Excerpt from The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, 1763-1776 A greater number of investigations of the American revolutionary epoch have been made in the last three or four decades than in all the preceding years. This dili gence has been the outgrowth of the modern spirit of historical research and has been productive of results which completely discredit the simple formulae by which the earlier historians explained the colonial revolt. In the light of these studies it is now almost universally agreed that the revolutionary movement was the product of a complexity of forces, governmental and personal, British and colonial, social, economic, geographical and religious. N o definitive history of the American Revol ution can be written until it becomes possible to appraise each one of these factors at its true value. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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"This wonderfully rich volume challenges those who claim that political history is arid, narrow, or worse, irrelevant to our own concerns. Jensen's study explores popular political mobilization on the eve of American independence. It reconstructs the complex decisions that slowly, often painfully transformed a colonial rebellion into a genuine revolution. Jensen's well-paced narrative never loses sight of the ordinary men and women who confronted the most powerful empire in the world." --T.H. Breen, William Smith Mason Professor of American History, Northwestern University