The Men Who Lost America…book review
The British stopped fighting…
Book review:
The Men Who Lost America:
British Leadership,
the American Revolution,
and the Fate of the Empire
by Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy (b1959)
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013
466 pages
O’Shaughnessy takes the unusual approach of writing nine detailed biographies of the men in the British government whose collective decisions and actions culminated in the loss of the North American colonies during the Revolutionary War.
The Men Who Lost America is a dispassionate debunking of the schoolboy history myth that Washington and his brave Continental Army troops survived the Valley Forge winter to beat the British at Yorktown in 1781, and win the war. Huzzah!
Of course the British—from King George III to his key ministers to the generals and admirals who tried to follow their orders—wanted to win the war. Of course they did.
Nevertheless, The Men Who Lost America lays out the numerous ways that these men never got around to sending enough troops and ships to subdue the American rebels. They never had a war-winning reserve of troops and ships to send, because they were too busy trying to secure their Caribbean sugar island colonies against French and Spanish attacks, and too busy fighting imperial military actions in Canada, Gibraltar, and India.
In fact, O’Shaughnessy demonstrates that the British were not totally defeated in North America. In simple terms, the men who “lost America” finally stopped fighting a war they finally realized they could not win.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2026 All rights reserved.
Book review: An Empire Divided
King George and his ministers
wanted the Caribbean sugar islands
more than they wanted the 13 colonies…
by Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy
click here
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Empyrean: new poems with 57 free verse poems,
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