King George’s Generals

A new military history of the American Revolution, told from the perspective of the British commanders charged with subduing the Crown’s restive North American colonies.

In King George’s Generals, historian William Anthony Hay revisits the pivotal battles of the American Revolution as they were seen by the British forces struggling to bring the colonial rebellion to heel. Framing his account around the five experienced, highly regarded generals who directed Britain’s war effort—Thomas Gage, William Howe, John Burgoyne, Henry Clinton, and Lord Cornwallis—Hay shows how and why America’s ill-trained and ill-equipped Continental Army ultimately defeated the world’s preeminent superpower.

Strategic failures seeded the American victory long before the first shots were fired, leaving Britain on the back foot from Lexington and Concord onward. In the 1760s, colonial protests had gone unchecked, growing into open defiance and ultimately escalating into war between the Continental Congress and the British Crown. By 1778, a series of British defeats and then France’s game-changing intervention made the American fight for independence part of a larger global conflict. 

Spanning from the French and Indian War to Cornwallis’s decisive rout at Yorktown in 1781, King George’s Generals offers an illuminating new perspective on America’s founding moments, revealing a war that teetered on a knife-edge until the very end.