ABSTRACT
Adams's subject is no less uncertain today. For unwittingly or not, a disagreement (a paradox) has been written into the commercial history of his American Revolution and its economic aftermath. Some historians have argued that the war was a hiatus, and that the peace ushered in a resurgence of imperial British commercial domination and a return to American subservience. Other historians have argued that the war created a discontinuity with the trading and shipping patterns that prevailed before the war. Which of these is true? Or in what sense is either of them true?
