We offer an analysis of the American Revolution in which actors are modeled as choosing the sovereign organization that maximizes their net expected benefits. Benefits of secession derive from satisfaction of greed and settlement of grievance. Costs derive from the cost of civil war and lost...

A model is developed explaining many common historical sequences: inter alia, the rise and fall of empires, expansion or contraction in the geographic size of nations, wars of secession, non-contested secessions, and growth of supra-national unions. The basic unit of analysis is a transaction in...