The dark side of the revolution.

• Author: Smith, Jordan Michael
• Position: Book review

Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), 704 pp., $37.50.

Alan Taylor's American Revolutions demolishes the fiction--deeply ensconced in the country's national mythology--of happy warriors united in a righteous cause against ruthless overlords. If the American Revolution was noble and just, it was also brutal and morally compromised. If it was inspiring and grandiose, it was also dispiriting and parochial. It is this story--of America's initial civil war, with many sides involved in the gruesome fighting--that Taylor aims to tell in his new book.

Alongside Gordon S. Wood and Joseph J. Ellis, Taylor is one of America's most prominent scholars on the revolutionary period. His 1995 book, William Cooper's Town, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize, but it is that book's successor, American Colonies, which shares an obvious kinship with American Revolutions. His earlier work was notable for offering a multinational, multicultural approach to the colonial period. From 1400 to 1820, the "Americans"--those descended from the British--were only one segment of the population living in the area. There were, in addition to the Yankees and the British, the French, the Spanish, the Dutch, the Portuguese and many Indian communities. These peoples overlapped and interacted, and their behavior was deeply shaped by the actions and circumstances of the others. Telling the story of one of those actors necessitates telling the story of the others.

Taylor's new book applies the same wide-lens approach to the revolutionary period. It takes nothing away from it to say that this approach is less exciting or ground breaking here than in American Colonies, because the years in which George Washington became a household name are more familiar. Those years have simply been far better studied by scholars and better portrayed by storytellers than the preceding centuries. This is a magisterial work, but it is one that relies heavily on other sources: the work of Wood, Peter Onuf and Eliga Gould, in particular.

What his new effort lacks in novelty, it makes up for in comprehensiveness. It is fair to say that no other book offers in a single volume as much appropriate detail about as many players from as many vantage points in the revolutionary era. Separate chapters are devoted to slavery, international alliances, naval warfare, the Constitutional Congress and other subjects. At the same time, some...