An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America

Book cover for An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight AmericaAn Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America by Nick Bunkerby Nick Bunker
@nbunkerauthor

Finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in History

Written from a strikingly fresh perspective, this new account of the Boston Tea Party and the origins of the American Revolution shows how a lethal blend of politics, personalities, and economics led to a war that few people welcomed but nobody could prevent.  

“A great Empire, like a great Cake, is most easily diminished at the edges,” observed Benjamin Franklin, shortly before the American Revolution. In An Empire on the Edge, British author Nick Bunker delivers a powerful and propulsive narrative of the road to war. 

At the heart of the book lies the Boston Tea Party, when the British stumbled into an unforeseen crisis that exposed deep flaws in an imperial system sprawling from the Mississippi to Bengal. Shedding new light on the Tea Party’s origins and on the roles of such familiar characters as Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, Thomas Hutchinson, and the British ministers Lord North and Lord Dartmouth, Bunker depicts the last three years of deepening anger on both sides of the Atlantic, culminating in the irreversible descent into revolution.
Show more
Show less

Interview with the Author

Podcast art for Boston AthenaeumBoston Athenaeum
Nick Bunker, “An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America”
9/6/16            37 min

Podcast art for Conversations at the Washington LibraryConversations at the Washington Library
19. Nick Bunker
7/15/16          55 min

Buy on Amazon

Related books

Book cover of The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire by Andrew Jackson O'ShaughnessyThe Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire Book cover for George Washington: A Life in Books by Kevin J. HayesGeorge Washington: A Life in Books Book cover of Young Benjamin Franklin: The Birth of Ingenuity by Nick BunkerYoung Benjamin Franklin: The Birth of Ingenuity Book cover of Revolutions without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World by Janet PolaskyRevolutions without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World Book cover of The Framers' Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution by Michael KlarmanThe Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.


*