To the Revolution!
By 
On the occasion of Ken Burns’ new series on the American Revolution, National Security Journal asked me for some thoughts on how things could have gone wrong for the Continentals in the war…
American accounts of the Revolution focus on how scrappy bands of rebels managed to defeat Europe’s most powerful crown, and tend to de-emphasize the extraordinary difficulties of holding onto a vast, lightly populated territory with poor infrastructure.
The inhabited territory of the Thirteen Colonies amounted to more than 400000 square miles, some five times the size of Great Britain. The colonies claimed some 2.5 million inhabitants to eight million Britons, although over half a million of the former were enslaved.
Moreover, although Great Britain was wealthier in aggregate than the Colonies, per capita living standards were almost certainly higher in America, mainly because of the abundance of land.
The British government also faced immense difficulties in maintaining armies in the field and in communication across the breadth of the Atlantic.
This is not to say that the Patriots faced an easy task; the British Army and the Royal Navy were larger, better armed, and more experienced than their Colonial counterparts. The British maintained better relations with the Native American tribes that lived on the frontier, a particularly sore point with the colonists. Nevertheless, conquering the recalcitrant colonies would have been an immensely difficult military task even for a Crown undistracted by other problems.