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July 18 marks the anniversary of what was widely considered to be the first song that expressed American patriotism. But did the fulfillment of the anthem's prophecy mark the demise of the British Empire?

"The Liberty Song" was published in the Boston Gazette on that day in 1768. The colonists' victory in the American Revolution that followed sets in motion the story of British decline, according to distinguished British historian Piers Brendon. Brendon's new book, "The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781-1997," opens with Lord Cornwallis' surrender at Yorktown on Oct. 17, 1781, indicating the beginning of the end for the empire.

"The Old World did regard the New World's victory as an ominous inversion of the established order," Brendon writes. "It was an unbeaten revolt of children against parental authority -- the first successful rebellion of colonial subjects against sovereign power in modern history."

Brendon, the former Keeper of the Archives at the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, England, starts his 15th history book with the story of a red-coated drummer boy emerging from the British camp with a British officer waving a white handkerchief behind him. At that moment, the 24-pound siege pieces, fierce howitzers, cannon balls, and French mortars stopped firing from George Washington's forces.

According to one witness, Brendon notes, the British soldiers -- now to become prisoners of war -- "behaved like whipped schoolboys," as the captive army's band played "The World Turned Upside Down".

"How could a rabble of farmers in thirteen poor appendages, with a population of only 2.5 million, defeat the trained might of the mother country?" Brendon writes. "Americans were divided among themselves and thinly spread along an underdeveloped eastern seaboard which shaded gradually into isolated pioneer settlements and virgin wilderness. They were opposed not only by white loyalists but by black slaves and 'Red Indians.' Washington's recruits, in a spirit of democratic 'licentiousness' (his word), were disinclined to take orders without discussion: as one senior officer complained, 'The privates are all generals.' Their auxiliaries, until the advent of the French, were wholly undisciplined."

The soldiers were often not soldiers at all, but farm workers, tailors, pharmacists, and anyone else who would and could fight, with frontiersmen wearing coonskin hats into battle. Yet, it worked. They fought harder, and often smarter, than their imperial masters.

The British generals, Brendon writes, were often incompetent and reckless, consumed with the drama but not the meaning of what was taking place. Not so, with Washington.

"Tall and stately in his familiar buff and blue uniform, with a long pallid face dominated by a jutting nose, a broad mouth and steely grey-blue eyes, he looked the part," writes Brendon. "And he played it with courage and canniness. Formidably self-possessed, ruthlessly single-minded, incomparably tenacious, he made small gains and avoided large losses, staving off defeat until he could achieve victory."

Brendon also shines a light on the British Empire's involvement in Palestine, and shows how the intention was to "shore up its ascendancy in the Middle East." The end result was quite the reverse.

"Britain's subsequent exodus from the Holy Land would mark a further stage, and a particularly inglorious one, in the dissolution of the Empire," he writes.

Many British parliamentarians supported Jewish immigration to Palestine, he writes, but underestimated the degree to which the Arabs would resist an increased Jewish presence among them. Arab violence included "mutilating Jewish corpses, exhibiting handfuls of severed fingers, [and] parading heads round the Holy City."

The Arabs were convinced the Jews wanted to conquer the entire land in fulfillment of a prophecy of Isaiah. The British soldiers thus resented the Jews both for the increased challenge of refereeing this fight -- and losing many soldiers of their own in the process -- and ruining what they felt was an authentic cultural quality of Arab life. Additionally, the British soldiers thought of the Arabs as a people that are easy to control because they lack modernity, organization, and a measure of self-respect. The Jews, on the other hand, were "implacable" and, in the soldiers' opinions, simply buying what the Arabs had earned.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton wrote to Prime Minister Clement Attlee: "The present state of affairs is not only costly to us in man-power and money but is, as you and I agree, of no real value from the strategic point of view -- you cannot in any case have a secure base on top of a wasps' nest -- and it is exposing our young men, for no good purpose, to abominable experiences, and is breeding anti-Semites at a most shocking speed."

In addition, crushing an Arab revolt bent on denying self-rule to the Jews who were already in pre-state Israel, as well as the Jewish "refugees from hell" fleeing persecution and extermination in Europe that Britain failed to prevent, was one thing. Crushing the will of Jewish life and killing the very same defenseless Jewish immigrants they were seeking to rescue was quite another for Britain.

"So whereas the British had used main force to crush the Arab revolt during the late 1930s, they now had no stomach for a full-scale colonial conflict against the Jews," Brendon writes.

The British had lost their grip by the time they threw in the towel. Brendon concludes his chapter on the Mandate with a story illustrative of the point. High Commissioner Sir Alan Cunningham drove through the Damascus Gate and out of Jerusalem in an armor-plated car with thick glass loaned to him by King George VI.

"Even so Cunningham was stopped at both Jewish and Arab checkpoints," Brendon writes. "The majesty of his vehicle scarcely compensated for the ignominy of his exit."