A STRUGGLE FOR POWER: The American Revolution.<i> By Theodore Draper</i> .<i> Vintage Books: 560 pp., $17</i>

In the year 1759, halfway through the Seven Years’ War that left England and France vying for supremacy of the seas, political London became involved in a pamphlet war whose intensity was unusual even in the robust world of Georgian London. Its subject was a burning question of policy raised by British victories over the French in the first true world war. The British hero, James Wolfe, had captured the French stronghold of Quebec. In the same year, a British fleet had captured the island of Guadeloupe, which produced as much sugar as all the British West Indies put together. Although the war went on for another three years, it was plain that peace might be on offer. The French might be prepared to give up either Guadeloupe or Canada; they were not likely to give up both.

The issue embraced by the pamphleteers was: Canada or Guadeloupe? In itself, it is now of academic interest only. Indeed, it is bizarre to think that a small Caribbean island could ever have been weighed in the same scales as what has become one of the greatest of modern nations. But as historian Theodore Draper points out in this original and intriguing book, that forgotten controversy raised a question that throws revealing light on the real causes of the American Revolution. For more than 15 years before Paul Revere’s ride, London pamphleteers were already arguing about whether it would be possible to keep the American colonies under the British flag once the overhanging threat of French power in Canada had been removed.

The heart of Draper’s argument is that even in the 1750s, American population and American wealth were growing so fast that Britons feared they would not long be able to hold onto their North American colonies. And Americans had “a sense of imminent greatness” that spurred them to defy the greatest power in the world. “From early in its history,” he says, “the future of America was made to influence its present.”

Between 1750 and 1770, a time when England’s population was growing quite slowly, population doubled in the American colonies. The growth rate in the 1780s, moreover, was the highest in all of American history. (Ironically, Britain was later to experience similar population growth in the 19th century.) Samuel Adams argued explicitly that it was absurd to expect Americans to have their property disposed of by the House of Commons 3,000 miles away because “the inhabitants of this country in all probability in a few years will be more numerous than those of Great Britain and Ireland put together.”

Wages were higher and life on the whole better for many in the colonies than in Britain. And Britain was becoming more and more dependent on the American trade and on the so-called “triangular trade” with the West Indies. (There, too, the pattern was to change as Britain built a new and vaster empire in the 19th century.)

Almost as soon as the Seven Years’ War was over, and at the latest by 1765, the key issue between the Americans and the British had been raised. In form, it was constitutional: Should the British Parliament have jurisdiction over North America? But in reality, Draper argues, the issue, long before the beginning of the revolution, was one of power: Could Americans win--and could Britain prevent them winning--independence? “The struggle for American independence,” he writes, “was a struggle for power because--most simply--the essential issue was this: Who would make the ultimate decisions? The question came to a head in 1760, but it had long haunted both the colonies and the mother country.”

On the way to that conclusion, Draper uncovers a good deal of evidence that makes the reader rethink the conventional view of American Davids pitted against a British Goliath. He points out that British colonial governors, with few or no soldiers at their backs and dependent on the colonial assemblies for even their own salaries, were scarcely the tyrants they have been portrayed as in American patriotic mythology.

He has unearthed a telling incident in the run-up to the “Boston massacre.” It started because British soldiers were so badly paid that they had to moonlight for American employers. The massacre occurred (five people were killed) when an American rope-maker, William Green, asked a British private if he wanted work.

“Yes, I do, faith,” replied Private Walker. “Well,” said rope-maker Green, “then go and clean out my [expletive].” Walker was tripped up and disarmed. He came back with eight or nine fellow-squaddies. A mob, in revenge, attacked British soldiers. A British officer led his men to the rescue and someone shouted “Fire!” Draper’s account of the long countdown to the revolution debunks the one-sided mythology of the revolution. British ministers, commanders and soldiers were not the tyrannous bullies, American patriots not the barefoot angels, of Fourth of July rhetoric.

I think, however, that the implications of Draper’s revisionism go further than that. For what he is saying is that the American Revolution was not a struggle for liberty, let alone for democracy. It was not essentially an ideological struggle at all but, as his title states, a struggle for power.

In recent years, there has been a revival of the doctrine of American “exceptionalism.” This is the self-pleasing notion that the United States is superior, not just in wealth or power but in its very moral nature, because it was born not of the natural desire of a maturing society for control over its own destiny but of an ideological quest for liberty.

Of course, the two interpretations are not wholly incompatible. In struggling for power over their own affairs, the colonists can be said to have fought for their own liberty. But that is critically different, it seems to me, from saying that they fought for Liberty, a moral abstraction.

If, as Draper says, the future of America influenced its present, there is no doubt that the present of America influences views of its past. Draper’s interpretation avoids anachronism and teleology. It contributes fresh and realistic insights to our understanding of the causes of the American Revolution. Those who know his work will not be surprised that it is written with clarity and the graceful persuasiveness to bring even a reluctant jury around to his way of seeing things.