On the British mainland, war and reform were separated – the one abroad, the other at home. Yet in other countries, including British Ireland, armed struggles fused the two. In France and America occurred the two great revolutions of the period. The outcome in America was that the United States became, probably, the most capitalist of countries, with one of the least national, most confederal of states. I characterize the new American state as crystallizing as capitalist-liberal, confederal, and party democratic, adding an uneven militarism, more pronounced domestically than geopolitically. I seek to explain how it acquired these characteristics.

The American colonies

In 1760, 2 million people were counted as living under the British crown in the colonies of North America. Native Americans (“Indians”) were not counted. (They numbered upward of 100,000 in the colonies, more farther west.) Slaves of African descent comprised 20 percent of those counted. Of whites, about 75 percent were of British or Irish descent. So, except for native Americans and slaves, most inhabitants were accustomed to British rule. America was British. Its ideological and economic institutions were similar to those of the mother country – this was the second home of that diffuse “civil society,” comprising capitalism and the commercial capitalist route to mass discursive literacy, introduced in Chapter 2. Its military and political institutions were also modeled on Britain's. We might expect an American variant of the moderately centralized old regime liberalism described in Chapter 4.