In Irons: Britain's Naval Supremacy and the American Revolutionary Economy

In Irons: Britain's Naval Supremacy and theAmerican Revolutionary Economy. By Richard Buel Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. xiv, 397 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-300-07388-7.)

The starting point of Richard Buel Jr.'s sweeping narrative is familiar: that despite steady colonial economic growth, revolutionaries experienced near collapse of the economy, and their army nearly starved. But Buel's reasons why this happened depart from many standing interpretations. In the first place, he argues, it was not the corruption of public officials or the greed of local producers that lay at the heart of persistent provisioning difficulties, but rather some real shortages of wheat and flour. Second, those shortages were not due primarily to farmers marching off to war, or to the mountains of depreciating state and Continental currency. Rather, revolutionaries' woes can be traced to a host of international commercial difficulties...