Opening New Markets: The British Army and the Old Northwest (review)

With Opening New Markets, Walter S. Dunn, Jr., offers his third in a series of volumes on the British army and the American frontier in the years before the American Revolution. This study examines "four crucial years from 1765 to 1768" which "marked the failure of British economic policies in America and led to political disaster" (p. vii).

Dunn argues that in the years after the French-Indian War, frontier commerce represented fully half the value of British imports to America. The control of this trade became naturally a major prize in the eyes of colonial merchants. Unfortunately for the American establishment, British policies were detrimental to colonial merchants and increasingly favored British mercantile houses and French traders. As a result, American merchants saw "Britain and particularly the army as responsible for their losses" and within a decade, those "same disgruntled merchants became leaders in the Revolution" (p. 1).

Employing a geographical framework, Dunn's chapters journey across the frontier from the upper Great Lakes to New York, from Pennsylvania to the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys. Dunn explains that within each region American merchants were out-maneuvered by long established French fur trading companies on one hand, and by newly formed British companies which controlled the lucrative army pay and supply contracts on the other. The result was "a devastating blow to the colonial economy" (p. 13). On the road to revolution, Dunn feels that the last straw was the passage of a series of Quartering Acts which, after effectively shutting out Americans from army resources and revenues, now expected Americans to help pay for their upkeep.

Dunn's tightly written economic analysis also offers a conversion feature which turns eighteenth-century pounds into contemporary dollars. The principal drawback of this study, like in the earlier two, is that the research was conducted between 1959 and 1970. There is no attempt to integrate scholarship of the past three decades. Although Dunn suggests that his account is not "a survey of all the secondary books and articles that have been published in the last 150 years" and that it rests on "primary source material almost exclusively," the footnotes reveal a more broadly based study than that claim (p. vii). Dunn's contribution, even so, adds insight and perspective to our understanding of this chapter in the decade before the Revolution.