A review by tessisreading2
An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America by Nick Bunker

5.0

Like many American kids, I grew up with a particular perception of the Revolutionary War: the Boston Massacre, unfair taxes, the Redcoats repressing Boston, Paul Revere riding to warn that the British were coming, heroic American farmers in homespun breeches lurking behind stone walls in Lexington to fight for freedom. This book presents a different Revolutionary War - one with rapacious corporations pressing for illogical taxes, colonies that weren't actually producing enough to make them financially independent, and exhausted British civil servants in tiny offices waving their arms around and prophesying doom, only to be ignored by the backbiting members of Parliament who only had a vague understanding of where America even was. It's fascinating stuff, even as I follow the Freedom Trail to my office every morning. The character sketches are vivid and my biggest complaint was that eventually the book ended: I'd have been interested to see what the author made of the war itself.