re: History thread: How did we win the Revolutionary War?

I'm a bit late to the party but I remember reading a book, I want to say by John Keegan, who writes some great military history, that argued the point that Britain did fight like mad in North America to hold onto what they saw as their most valuable colonial possessions.

It is just hard today to understand that it was the Caribbean they were really worried about. At the time sugar and rum production was one of the most important parts of the British economy. It would have been a financial disaster for them to have lost those islands or their growing colonial territory in India.

The American colonies, on the other hand, cost Britain money without generating massive amounts of revenue. We weren't worth it to keep fighting over and after Yorktown the writing was on the wall for the British.