A Struggle for Power (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

Theodore Draper’s A STRUGGLE FOR POWER: THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION is a bold reinterpretation of the coming of the American Revolution. A distinguished historian who has written about topics as diverse as the rise of the American Communist Party, Fidel Castro’s seizure of power in Cuba, and the Iran-Contra affair, Draper brings a fresh perspective to an oft-told story. He challenges the academic orthodoxy which for the past thirty years has argued that the underlying cause of the rift between the colonies and mother country was ideological. According to this dominant interpretation, the famous phrase “no taxation without representation” accurately summarized the issue that spurred Americans to rebel against the authority of king and parliament. Schooled in a heady mixture of Lockean political philosophy, with its emphasis on natural rights and representative government, and the “Commonwealthman” tradition of English radicalism, which had long criticized the oligarchic realities of power in London, the American colonists were intellectually primed to resist the encroachments of a British government determined to rationalize imperial administration in the 1760’s.

Draper does not dismiss the importance of the American revolutionaries’ beliefs, but argues that a preoccupation with them has obscured a more fundamental explanation of the breakdown of British authority in the thirteen colonies. Draper contends that a contest over power lay at the heart of the American Revolution. The colonies were growing rapidly, doubling their population every twenty-five years. Already it was widely believed that they were more economically important to the mother country than the reverse. The conquest of French Canada in 1760 removed the last military threat tying Americans to Britain. A consciousness of the rising power of America hardened the positions of both sides in the disputes leading up to the Revolution, the British determined to tame the colonies before it was too late, and the Americans increasingly confident of their ability to go it alone. Thus, according to Draper, war ultimately came because the American colonies had outgrown their dependence on Britain. A STRUGGLE FOR POWER deserves to be consulted by every student of the American Revolution.

Sources for Further Study

Chicago Tribune. March 24, 1996, XIV, p. 1.

Library Journal. CXXI, January, 1996, p. 116.

London Review of Books. XVIII, April 18, 1996, p. 13.

The Nation. CCLXII, February 26, 1996, p. 26.

The New Republic. CCXIV, February 19, 1996, p. 33.

The New York Review of Books. XLIII, March 21, 1996, p. 17.

The New York Times Book Review. CI, February 18, 1996, p. 9.

The New Yorker. LXXI, February 5, 1996, p. 68.

The Times Literary Supplement. May 17, 1996, p. 5.

The Wall Street Journal. February 12, 1996, p. A12.