A Few Bloody Noses: The American War of Independence - Couverture souple

The War of Independence was one of the founding events of today's world, but it has been simplified into a myth of liberty against oppression, right against wrong. A recent Hollywood film The Patriot, even borrowed atrocities from the Nazis and ascribed them to British redcoats.;In reality London was simply too distant to rule with a heavy hand. The Boston Tea Party notwithstanding, taxes were only an excuse for protest - they were routinely avoided. What angered settlers more was the law that stopped them seizing Indian land. Love of liberty ran deep, but economics and demography were the driving forces of revolution - and it challenged not just Britain but American's own social order. Far from being united in patriotism, American in 1776 was violently divided over independence. Conversely, many in Britain favoured it, especially in preference to bloodshed.;The war was marred by incompetence and bad faith on both sides. It was also close. Before Yorktown, the rebel generals thought they were losing. But they knew they could not be defeated in the long run, as much as 200 years later in a war of striking similarities, the Vietnamese knew the same. After the fighting, about eight per cent of Americans left the country. Following four years of misrule the Constitutional Convention imposed its own conservative counter-revolution, and from cunning, idealism and courage emerged the most powerful nation the world has yet seen.

We meant well to the Americans-just to punish them with a few bloody noses, and then to make laws for the happiness of both countries," said George III. The ensuing uprising led to the creation of the United States, the most powerful country in the modern world.

Robert Harvey, whose most recent book Liberators was brilliantly reviewed on both sides of the ocean, challenges conventional views of the American Revolution in almost every aspect-why it happened, who was winning and when, the characters of the principal protagonists, and the role of Native Americans and slaves. In a time when the history of the United States is being reconsidered-when David McCullough's John Adams and Stephen Ambrose's Band of Brothers top the bestseller lists-Harvey creatively studies this seminal event in the making of the United States. He takes a penetrating look at a war that was both vicious and confused, bloody and protracted, and marred on both sides by incompetence and bad faith. He underscores the effect of the Revolution on the settlers in America, and those at home in Britain-the country that the settlers had left behind, and to which many returned. The result is an extraordinarily fascinating and thoroughly readable account.