It is now a quarter-millennium since those embattled farmers stood by that arched bridge, flags to April’s breeze unfurled. Just as the Massachusetts militia’s volleys at Lexington and Concord portended innumerable more to follow, John Ferling’s Shots Heard Round the World: America, Britain, and Europe in the Revolutionary War will be a first among many new books timed for the anniversaries of each momentous event in America’s early national history. But before this republic voted for independence or adopted any constitution, it began as an armed resistance—its first milestones are military. Few scholars are more qualified to narrate and assess the War of Independence than Ferling, who, with his contemporaries Gordon Wood and Joseph Ellis, is one of the eminent living “deans” of Revolution-era historiography. He has written fifteen books on the late-colonial and Founding periods, including three previous works on this war.

Ferling’s latest is not a global history of the American Revolution and its manifold implications in the mode of Janet Polasky’s Revolutions Without Borders (2016) or Matthew Lockwood’s To Begin the World Over Again (2019). It follows a somewhat standard chronology of the war in North America but emphasizes the influential—even determinative—parts played by various non-Americans. Ferling’s major themes are the tragic failures of key British leaders, the Americans’ existential dependence on tenuous French support, the uncertainty of Patriot victory, and the unlikely alignment of events that secured it.

It is usually unfair to criticize past actors’ sins and errors in terms no contemporary used. Britain’s loss of its North American empire is not such a case. Before a single shot was fired or heard, the Rockingham Whigs denounced Prime Minister Frederick North’s war policy with stunning prescience. In January 1775, William Pitt, the Earl of Chatham, warned in the House of Lords that no available number of troops could pacify the colonies. “We are told,” he chided, “that if seventeen thousand men won’t do, fifty thousand shall.” Such an army might “ravage the country, [but] can they occupy the places they have passed? Will not … three million people, wronged and insulted, start up like Hydras in every corner?” Hindsight imbues such anti-war speeches with an aura of inevitability, but events did not always appear in that light at the time. History is seldom so neat.

In December 1776, after his army improbably escaped destruction in the New York campaign and shortly before his triumphant Christmas raid on Trenton, George Washington wrote to his cousin that “affairs are in a very bad way … [the] game is pretty much up.” Four years later, with a French army in North America preparing for the allies’ climactic joint campaign in Virginia, he felt nothing but dread. Amid chronic shortages and economic collapse, Washington told one correspondent that “every idea you can form of our distress will fall short of reality,” and admitted to another having lost all hope of securing independence.

Indeed, on several occasions British armies had complete victory within their grasp. They ought comfortably “to have finished the war in 1776.” Ferling writes that general-in-chief William Howe “threw away several chances to crush the Continental Army.” First in Brooklyn, then Manhattan, Howe’s “languid movement” allowed Washington “to escape … ironclad snares.” Pyrrhic victory at Bunker Hill “mangled Howe’s spirit. … He was never the same soldier again.” During the war’s first two years, Howe consistently ignored the sound military advice of his second-in-command, Henry Clinton, whom Ferling calls “Britain’s best general.” Yet, in spite of needless defeats and missed opportunities, Britain’s strategic aims remained attainable into the fall of 1781. Howe’s reticence, George Cornwallis’s march from North Carolina to Virginia (in defiance of Clinton’s orders), and Colonial Secretary George Germain’s repeated “failure to compel his commander[s] … to adhere to realistic campaign plans” doomed their armies to defeat.

True to Pitt’s warning, Lord North’s war policy foundered on the American continent’s insurmountable vastness, to which eighteenth-century military technology was unequal. The war’s decisive engagement is a case in point. In late July 1781, as Cornwallis sluggishly began fortifying his position on the York River, a French fleet commanded by the Comte de Grasse left the Caribbean bound for the Chesapeake. In Jamaica, Admiral Sir George Rodney learned this intelligence but inexplicably delayed two weeks before forwarding it—the key to anticipating Washington and French general Comte de Rochambeau’s plans—to Clinton in New York. Even still, disaster might have been avoided when Rodney’s successor, Samuel Hood, reached the Virginia coast in late August, five days before de Grasse. Hood could not imagine that, with a multi-week head start, the French fleet had not beaten him there. Finding no sign of it, he made in haste for New York to the imagined relief of General Clinton. By the time the British fleet learned its error and returned on September 5, de Grasse was positioned for defensive action. Ferling observes wryly that of fifteen great fleet actions “waged between 1692 and 1782,” only six “ended in a decisive victory. … [This] was one of them.” Had Hood apprehended the situation correctly and evacuated Cornwallis, the Franco-American army would likely have wrecked itself in a futile assault on an impregnably reinforced New York City. Instead, Britain’s calamity in Virginia mirrored allied fortunes. “In an age before telegraphs, telephones, steamships” and the like, “few military plans panned out as imagined.” Yet two armies marching south over hundreds of miles rendezvoused with a fleet arriving from the Caribbean “within days of one another … [in] sufficient time to conduct a joint siege operation.”

