The Imperial Webb: The Thesis of Garrison Government in Early America Considered

Abstract

IT has been seven years since the publication of Stephen Saunders Webb's The Governors-General. The English Army and the Definition of the Empire, 1569-1681. A daunting volume both in scope and size, it encompasses more than century of Anglo-colonial history in some five hundred fifty pages of text, appendix, and indexes, buttressed by forty-six feet of footnotes in small print. Its impact as a landmark of modern historical scholarship that radically shifts most of the familiar perspectives on the colonial period-the publisher's boast, not the author's-was all the greater in that Webb had prepared the ground by preliminary bombardment over the previous decade of at least six substantial articles all closely tied to the book's central thesis.' Historians, however, are notoriously slow to change their minds or rewrite their lectures-and besides, since the book was announced as but