The United States was born in a revolution against Britain’s attempt to strengthen the control of the imperial government over its distant colonies. Yet once independence was achieved, the erstwhile colonists constructed a central state apparatus far more powerful and far costlier than anything Britain had envisioned in the 1760s and 1770s. This ironic development followed directly from American independence, which turned thirteen colonial dependencies into a sovereign nation within an intensely competitive transatlantic state system. Once the 1783 Treaty of Paris had secured nominal independence, the leaders of the new republic sought to replace the military and governmental institutions and the commercial and diplomatic policies that had allowed the North American colonies to thrive under the protection of the British Empire.