In Lord Churchill's Coup, Stephen Saunders Webb further advances his revisionist interpretation of the British Empire in the seventeenth century. Having earlier demonstrated that the Anglo-American empire was classic in its form, administered by an army, committed to territorial expansion, and motivated by a crusading religion, Webb now argues that both England and its American social experiments were the underdeveloped elements of an empire emerging on both sides of the Atlantic and that the pivotal moment of that empire, the so-called "Glorious Revolution", was in fact a military coup driven by religious fears.

Stephen Saunders Webb, professor of history at Syracuse University, is the author of The Governors General: The English Army and the Definition of the Empire, 1569-1676 and 1676: The End of American Independence