Stratfor covers the globe from its headquarters in Austin, Texas. As a result, many of the company's staff celebrate the Independence Day holiday on July 4. Today we are sharing this column by Stratfor Senior VP of Strategic Analysis Rodger Baker, taking a different perspective on the American Revolutionary War.
Piers Mackesy's 1964 history of the American Revolution traces the war from a British perspective, one that seeks to understand not the questions of battlefield technique or specific battles, or even the politics of independence, but rather the broader context of a nearly seven-year conflict with a distant colony amid a global competition for economic and strategic security.
Mackesy helps us see not a story of a scrappy band of rebels cleverly hiding behind trees and using backwoods marksmanship to defeat an outdated rank-and-file military organization, an image still pervasive in Americana today. Instead, we see a cautionary tale of...
