The Price of Revolution

Richard Buel, Jr. In Irons: Britain's Naval Supremacy and the American Revolutionary Economy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. xi + 397 pp. Appendix, notes, and index. $35.00.

This is an ambitious book, modest in size but bold in its goals. At the outset Buel asserts that his task is to bring intellectual light into the darkness of the economic history of the Revolution. According to him the key to understanding America's revolutionary economy is seapower. The British had it and we did not.

From the first days of settlement the colonies were an integral element of the Atlantic world, a place that was increasingly dominated by English merchants and the king's ships. Agents in London and elsewhere in Great Britain organized markets for American goods, accumulated capital for investment and lobbied Parliament to enact laws and regulations beneficial to their enterprise. While not always pleased at their indenture to the home country, American merchants enjoyed the physical security provided by the Royal Navy and the financial stability offered from their English correspondents. Notwithstanding occasional murmurings of dissent, for most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries both sides of the Atlantic were content with the prevailing arrangements.

For reasons more political than economic, this prosperous world came apart in the crisis years leading to the Revolution. For eight years (1775-1783) armies, Rebel and British, danced and fought across an increasing distressed American countryside. Whatever damage was wreaked in combat was nearly matched by the economic dislocation caused by these locust-like masses of men marching about. At anytime in the Revolution, Washington's army was easily one of the largest concentrations of population in the colonies and it moved about consuming but rarely contributing to the local economy. Buel reminds us just how costly the Revolution was to the American economy.

Buel sets two goals for himself. First he hopes "to identify some of the major sources relevant to the subject." Secondly he aims "to give a general though by no means comprehensive account of the war economy." In the first he succeeds marvelously well. The second is more problematical.

Two hundred sixty-two pages of text are followed by nearly 750 footnotes. Judging by the citations and bibliography, Buel sat in the reading room of virtually every important archive in the United States that holds material relevant to his inquiry. As a sometime editor who spends considerable time trying to persuade authors to reduce their notes, I can only imagine how the editors at Yale must have struggled to get Buel down to a mere 750! Some of these notes are mini-essays and deserve careful reading. Many are explanations for data found in the text and herein is found a cautionary tale. Buel is careful to stay within the bounds of his data and he resists establishing claims beyond what his information will support. For example, Buel explains how he happened upon the calculations used to produce a table articulating the number and tonnage of privateers and letter of marque vessels out of Philadelphia (p. 175, n 47). This note deserves careful attention for it displays both the strength and weakness of the argument. Buel admits that this table is fashioned from incomplete data and that therefore the results expressed, including his own interpretation, are based on limited information. There is no apparent reason to doubt the reliability of Buel's interpretation. Nonetheless, the exercise does demonstrate the tentativeness of the interpretation. On the other hand it is difficult to imagine anyone digging deeper or more widely into the sources than Buel has done.

British strategy was aimed at seizing population centers (almost always ports), cutting sea-lanes and subduing the countryside with the help of loyal subjects. With little difficulty they managed their first two goals but failed to achieve the third.

Early in the war the king's forces took New York and then Newport, Rhode Island. Central location with excellent access to the interior...