A Struggle for Power

Theodore Draper's new book is an acute dissection of the process that led to the final break with England and to the armed revolt in 1775. It is an interpretation that differs from others which have given most prominence to ideological factors as the root cause of the rebellion. Draper's treatment gives as much importance to the British as to the American side of the struggle. He shows how early in the colonial story British thinkers began to worry about the inevitability of an American breakaway.

Draper lucidly examines the logic of dissolution, and the manifold ways in which the rapidly increasing colonial population and commerce propelled an unfolding revolutionary process. Ideological arguments, he contends, provided a means, not an end, to the revolutionary struggle. Before the outbreak of the rebellion, American leaders foresaw that the colonies were bound to become "a mighty empire" or "a rising Empire." They were determined that Americans, not the British, should control this future. But they aimed at little more than a change in the power relationship and left political, economic, and social changes for later. A Struggle for Power offers a lively and compelling account of not one but of two highly complex conflicts - of the British against the French, and of the Americans against the British. A Struggle for Power seeks to answer the question of how and why, in the space of little more than a decade after the Stamp Act of 1765, the people in the New World transformed themselves from proud British colonists into self-conscious Americans intent on establishing an independent republic.