairs in the American colonies went unremarked in Parliament for months at a time. Out of the maneuvering came a poorly conceived plan to dump excess tea inventory on the American colonies and thus force the colonists to pay the despised tax on tea - which led to the Boston Tea Party.

So, when Parliament's focus finally shifted to America it was almost too late. Early inaction, compounded by the slow flow of information, and lax communication from the governors of the American colonies, left Parliament reacting to perception as much as reality. Harsh measures taken in Parliament led to escalating measures from the Americans, leading finally to war.

Bunker has penned an interesting story and I enjoyed reading it. I especially appreciated the point Bunker makes that Britain had no overarching policy or plan for its American colonies. As far as Britain was concerned the colonies were there to support trade with Britain and to pay taxes. Beyond that there was little interest in Parliament in the affairs of the colonies, nor any strategic thought given to them.

Four Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐ for An Empire on the Edge. ( )

An enlightening and accessible look at a topic most Americans feel like they know a lot about: the American Revolution. But Bunker tells the story from a different perspective than the usual focus on Sons of Liberty, continental congresses and committees of correspondence: the British.

Specifically, he goes into the political and economic problems facing the British government in the 1770s, and how those problems led American protests to be ignored as a relatively minor irritant. He also describes the rigid ideologies that prevented Britain's largely mediocre leadership from the outside-the-box thinking needed to avert the crisis when it finally bubbled up. (Though even a greater mind such as Ben Franklin does not come off well in the saga.)

A great perspective-broadener that I recommend to anyone with an interest in Revolutionary history. ( )

This was a very interesting book: the run-up to the American Revolution, from the other side. A good explanation of how things worked in Great Britain at the time (Sam Adams supposedly didn't understand this real well; neither, frankly, did I), what else was going on, and why certain decisions "seemed like a good idea at the time".

Here is the short version of Nick Bunker’s thesis: King George and his government let the North American colonies slip from their grasp.

A newcomer to the history of the American Revolution might think that this book is a cockeyed way to learn about the “shot heard ‘round the world” and the consequences of the actions at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775.

An informed student of the Revolutionary War probably will find much new material in Bunker’s relentlessly detailed An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America.
On our side of the pond, we don’t have much opportunity to consider the war or the revolution from the British point of view.

Bunker offers devastating detail about the ill-informed, patronizing, self-serving, doctrinaire and sometimes feckless actions of Lord North and the British government in the years that led to the sanguinary clash of British regulars and American farmers-militiamen on the road from Concord, through Lexington, to Boston on “that famous day and year.”

An Empire on the Edge offers an extensively documented case that the British leaders were largely ignorant of the scope and depth of colonial antipathy toward the various punitive measures that Britain sought to impose in North America, as early as 1765 (the Stamp Act) and continuing to the final, ill-fated steps to chastise the city of Boston after the notorious Tea Party in late 1773.

Further, Bunker describes the half-cocked military moves by Lord North and his ministers, in the
years leading up to the disastrous outing to Lexington-Concord. The king and his government were not prepared to wage war successfully in North America, partly because they waited too long to believe that the colonists actually would fight, and partly because they disdained the colonials’ fighting capacity, and partly because they put higher priority on their Caribbean sugar colonies, and partly because they were pre-occupied with the military threat posed by France and various European intrigues.

Bunker does not speculate on a question that occurs to me: after that first shot was fired at Lexington, did the British really commit themselves to winning the war?

The king and his government made the commitment to fight. They did not, however, at any time before or during the war, commit all the king’s horses and all the king’s men to the military campaign to regain dominion in North America. At the commencement of fighting, a British victory was not immediately feasible. Perhaps it did not become feasible.

Bunker’s analysis of the planning and wrangling in Lord North’s war room suggests that the British wanted to win, but didn’t push the right buttons to bring victory within their grasp.
More on my blogs:
http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/
http://historybottomlines.blogspot.com/ ( )