Dunmore's New World

September 15, 2013

As this book's 19th-century-style subtitle suggests, John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore (1730-1809), the last royal governor of the Colony of Virginia, had a very busy life. A well-connected Scottish peer, ambitious, and always broke, he was appointed royal governor of New York and then of Virginia. As Virginia's governor, he led formal incursions against native tribes and sought to rule without calling the House of Burgesses into session. Although he held the Virginia post throughout the war, he abandoned the colony for Britain early on in the fighting. The British later sent him to govern the Bahama Islands. David's work, based on his PhD dissertation, which tellingly did not offer the same subtitle (it was subtitled Political Culture in the British Empire, 1745-1796), shows an amazing amount of research (70 pages of notes and bibliography). The author confidently knows the period and its people, although Dunmore himself comes across as a dull, money-grubbing bumbler. VERDICT This volume will interest serious readers pursuing deeper and different studies of the American Colonial period and the revolution, but general readers may be bored. However, it complements other new titles: Glenn F. Williams's Dunmore's War: The Last Conflict of America's Colonial Era and Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy's The Men Who Lost America.--Michael O. Eshleman, Hobbs, NM

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