An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America

by Nick Bunker

Overview

Finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in History

Written from a strikingly fresh perspective, this new account of the Boston Tea Party and the origins of the American Revolution shows how a lethal blend of politics, personalities, and economics led to a war that few people welcomed but nobody could prevent.  

“A great Empire, like a great Cake, is most easily diminished at the edges,” observed Benjamin Franklin, shortly before the American Revolution. In An Empire on the Edge, British author Nick Bunker delivers a powerful and propulsive narrative of the road to war. At the heart of the book lies the Boston Tea Party, when the British stumbled into an unforeseen crisis that exposed deep flaws in an imperial system sprawling from the Mississippi to Bengal. Shedding new light on the Tea Party’s origins and on the roles of such familiar characters as Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, Thomas Hutchinson, and the British ministers Lord North and Lord Dartmouth, Bunker depicts the last three years of deepening anger on both sides of the Atlantic, culminating in the irreversible descent into revolution.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307741776
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/04/2015
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	5.21(w) x 8.03(h) x 0.98(d)

About the Author

Nick Bunker is the author of Making Haste from Babylon, a history of the Mayflower Pilgrims, described by The Washington Post as “a remarkable success.” Educated at King’s College, Cambridge, and Columbia University, he was a journalist for the Liverpool Echo and the Financial Times, and then an investment banker, chiefly with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. During his careers in journalism and finance, he traveled widely in China, India, the former Soviet bloc, and the United States. He now lives in Lincolnshire, England.

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Copyright © 2015 Nick Bunker.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
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Table of Contents

Prologue

1 The Finest Country in the World 3

2 The Old Regime 13

Part 1 The Empire of Speculation

1 The Tiger's Mouth 31

2 "This Dark Affair": The Gaspée Incident 50

3 A Bankrupt Age 70

4 The Unhappiness of Lord North 85

5 Ignorance and Bad Policy 104

Part Two The Sending of the Tea

6 The East India Crisis 127

7 Whigs, West Indians, and Thomas Hutchinson 139

8 Massachusets on the Eve 162

9 The Boston Tea Party: Prelude 187

10 The Boston Tea Party: Climax 206

Part 3 Down the Slope

11 The Cabinet in Winter 239

12 "Boston must be Destroyed" 256

13 The Revolution Begins 281

14 An Election in Arcadia 310

15 The Arming of America 326

16 The Fatal Dispatch 343

Epilogue: The Noble Dead 366

Appendix 1 The Meaning of Treason 373

Appendix 2 The Value of Money in the 1770s 377

Sources and Further Reading 379

Notes 381

Acknowledgments 413

Index 415

Editorial Reviews

Finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in History
Winner of the 2015 George Washington Prize
Winner of the 2015 Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award

“[A] bracing gallop through the three years leading up to the ‘shot heard round the world.’. . . A broad and telling portrait.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Absorbing and detailed. . . . Bunker’s narrative is human and even-handed; and from the Boston harbourside to the salons of London, a complex and epic tale is told with colour and enthusiasm.” —The Sunday Telegraph (London)

“Bunker’s tightly argued and deeply researched book shows how a broader perspective can shed new light on even the most familiar events.” —Foreign Affairs
 
“A joy. . . . An exciting backstage look at the events that caused the American Revolution. . . . [and] an excellent analysis of the situation in the American colonies and Great Britain in the 18th century.” —New York Journal of Books
 
“Nearly two and a half centuries after the fact, it would seem all but impossible to shed fresh light and insight into the origins of the American Revolution. And yet, this is precisely what journalist-turned-financial analyst-turned-historian Nick Bunker has accomplished in a majestic new study of the events leading up to shots being fired at Lexington and Concord in 1775.”
 —The Manchester Journal
 
“Highly recommended.”
—Andrew Lambert, BBC History Magazine
 
“A nuanced global analysis of Britain’s failure to hold onto its American colonies. . . . riveting. . . . With a sharp eye for economic realities, Bunker persuasively demonstrates why the American Revolution had to happen.”
—Publishers Weekly (boxed review)

“An eye-opening study of the British view of the American Revolution and why they were crazy to fight it. . . . the failure of British leadership to recognize the warning signs will astonish readers who thought the Revolution was just about tea. A scholarly yet page-turning, superbly written history.”
—Kirkus (starred review)
 
“[An] enthralling examination of the three years leading up to the American Revolution. . . . Bunker sets the story in its global context. However, he is also good at zeroing in on the local and unfamiliar.”
—The Times (London)
 
“Utterly absorbing and full of colour, we learn afresh what a mess Britain made of leaving America and, crucially and importantly, how that mess shaped the American psyche.”
—Justin Webb, presenter, BBC Today Programme 

“Bunker’s is a fascinating historical account, with implications that go beyond its subject matter into the question of how empire-building works—or doesn’t.”
—The Columbus Dispatch

“Nick Bunker dazzles the reader with a deeply researched and clear-eyed accounting of the dissolution of the mighty—but woefully overextended—British Empire, and in particular its 13 colonies in North America. Bunker’s mellifluous prose fairly jumps off the page, drawing the reader deeper and deeper into this intricate and fascinating tale.”
—William D. Cohan
 

From the Publisher

07/07/2014
Covering the three years leading up to the outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1775, journalist Bunker (Making Haste from Babylon) wisely jettisons a hero/villain dichotomy in favor of a nuanced global analysis of Britain’s failure to hold onto its American colonies. Bunker opens his riveting narrative with an account of the East India Company’s maneuvers to secure tea for the thirsty British market. In 1771, the company miscalculated demand and ended up with a crippling amount of unsold stock that, with the help of the British government, it intended to unload on the 13 colonies. By 1772, the colonists, accustomed to running their own economies and local governments, pushed back at what they viewed as unwarranted intrusions into their affairs. This serious difference of opinion over the nature of the colonial relationship became crystal clear when a group of American raiders attacked a British customs schooner, the Gaspée, off the coast of Rhode Island. Relations with Britain deteriorated, culminating with the dumping of the East India Company’s tea in the Boston harbor. This was a major property crime and another direct challenge to Parliament’s authority. With a sharp eye for economic realities, Bunker persuasively demonstrates why the American Revolution had to happen. Illus. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2014-06-23
Bunker (Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History, 2010) delivers an eye-opening study of the British view of the American Revolution and why they were crazy to fight it.England never had a solid plan for administering the American colonies, situated on a continent they couldn’t understand and could never hope to rule. Their existence was purely economic, a market for English goods and an exclusive supplier of tobacco, rice, timber, fur, rum, sugar and other important exports. Those who governed for England sent few, if any, reports, and those were incomplete and/or about the coming trouble. Thomas Gage, the commander in chief of the British Army in America, was responsible for territory from Nova Scotia to the Bahamas, in addition to the western bases, from Quebec to Alabama, that Britain gained after the Seven Years’ War. On the other hand, King George III’s influence was limited. Things might have carried on as usual except for the 1772 banking crash and resulting recession. Speculation, greed, extortion and fraud brought the East India Company to its knees, deep in debt with a mountain of tea losing value to a worldwide smuggling trade. The author lists countless mistakes, misunderstandings and plain stupidity, all of which led to revolution. The ultimate cause of the revolt was Britain’s staunch belief in the twin pillars of the British constitution: parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law in a government built on land ownership. Colonists had no rights, and only landowners could attend town meetings. Questions of taxation, religious freedom and the bailout of the East India Company were really just flash points, and the failure of British leadership to recognize the warning signs will astonish readers who thought the Revolution was just about tea.A scholarly yet page-turning, superbly written history.

Kirkus Reviews