Conceived in Crisis - (Early American Histories) by Christopher R Pearl (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Conceived in Crisis argues that the American Revolution was not just the product of the Imperial Crisis, brought on by Parliament's attempt to impose a new idea of empire on the American colonies. To an equal or greater degree, it was a response to the inability of individual colonial governments to deliver basic services, which undermined their legitimacy. Factional bickering over policy, violent extralegal regulations, and the dreadful experiences of conducting an imperial war while governing a demographically growing and geographically expanding population all led colonists and imperial officials to consider reforming the colonial governments into more powerful and coercive entities.

Using Pennsylvania as a case study, Christopher Pearl demonstrates how this history of ineffective colonial governance precipitated a process of state formation that was accelerated by the demands of the Revolutionary War. The powerful state governments that resulted dominated the lives of ordinary people well into the nineteenth century. Conceived in Crisis makes sense of the trajectory from weak colonial to strong revolutionary states, and in so doing explains the limited success of efforts to consolidate state power at the national level during the early Republican period.

Review Quotes

Pearl has written a powerful new interpretation of the American Revolution. Not only does he make a persuasive argument about the coming of the Revolution; he also explains what may have been its most important outcome--the creation of sovereign republican states capable of realizing the will of democratic majorities. It is a major scholarly contribution.

This important book breaks new ground on an old topic: the origins of the American Revolution. Pearl's brilliant, painstaking research reveals a crucial part of the origins story we have overlooked for nearly two hundred and fifty years. This book will change how we tell that story and willsurely inspire other scholars to test his thesis in other colonies. That is a magnificent accomplishment.

Well-written and well-researched, Conceived in Crisis makes an important--perhaps decisive--contribution to the problem of state formation in the American Revolution.

About the Author

Christopher R. Pearl is Associate Professor of History at Lycoming College.