63. Ingredients of Defeat

What led to the British defeat in North America? Was it a battle at Yorktown in Virginia, brilliantly won by George Washington and the Count of Rochambeau's American and French armies? And did that victory at Yorktown immediately lead to US independence?

This episode sets out to give the context to Yorktown and reinterpret the common narrative about the Franco-American victory. Essential to a new understanding is to take into account that Britain was no longer fighting just a war in America, but another world war, after the Seven Years' War. This time, though, a decade and a half of ill-planned economy measures had left the country desperately badly prepared to fight it.

That, more than any one battle, even as disastrous a defeat as Yorktown, made it inevitable that Britain would lose its American colonies.

Illustration: The Battle of the Chesapeake (sometimes called the Battle of the Virginia Capes). Public domain.

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License