Events certainly did align improbably to deliver the Patriot cause from ruin. But in retrospect, underlying conditions never truly favored British success. Geopolitically, rebellion erupted at the worst conceivable moment for George III. Marie Antoinette’s marriage to Louis XVI in 1770 sealed a Franco-Austrian entente that militarily realigned Europe. Affairs worsened for London in 1772, when Austria, Prussia, and Russia “resolved their differences … by [partitioning] Poland.” Covert arms shipments from France sustained the rebels for two years before an alliance treaty formally brought Britain’s old enemy into the war as a co-belligerent early in 1778—a choice Louis “might never have made [with] an acrid rival and British ally at his back.” Fighting France for the first time without a European partner was inauspicious, yet Britain’s most important friends were now its enemy in America. In the Seven Years’ War, Redcoat regiments and the Royal Navy “received considerable assistance from the colonists.” In this one, they were “dogged by shortages” as “a hostile population” frustrated their “precarious supply chain” and intelligence network. The island nation’s small professional army simply was “not large enough to effectively wage war in America.” It never had been. Despite the snobbish disdain of its class-bound officers for colonial militia, before 1775 it did not need to be.

In Ferling’s account, then, nearly all of those who most determined the war’s outcome were Europeans. Other than Washington, he identifies four men of special importance: the hapless Howe and insubordinate Cornwallis, and de Rochambeau, who convinced the American general-in-chief to abandon his siege of New York for Virginia in 1781. But the greatest author of American victory, Ferling argues, was France’s Foreign Minister, the Comte de Vergennes. In the spring of 1776, his memoranda to the king “outlined a plan for a proxy war” that overcame powerful objections from Finance Minister Anne-Robert Turgot, “who knew that France had not been solvent for more than a generation.” Louis “desperately wished for peace, at least for the foreseeable future,” and feared realizing Turgot’s dire prophesies of national ruin. But the young monarch also wished to humble the British, as did his Bourbon cousin Carlos III of Spain.

Vergennes mediated terms for his monarch to approve belligerency in 1778, then brokered a joint fleet naval strategy sufficient for Spain to declare war a year later. The Franco-Spanish fleet failed in its two great European-theatre goals, to invade the British home islands and to capture Gibraltar. As the campaign season of 1781 approached, Louis XVI’s expenditure neared a billion livres for little return and the frustrated Spanish quietly began exploring terms for formal peace talks with a British agent in Madrid. The crucial moment came in July, when Russia and Austria jointly offered to mediate peace terms. Their proposal called for an immediate armistice without requiring pre-conditional British recognition of US independence. Both Bourbon monarchs favored acceptance, but American envoy John Adams told Vergennes he could not accept even a temporary ceasefire on such terms. “Given America’s war weariness,” he felt it “unlikely his country could ever resume fighting following a pause in hostilities.” In this moment of utmost peril, the fraught Adams lamented that Vergennes “was all silence and impenetrable mystery.” In fact, the French minister had quietly “advised Russia and Austria that mediation could go no further [over] American objections.” On his advice, Louis consented to support one last campaign season before opening talks. Even as Vergennes communicated this decision, Washington and de Rochambeau’s forces turned south toward Yorktown. The French minister “won the [argument] to maintain France’s commitment to its hobbled ally, and at just the right time [secured] the king’s consent to send de Grasse’s fleet” to Virginia.

Yet American diplomats were no mere catspaws of foreign potentates. In the summer of 1781, as Vergennes dealt with the Austro-Russian proposal, Louis’s minister in Philadelphia, Chevalier La Luzerne, convinced Congress to issue new instructions to its peace envoys. These gave Adams, John Jay, and Benjamin Franklin discretionary authority to accept an armistice, and directed them to “undertake nothing in negotiations … without [French] knowledge and concurrence.” Ferling calls this imprudent step “a virtual suspension of American sovereignty.” Fortunately, Jay possessed keener judgment than Congress. In August 1783, while Adams negotiated with the United Netherlands in The Hague and Franklin pliantly awaited direction from Vergennes, Jay suspended communication with Britain’s agent in Paris. He communicated to London that he required recognition of US independence as a condition of resuming talks, but also that the US would abandon its ally and make a separate peace if Britain accepted America’s western border at the Mississippi River. Jay thus preempted the possibility of France, Spain, or both trading their commitment to America’s independence or western claims for their own strategic ends. Though risky and unauthorized, Jay’s gambit broke the diplomatic deadlock. Ensuing talks produced a treaty “quite close to what [Congress] had sought.” For his part, Vergennes “did not seek to prevent the separate talks” or force the Americans “to adhere to the instructions La Luzerne had conjured Congress to write.”

Thus, the war concluded in full American independence—perhaps an ironic outcome as “a privileged nobleman who served an absolutist monarch played an outsized role in enabling republican revolutionaries to realize their dream” of a new nation. Of that republic’s long-term significance to human history, Ferling says little here. Thomas Jefferson, like “many of his countrymen,” later harbored “the largely blissful illusion that the American Revolution had inspired the French to remedy their [own] discontentment, unleashing a mighty burst of reform.” In an earlier work, Apostles of Revolution, Ferling recounts the efforts of Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and James Monroe to turn the Old World upside down. Here, he only states somewhat peremptorily that it is “fanciful to say that [Americans] alone caused the French Revolution and its wars.” In fairness, Jefferson never claimed America’s Revolution alone caused anything.

Ferling’s only noteworthy historiographical claim in this work, then, is his naming four Europeans alongside Washington as the five most determinative actors in America’s great nation-making drama. The publisher’s note calls Shots Heard Round the World “the perfect one volume go-to for the anniversary of the American Revolution.” That is an overstatement even if limited only to Ferling’s books. Almost a Miracle (2007) gives a better-paced, more thorough military history of the war. A Leap in the Dark (2003) adroitly narrates the era’s political struggles, of which this volume says little. Nonetheless, Ferling’s lucid prose engagingly conveys the insights of a brilliant historian’s long career. Any casual reader wishing to revisit the War of Independence in its semi-quincentennial year would do well enough to start here.