A German trained in England as a historian of the British Empire, Hoock trumpets the novelty of his angle of vision in what he calls the “first book on the American Revolution and the Revolutionary War to adopt violence as its central analytical and narrative focus.” He marshals a good deal of startling new evidence, the fruits of prodigious research in British archives too rarely used by historians of colonial America and the early United States. But conceptually, “Scars of Independence” also owes a large debt to other scholars’ efforts to reframe the revolutionary era. Like Kathleen DuVal’s “Independence Lost,” Maya Jasanoff’s “Liberty’s Exiles” and Alan Taylor’s “American Revolutions,” Hoock maps a war far broader — both strategically and geographically — than the founding of the United States. Following their lead, he takes in the view from London and from the North American interior as well as from Boston, New York and Philadelphia. (The Caribbean, a focus of some of the best recent works, is largely missing here.) Hoock’s account of the insights and blind spots of George III’s ministry leans on the work of Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy in “The Men Who Lost America”; his analysis of the careful grooming and deployment of ethnic hatreds accords with Robert G. Parkinson’s pioneering research in “The Common Cause.” And like all of these works (and my own recent book on the subject), Hoock recovers a conflict in which “the motivations of the Revolutionaries were complex,” and in which Patriots, Loyalists and neutrals all mingled “principle and pragmatism.”

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Yet the Patriots’ battle for independence was, to the British crown, not war but rebellion. From the perspective of George III’s ministry, the American cause was an insurgency: an uprising of once (and rightfully) loyal subjects rather than a conflict between sovereign rival nations. British political and military leaders confronted what Hoock calls a “strategic-moral dilemma”: how to crush the insurrection without driving the rebels further from the imperial fold and closer to each other? The distinction between waging war and suppressing rebellion mattered, too, on the fields of battle, where engagements often slipped the porous boundaries dividing state-sanctioned, choreographed regular combat from irregular or “desolation warfare.” Flags of surrender meant little in such a conflict. Captured patriots were not prisoners whose care was governed by established norms, but rather traitors “destined to the cord,” General Gage told General Washington early in the conflict.

The treatment of battlefield captives and the arming of the enslaved nourished on all sides of the long, grinding civil war “an enduring desire for revenge.” Hoock documents reprisals as creative as they were brutal. In New Jersey in 1782, for example, a cascading series of quasi-official executions — a Loyalist murdered by Patriot troops, then a Patriot strung up for the Loyalist’s killing, then a British officer picked by lot to mount the scaffold for the Patriot’s death — embodied the paradoxical notion of “lex talionis”: the law of retaliation.

Narratives of atrocity were themselves weapons of war, and “both sides recognized the power of print media,” Hoock points out. The Patriots’ near monopoly on American printing presses meant that reports of British and Hessian cruelty spread and survived disproportionately. But Patriots, too, engaged in decidedly irregular warfare, especially with Britain’s native allies. Hoock narrates the brutal “campaign of terror” Gen. John Sullivan waged in Iroquoia during the summer of 1779, a scorched-earth march involving one-third of the total Continental fighting force. George Washington himself planned the campaign, telling Sullivan to pursue “the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more,” wrote the Patriots’ supreme commander, whom the Seneca nicknamed Town Destroyer. Sullivan followed Washington’s orders; his men put at least 41 Indian towns to the torch. They desecrated native graves, raped native women and mutilated native bodies for profit and for sport. One lieutenant, William Barton, sent a party of his men “to look for some dead Indians.” The soldiers returned to camp having skinned two of them from their hips down for boot legs: a pair for Barton’s commander and “the other for myself,” he wrote in his official journal.

If war was hell, it was also gold. “British massacres … became highly effective assets in the Patriots’ moral war,” Hoock writes. So, too, in his own narrative, and just in time for Father’s Day. “Scars of Independence” veritably drips with patriotic gore, wallowing in the details of bayonet attacks, tomahawk chops and “the awful sound of musket butts against a skull.” On occasion, Hoock’s sources lead his tone, and his generally brisk and vivid prose turns purple, as when he introduces the unfortunate Loyalist captives in Kingston, N.Y., who, like characters out of Dickens, if not Frances Hodgson Burnett, had “only lice and fleas for company.” The best war writers, from Pat Barker to Tim O’Brien to Phil Klay, often create the highest drama from the quietest moments. Hoock too often looks for glory in guts.