the conflict. He begins his narrative in 1763, the year of the Treaty of Paris that ended the French and Indian War, and of the Proclamation of 1763, the royal edict that attempted to stop settlements in the trans-Appalachian West. His narrative ends with the ratification of the US Constitution, which he sees as a sort of consummation of the Revolution.

Along the way, Wood visits themes that he has expanded upon in his influential scholarly works, including The Creation of the American Republic and The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Chief among these is republicanism, the ideology that Wood sees as a radical political force, one that the revolutionaries struggled to control. The book emphasizes, as does Wood's overall body of work, what he calls the "transforming effects" of the Revolution, which led to "alterations in the way people related to government, to the economy, and to one another."

He pursues these themes through the early protests against British rule, the outbreak of war, the process of state-constitution making, and the war itself. His book concludes with the aftermath of the war, which saw some of the social effects of the Revolution spin off in directions the revolutionaries did not anticipate nor desire. In Wood's mind, the Constitution, which reflected the hope of the Framers to control these forces, did not really stop the social and political change unleashed by the Revolution.

In this relatively short book of history, Wood attempts to explain the causes of the American Revolution, its character, and its consequences (xxv). In the first part of the book, Wood explains that the American colonies had been developing in their own way for hundreds of years when Britain, around 1760, began to reinsert itself into colonial affairs in a powerful way. Though the colonies were regarded as primitive, during the Revolution, they began to stand for something novel and formed a break with the European political culture of the past.

Britain had treated its colonies, including regulating colonial trade, with laxness and loose, inefficient regulation, Wood explains, until several factors made it necessary for Britain to regulate its colonies with more efficiency. One of these factors was the movement of people into the interior of America and the increasing importance of colonial manufacturing. However, when Britain attempted to control colonial trade, the colonists revolted, and revolution ensued.

The revolution, Wood explains, fed on local imperial antagonisms that were whipped up by local politicians to win favor with the public. Without intending to do so, these movements created a new kind of political movement that questioned old political ideas and that broke with the English constitution and political culture. In particular, Americans embraced many of the ideas of the "country opposition" in England, which had long opposed the court and the Church of England.

Though the colonists had not intended to do so, they went further in developing a new kind of political culture than they had intended. Wood discusses the process by which Americans developed state and national constitutions and by which they realized that they had gone too far in removing all executive power in the Articles of Confederation. He also examines the new Republicanism that developed following the Revolution and the battles between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists surrounding the writing of the Constitution. His work examines the political, cultural, and economic underpinnings and consequences of the American Revolution.