A Global History of the American Revolution

This lecture and discussion offers a globe-trotting tour of the reach and resonance of the American Revolution. It asks how the familiar story changes when we locate the Revolutionary War in a worldwide context. What is gained when we think about the American Revolution as part and parcel of a titanic struggle between Britain and other European empires like France and Spain for control of a vast, resource-rich new world? And what is gained when we place the Patriots’ war for independence in pole position in a chain of revolutionary insurrections bent on overturning autocratic regimes in Europe, Africa, and South America between 1775 and 1800? Answering these big questions invites us to place the dreams and hopes of Jamaican carpenters, Mohawk traders, Spanish siege captains, Hessian hirelings, Loyalist exiles, French sailors, African rebels, Bengali rulers, Mediterranean privateers, Chinese tea-growers, and British convicts on the same stage as the Sons of Liberty, the Minutemen, and the members of the Continental Congress. It requires us to recognize that Caribbean slave labor camps, Indian Ocean shipping lanes, Florida forts, French dockyards, Central American jungles, Canadian refugee camps, Irish prison hulks, and Ohio forests were just as important sites of struggle in this global war as Lexington Green, Independence Hall, or Valley Forge. In short, the great task before us is to start to imagine the American Revolution in post-exceptional terms; as a creation story in the making of our multi-cultural and interconnected modern world.