Mass. merchants’ revolution

The British prepare to evacuate Boston on March 17, 1776.

“The American Revolution was a remarkably successful revolution. It did not fall into chaos and violence, nor did it slide toward dictatorship. It produced no Napoleon…. It achieved its goals. It was also, as revolutions go, extremely unromantic. The radicals, the real revolutionaries, were middle-class Massachusetts merchants with commercial interests, and their revolution was about the right to make {lots of} money….

“The American Revolution was the first great anticolonialist movement. It was about political freedom. But in the minds of its most hard line revolutionaries, the New England radicals, the central expression of that freedom was the ability to make their own decisions about their economy.’’

Mark Kurlansky, in his book Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World