The colonies already claimed more degree-granting institutions of higher learning. Had an imaginative government moved at that point to incorporate the colonies into a greater Britain, providing a kind of partnership, a break might have been avoided, but the rate of growth soon made that possibility academic. Having contributed few resources to the establishment of the colonies - other than land it did not own - Britain was reluctant even to provide salaries for the few officials installed to look after the affairs of government. These royal representatives found themselves negotiating with the assemblies for their own pay.

In the absence of other institutions - an established church, a hereditary aristocracy, a military force of any size - the power of the purse emerged supreme. Thus began the American cultural obsession with money, as rank, religion and influence. The "struggle" in Draper's title refers to the internal fight to retain control of the purse as it grew to immense proportions, and to the trans-oceanic battle to wrest control of trade from Parliament.It can be difficult to imagine how alarmed 18th-century British observers grew as America's population and economy began to come even with its own. Without the resources to colonise America on its own, the Crown permitted enterprising citizens to form their own councils and assemblies to administer the lands they settled. The system worked well in the early days, with raw materials flowing back to Britain to fuel a manufacturing economy and finished goods returning to a rapidly growing market. However, self- government can be habit-forming, as the governors who were appointed by the king to oversee the colonies soon were writing home.

Six decades and more before the first shots were fired, they and others who came to visit were warning that a burgeoning population and an exploding economy would lead inevitably to demands for complete independence. Only a reversal of Parliamentary policy could delay the outbreak of revolutionary zeal, they warned, and even then only for a time.Their letters frequently started with complaints about their own compensation. His pattern explains not only the origins of the United States but also much about contemporary Britain and her relationship now with her colonial offspring. In Draper's design, the revolution began not in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence but generations earlier, with the granting of royal charters. He raises all the questions, then finds the threads in the vast literature to answer them.

Theodore Draper consigns this moth-eaten cloth to the bin and embarks on an inquiry to fill the gap. He surveys both sides of the Atlantic, relying on the words of pamphleteers and government officials to explain the forces that gave birth to the colonies in the 17th century and then drove their separation from the mother country 150 years later. It was a tidy little war, almost a toy war, organised by a handful of principled gentlemen now known in the United States as the Founding Fathers. It had something to do with taxes and representation, and it ended in a special relationship for one side and a written constitution for the other. Not a very satisfying portrait, but rich enough in images to make up a theme park (which Disney nearly did last year on the farmland west of Washington, DC) so long as no one asks the questions. When the need arises we can use it to trace the outline of the Boston Tea Party and just pick out the shot heard around the world. THE STORY of the American Revolution hangs on the mind's wall like a tapestry, visible but unnoticed until George III or George Washington elbows his way into a conversation.

A quarter of a century on, he extrapolates eloquently from this bleak moment to the smashing of the crystal decanter of left wing intellectual certainty with Thatcherism's grisly lump-hammer."What on earth would I have made in 1969," Fowler wonders, "of a row of conservative politicians sitting under a banner proclaiming `Power To The People' and singing a chorus of `Imagine No Possessions' led by the black lead singer of Hot Chocolate?" This book's highlights convey the same sort of excitement as the best historical moments in Our Friends in the North: the headlong rush of the passage of time and the tingling sensation of liquid reality crystallising into vitreous myth.. Fowler's great original essay "Skins Rule" identified the appearance of marauding gangs of skinheads at the Rolling Stones' Hyde Park concert as a harbinger of what he calls (in a rare clumsy moment) "the disunity of community in the worlds represented by British rock". Reading about the formation of David Cassidy's teenybop constituency, the evolution of the Northern Soul dance underground, and the distinctive characteristics of a Black Sabbath audience in the mid-Seventies ("None of them had horns") tells us things there was no other way of knowing about Take That, Acid House and Nirvana (though not necessarily in that order).To add an extra dimension to this top timewarp action, the original writers have been recalled and invited to don hindsight's x-ray specs. And if the occasional sociological table has a rather dusty look to it, this is more than compensated for by the thrill of travelling back in time without anyone having had a chance to tidy up. This is what Greil Marcus was aiming to get out of The Dustbin of History: that people's past ideas of what might happen say a lot about what still could. Even issues whose currency has dwindled somewhat two decades on - the rudeness of Prince Buster's lyrics; whether Lindisfarne could succeed in producing music that is "British without being insular or nostalgic" - echo forward to the present day and beyond.