Customer Reviews

Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire

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This volume is not only essential reading for the British history buff, but also for the American history buff, offering an understanding of the British political mindset in the 1700's. It is not an easy book for the average American reader, and assumes a greater understanding of British and European history than most of us might have, so the initial learning curve is somewhat steep.
The American Revolution did not occur in a vacuum, and what Simms implicitly provides is a background into the development of British policy and attitudes towards the American colonies, and an understanding of American attitudes that grew out of the same era, including why the British (and Americans) disliked large standing armies, why the employment of Hessian soldiers was standard operating procedure long before the American Revolution, and how the colonial militias were wholly ineffective during the French and Indian War (just as they were later during the War of 1812) necessitating the use of British regulars and Hessians, and running up the costs of the war that were to be recompensed by the hated Stamp Act and other taxes. An American history buff will have many "Eureka!" moments as new light is shed on the hackneyed and overly-simplified causes of the American Revolution that have been taught on this side of the Atlantic.
Simms' study of the political and military connections of Britain to Hanover and the balance of power in Europe lends a whole new perspective to the rise of Britain during the 1700's and serves as prelude to the American Revolution and Napoleonic wars. Some of his characterizations of the American colonists, and all their shortcomings and foibles, show that Americans haven't really changed all that much over the intervening two hundred years.
A "must read!"

I've seen very few books that attempt to tell the story of Great Britain in the 1700s from a European perspective. That means that there's a lot of untrod ground for Simms to cover, and he covers it well. He describes the people involved in setting British foreign and military policy during the period, describes their political motivations, and their disagreements with one another. There is a lot of information here that I've never seen before in one place, and Simms knits it all together in a cogent and interesting way. Therefore, as a chronicle, the book works quite well.

Unfortunately, Simms chose to organize his book around his idiosyncratic view that Europe was the focus of all of Britain's effective political and military strategy during the period, and that all of Britain's failures are explained by deviations from a Eurocentric policy. The effort is ultimately unconvincing because Simms is too good a historian to leave out the numerous facts that disprove his theories. But periodic injections of his theories disrupt the narrative, and he becomes supremely annoying in repeated efforts to make the facts support conclusions that they do not. Most of the time these take the form of a sequence of facts, followed by a statement that they were really Eurocentric (if successful) or that they were naval or colonial in focus (if unsuccessful). Thus, we hear that Britain's successful combat with France in America in the 1750s was really a Eurocentric strategy while Britain's unsuccessful combat with France in the 1770s and 1780s was foolishly colonial. Sometimes the assertions are just bizarre. For example, we're told that Walpole was viewed as a financial expert with strong connections to the banking sector, but that his accession to power during a fiscal crisis was REALLY because of his German policies. Simms simply asserts that trade with the colonies -- which he admits was the fastest growing sector of British trade -- was not about economics, but about European strategy. In Simms' hands, even the American Revolution was really about colonists' divergent "strategic versions" of European strategy, and not about constitutional principles. There is no support for this proposition, and Simms provides none -- just the assertion.

That said, if you can get past the silly theorizing, there's a lot of interesting information for the history buff.

This book describes the diplomatic and military history of Great Britain from 1701 to 1783; it does so as part of a comprehensive case for the "Eurocentric" thesis in British diplomatic history. The ultimate outcome, of course, is the creation of the American Republic (or "partition of Britain"), which Simms demonstrates to have been the result of events in Continental Europe rather than in the Colonies.


The book is naturally organized around the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1713), the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748), the Seven Years War (1756-1763), and the War of American Independence (1770-1783). The first three of these were categorically European wars, with fairly modest naval theaters. The last was a complicated combination of naval and North American engagements; the European modality of the conflict was exclusively diplomatic, but that was to prove decisive.


The first three wars featured an insidious dwindling of Britain's European allies: a grand alliance of the Netherlands, Portugal, Savoy, Austria, Prussia, and Hanover combined with Britain to contain Louis XIV. The constant opportunistic maneuvers by successive ministries (in London and elsewhere) destroyed mutual trust in the system of alliances, but not the will to wage war. Britain was nearly left at the altar in 1740, when its foreign secretaries sought Austrian assistance with nothing in return; then again, in 1756, when everyone swapped partners and it was stuck with Prussia. In both 1710 and again, in 1761, the British government abruptly abandoned its allies when it got what it wanted (and changed governing parties); this led directly to the isolation of 1775.


The victory of 1763 was staggering in its magnitude; it left Britain the master of America, the African littoral, and South Asia. The victories were so sweeping they not only made Britain politically incapable of making the compromises needed to cultivate alliances, but also left it a defense perimeter of unmanageable size. Most of Continental Europe was either in a revanchist mood, or else exasperated by Britain's rough handling of neutrals. Hence, when the Revolution erupted in New England, the UK soon found itself at war with every single continental power; it was unable to open a front on the Continent, unable to tie down France, and paralyzed by violent extremes of public opinion at home.


The book is so excellent because it rises to meet an extraordinary challenge: it describes with maximum efficiency the crucial diplomatic/strategic transformations that made Britain the first true global superpower. Simms has to marshal immense documentary evidence merely to describe what happened, let alone defend his thesis. He does so with profound effectiveness because he never pads his prose. There are no digressions on whether we should judge the characters by our own standards or theirs, no efforts to "novelize" the narration with speculations on the actors' impressions or motives. Most of the time, Simms actually furnishes evidence as to what these were, and uses his skills as an historian to explain how we can assign relative weight to the events.


The book is so sparely written that a truly awesome amount of information is presented, and all of it is meticulously documented. But this is no almanac; every single detail has a clear purpose. Simms' thesis is that Great Britain's elites had a vivid, professional conception of their role in a congress of Europe; that Britain required that its potential rivals remain incapable of unilaterally dictating European affairs. In the 1760's, Britain itself had become that which it feared, a hyperpower which could virtually face down the whole of Europe. Its defeat was not at the hands of American settlers, nor even at the hands of the French and Spanish navies (although these were crucial). Rather, it was the collapse of a stable pan-European polity, and the desperation on all sides to restore that polity.

With over one hundred pages of footnotes we can be confident that Brendan Simms did his research for "Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire." Indeed, facts and information are jampacked into the book, which makes it a cumbersome and tedious read. The book has a thesis -- that Europe, rather than its colonies, was the most important arena for British foreign policy, and failure to heed this dictum led to failure on the battlefield and loss of the American colonies -- but it's easy to forget the thesis, as we easily get stuck in the rainy mud that is Simms' prose.

Powerful enemies without and internal strife within, we have to appreciate the genius of the British aristocracy for maintaining liberty in a time and place of instability. We also have to appreciate the British genius for the practical, inviting foreign monarchs to occupy the British throne when they themselves find their own monarchs severely lacking. It's also a cynical mind that aims to keep Europe and the world in tumult in order to keep its island safe.