Volume 27, Number 19 · December 4, 1980
America's Garrison Government
By Edmund S. Morgan
The Governors-General: The English Army and the Definition of the Empire, 1569-1681
by Stephen Saunders Webb
University of North Carolina Press, 549 pp., $22.50
The difference between eccentricity and originality in historical studies is often difficult to detect at first encounter. When a radically new interpretation of a large segment of history makes its appearance, time is needed to sift the evidence that will establish it as a seminal work or send it to the dust pile of bright ideas that did not work out. It is going to take time—and some further volumes already promised by the author—to tell where Stephen Saunders Webb's challenging new interpretation of the first British Empire will wind up. If Professor Webb is right, then a lot of English and American history will need rewriting.
Review, 2369 words
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