Edward Bancroft

Edward Bancroft’s story offers new perspectives on a variety of topics: the history of espionage, French involvement in the American Revolution, the operation of the British government, and the character of persons like Franklin, Adams, and John Paul Jones.

I am not a theoretical kind of historian. I don’t have big conceptual paradigms through which I view the world. Through my career I have gravitated toward various topics that have caught my interest and used thorough research and sound analysis to reach conclusions.

When I started my career in the late 1970s, as a freshly-minted Ph.D., I specialized in the economic and financial history of late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century France. I wrote two books on that topic—admittedly, not of the sort to land on the New York Times bestseller list.

In the late 1980s and 1990s I switched to late eighteenth-century France and wrote two books dealing with French involvement in the American Revolution. It was while doing research on those projects that I discovered Edward Bancroft.

I began to take notes whenever I found information on him, and I tucked Edward Bancroft in the back of my mind for future reference. For six years I directed my university’s summer program in Oxford, and that experience took me into yet a different research direction. I ended up writing a book on the history of American Rhodes Scholars.

After finishing that project I longed to return to my “home” in the eighteenth century. I checked around with various historian friends and found that the intriguing story of Edward Bancroft still had not been grabbed. The rest, as they say, is history.