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The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. By Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. Pp. 480. Cloth, $37.50.)
Reviewed by Albert H. Tillson, Jr.
In this work Andrew O'Shaughnessy attempts to answer an old question-why Great Britain lost the American Revolutionary War-by separate examinations of ten British political, military, and naval leaders who oversaw the conduct of the conflict. Because these men were subjected to satire and ridicule on both sides of the Atlantic, scholars as well as popular culture have unjustly come to see them as incompetent and hidebound.
To understand the roots of Britain's defeat, O'Shaughnessy argues, requires a more nuanced and complex understanding of these men and the political and material constraints within which they operated. As a group, they were far from ignorant: Most were well educated and conversant with the British Enlightenment; a number were actively involved in literary and cultural life. Although part of an oligarchy, they and other British leaders competed for positions of power and prominence through merit and hard work. Essentially, they were confronted by a war that became for many reasons unwinnable. Yet its futility was not always clear as the war progressed; the British were in fact close to victory at several points and seemed to be so at others. Beyond simply providing a more three-dimensional portrayal of these complicated men, this book's greatest virtue is its illumination of the strong elements of division and ambivalence regarding the war, not only within the British public but...