(^184) Chapter Fire
redcoats from complete disaster, though barely, for in January 1779,
the British army in New York had only four days’ rations in hand
when a relieving fleet arrived.^58
The strain, nevertheless, was considerable. Earlier in the century,
wars appear to have been economically beneficial to Great Britain.
Stepped-up government purchases provided a tonic to the market;
technological advances in the metal trades were hastened; and chronic
underemployment was reduced. Subsidies to foreign governments
were easily recouped by the export of commodities from overseas.
But the war of 1776–83 brought economic setback: loss of trade with
the rebellious colonies as well as contraction of investment at home.^59
In other words, with the War of American Independence, Great Brit
ain began to run up against limits to the ninety-year-old feedback
pattern whereby naval power and expenditure reinforced commercial
expansion while commercial expansion simultaneously made naval
expenditures easier to bear.
In France, too, in the 1780s the government was also running up
against the limits of its fiscal resources. The costs of the American war
put what proved to be an unmanageable strain upon existing forms of
government credit and tax income. The effort to meet resulting finan
cial shortfall led, as is well known, to the summoning of the Estates
General in May 1789 and to the outbreak of the French Revolution.
Drastic political and social changes precipitated by the Revolution
soon had the effect of unleashing hitherto unimagined military force.
But in Great Britain, too, a different kind of revolution—techno
logical and industrial—simultaneously raised the limits of the possible
beyond men’s earlier dreams, in matters military as well as civil. Other
countries of Europe and the world were left behind by the remarkable
transformations that came to France and Great Britain between 1789
and 1815. Indeed all humankind is still reeling from the impact of the
democratic and industrial revolutions, triggered so unexpectedly in
the last decades of the eighteenth century. We must therefore con
sider these twin mutations of humanity’s social organization in the
next chapter.
- Three fine books discuss details of the British logistical effort during the War of
American Independence: Piers Mackesy, The War for America, 1775–1783 (Cambridge,
Mass., 1964); David Syrett, Shipping and the American War, 1775–1783: A Study of
British Transport Organization (London, 1970); R. Arthur Bowler, Logistics and the
Failure of the British Army in America, 1775–1783 (Princeton, 1975). Norman Baker,
Government and Contractors: The British Treasury and War Suppliers, 1775–1783 (Lon
don, 1971) is also informative. - A. H. John, “War and the English Economy, 1700–1763,” Economic History
Review, 2d ser." 7 (1954–55): 329–44.