tion. By contrast, in the colonies, land was cheap and plentiful, so new methods were not required. Nonetheless, it seems safe to argue that the methods adopted in the colonies would have been adopted eventually, war or no war, when the population density made it sensible to do so. Along similar lines, Jameson suggests that the war caused a revolutionary growth and change in war and commercial industries: paper, salt, powder, cannons, and muskets all had to be manufactured to fight the war. Of course, after 1918, when the industrial nature of warfare had become painfully evident. It is easy to see how he made this conclusion. But it is also easy to see, even with the benefit of the same hindsight that Jameson could have used, that the growth of industry and commerce would almost certainly have occurred anyway, war or no war. Napoleonic France was not converted into an industrial power, despite nearly twenty-five years of virtually non-stop warfare that was of a far greater magnitude than was the “American Revolution.” It is far more sensible to argue that the industry and commerce of the Americas would have developed as a result of trade with Europe, with or without a war. Lastly, many participants argued at the time that the colonies were economically weakened because of the war for a significant period. How is it that Jameson concluded the exact opposite one hundred fifty years later? Fourth, Jameson argued that thought and feeling changed. At first, this claim seems the most plausible. He suggested that the war was a precursor to the European revolutionary fervor of the 1830s; this perhaps has some validity, but the fervor of the 1830s was a more peasants-against-the-aristocracy sort of thing than it was a taxation-without-representation sort of thing. Another difference was nationalism, a decidedly made-in-France phenomenon. Greeks, for example, rose up against the Ottoman Turks in 1830 in order to establish a Greek stat...
