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Tea Party to Independence: The Third Phase of the American Revolution, 1773-1776. By Peter D. G. Thomas. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991. viii + 357 pp. $69.00, ISBN 0-19-820142-7.)
Spanish Observers and the American Revolution, 1775-1783. By Light Townsend Cummins. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991. xvi + 229 pp. $32.50, ISBN 0-8071-1690-4.)
Tea Party to Independence completes Peter D. G. Thomas's trilogy on the British response to American colonial problems between 1763 and 1776. In his earlier volumes, British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis: The First Phase of the American Revolution, 1763-1767 (1975) and The Townshend Duties Crisis: The Second Phase of the American Revolution, 1767-1773 (1987), and in this one, Thomas gives his readers a closely argued analysis of decision making at the highest levels of British government. Although it is not his main purpose to enter into historiographical debates on the causes of the American Revolution, Thomas's well-crafted narrative both supplements and modifies in significant ways the existing literature on the subject, principally Bernard Donoughue's British Politics and the American Revolution: The Path to War, 1773-1775 (1964) and, to a lesser extent from the American perspective, David Ammerman's In the Common Cause: American Response to the Coercive Acts of 1774 (1974).
Central to the book are the arguments that the colonies had few friends in British parliamentary circles, that the ministry's decisions were not much influenced by extraneous factors (such as public opinion or the activities of colonial agents), and that the British political establishment was not seriously divided...