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Among the cases under consideration, high marks go to the diplomats of the American Revolution whose realism compelled them to think and act in terms of power, rightfully eschewing ideology and moral principles. There was, in fact, precious little room to manoeuvre, and the fear of failure was a constant companion.

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    This question is an interesting question, but it really needs a few more things to be a good question – like a link to the source, a bit more elaboration about what's confusing you, and a little bit of research explaining what you looked up and what you found.
    – J.R. ♦
    Apr 2, 2016 at 18:34

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It means that they had very little room [in which] to manoeuvre.

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idioms.thefreedictionary.com gives this definition:

precious few
Also, precious little. Very few, very little, as in There are precious few leaves left on the trees, or We have precious little fuel left. In these idioms precious serves as an intensive, a colloquial usage dating from the first half of the 1800s.

It is an informal way of saying that there was very little room to maneuver.

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  • On the contrary, "precious little" is a very common idiom. But apart from the variant "precious few", this meaning of "precious" is otherwise obsolete.
    – Colin Fine
    Apr 2, 2016 at 15:43
  • @ColinFine: Perhaps it is a regional thing. I have never heard it used except either in old books or as a joke. Perhaps an ngram could be helpful here.
    – zondo
    Apr 2, 2016 at 15:44
  • GLoWbE (the global corpus of web-based English) has 1878 instances of "precious little" - 536 from UK, but 418 of them from US. So it might be more common in the UK, but it's well represented in the US and elsewhere. It has 47739 instances of "very little"
    – Colin Fine
    Apr 2, 2016 at 15:50
  • @ColinFine: Two thousand as opposed to forty-seven thousand seems like quite a difference, but perhaps I should say "rarely" instead of "very rarely". Over how much time did those two thousand instances occur?
    – zondo
    Apr 2, 2016 at 15:57
  • Since the Web started, up to 2013. To me "precious little" has a strong affective component - it is emphatic, and expresses sadness or disappointment or indignation, or resignation about the smallness of whatever it is. So I would not expect it to rival the neutral phrase "very little" in frequency.
    – Colin Fine
    Apr 2, 2016 at 16:55

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