She brings the same assured touch to her broad swaths of narrative and to her choice of detail. Tuchman chronicles these events with her customary skill. The whole scope of the conflict between Britain and the Colonies had been transformed by the intervention of the French, who - drawing their own conclusions from the American victory at Saratoga - had entered into an alliance with the Colonists in February 1781, and declared war on Britain five months later. Admiral Rodney accomplished his mission in February 1781 but although the island was rich in booty, by now it had lost most of its strategic significance. One early consequence of this rupture was the dispatch of a British squadron under Sir George Brydges Rodney, with orders to seize St. Sketching the Dutch struggle for independence in the 16th and 17th centuries, she points to parallels between the rise of the Dutch republic - the United Provinces - and the emergence of the United States returning to the complexities of Dutch politics in the 1770's, she describes the gradual breach with Britain that led to the two countries' going to war in 1780.

Eustatius, and then takes us back to the Netherlands. It was also of vital importance to the American war effort, since the Colonists were unable to manufacture the guns and gunpowder they needed. It was an extremely profitable trade (and one in which many British merchants were engaged, incidentally). Eustatius had served as the foremost conduit through which the Colonists obtained such supplies from Europe. From 1774, when the British placed an embargo on the shipping of ''warlike stores'' to their American colonies, St. Tuchman's new book takes its title - the first occasion (or so it has been generally accepted) on which American sovereignty was formally recognized by the representative of a foreign government.Īt the time the Netherlands was still bound to Britain by a treaty of alliance, but the salute spelled out the commercial realities of the situation. This was the ''first salute'' from which Barbara W. 16, 1776, a ship flying the flag of the Continental Congress put in at the island, and on the orders of the Governor the guns of the local garrison fired a welcoming salvo.

It is not a place you hear much about today, but for a brief year or two in the 18th century it became one of the focal points of world history. Eustatius is a small island in the West Indies that was settled by the Dutch in the 17th century.

The first salute tuchman