What the American Revolution Owes the Rest of the World

Perhapsthe least commented upon feature of the dystopian Trump banners adorning partsof Washington D.C . is the red, white, and blue number—"250"—emblazoned justbeneath the president's Windsor-knotted tie. These ribbon-shaped digits are theemblem of the "America 250" campaign, a public-private enterprise establishedby Congress in 2016 to spearhead the celebration of the 250th birthday of theUnited States in 2026. The banners are thus part of what will likely be a longcontest to shape (and profit from) the narrative around this round-numberanniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution.This will not be a product of the government alone, of course—we haven'tarrived at that dystopia just yet—but will involve numerous editorials, books,documentaries, and public events.

RichardBell's The AmericanRevolution and the Fate of the World is one such entrant in this field,an entertaining history of the Revolution that encourages readers to see it asan event defined by "interdependence" as much as independence, a "creationstory" not just for the United States but for "our modern world." Moresuccessful in making this first point than the second, the book neverthelessprovides—almost inadvertently—a good reminder of what made the Revolution distinctive,and why that distinctiveness deserves renewed attention at a time when somemight otherwise use the memory of an anti-monarchial revolt to crown a newking. 

Aprofessor of history at the University of Maryland, Bell wants to challengewhat he calls the "tightly blinkered" perspective on the Revolution found in"most basic textbook histories." This narrative, he suggests, focuses too muchon the "simple story of rebels versus redcoats," obscuring the conflict's true "transnationalscope and complexity." He proposes instead an account that includes not justthe Founding Fathers and their Continental Congresses but also "Black Americanfreedom seekers … Chinese tea-pickers, Mohawk warriors, Sierra Leonian separatists …[and] Asian rulers."

TheAmerican Revolution, he argues, cannot be understood as merely an "American"event. Bell does not reject the traditional story of the Revolution—what wemight call the Schoolhouse Rock tale of American "Patriots" shouting, "No morekings." But, he argues, it must be seen as a global upheaval, one that beganbecause British trade policy in China triggered a civil war in North America, launchinga global war for empire that reached from the Caribbean to India, leadingslaves to take arms against their masters and tens of thousands to flee acrosscontinents and oceans.

Bellstarts with the traditional sequence of revolutionary-era events—the Boston TeaParty, the Battles of Lexington and Concord, etc.—but he shows how they fitinto Britain's tea trade with China. Seeking to maintain commercial advantagesin China and India, London wanted the colonists to buy only British-shipped tea(and not the cheaper, smuggled Dutch tea they preferred). The colonists resentedthe implication that their economic choices should be subservient to Britain's.Trade, money, and tea prices were the initial sticking point, not the existenceof the monarchy. And by shifting the focus in this way, Bell reveals how theAmerican Revolution was initially more about economic policy than monarchialpower or political rights.

Fromthere, Bell largely leaves behind the familiar story, touring instead theglobal landscape that shaped, and was shaped by, the better-known events inPhiladelphia, Boston, and New York. The kingdoms of France and Spain, heproposes, did as much to deliver victory for the colonists as the would-berepublicans in the Continental Army. French troops and ships provided the bulkof the military power behind the climactic rebel victory at Yorktown in 1781. Spanishmilitary aid, in turn, helped keep colonial troops in the field. Many rebelguns at Lexington and Concord, it turns out, literally bore the mark of Spain'sKing Carlos III, sent from then-Spanish New Orleans—while Carlos's soldiersmade their impression, as well. Almost entirely forgotten Spanish campaignsalong the Gulf Coast dragged London into yet another theater of war, forcingthe surrender of British Florida and dramatically escalating the costs of the conflictin the months before the British collapse in Virginia. 

The kingdoms of France and Spain, heproposes, did as much to deliver victory for the colonists as the would-berepublicans in the Continental Army.

Still moredisruptive to the traditional narrative of white Continentals fighting theirwhite British cousins are Bell's accounts of lesser-known figures, like MollyBrant, an influential Mohawk woman married to a British diplomat, and HarryWashington, an enslaved West African man who fled George Washington'splantation to join the British war effort against his former master. Brant'sstruggles to maintain an anti-Patriot alliance between the Iroquois Confederacyand the British illustrates well how the Revolutionary War was no mere contestamong Europeans. Native leaders like Brant saw the conflict as a chance topartner with the British Crown to reassert their own sovereignty againstcolonial encroachment. A brutal fight for the interior resulted, culminating ina horrific scorched-earth campaign against the Iroquois in upstate New York (orderedby General Washington), forcing Brant to flee to Canada. Harry Washington'slife, meanwhile, reveals another forgotten aspect of Washington's war againstBritain—that it precipitated one of the largest slave rebellions in Americanhistory, as more than 25 thousand Black people fled to British lines, manytaking up arms for the king.

Afterfighting up and down the East Coast, Harry was among the handful of formerslaves evacuated by British forces after Yorktown. He eventually settled inSierra Leone, part of a new wave of European-backed imperialism in Africa. He andhis compatriots were not alone in being forced to settle across the sea, either; the Revolution scattered populations across the globe, white and Black alike. White"Loyalists" to the Crown fled north to further populate British Canada, whilenumerous British convicts previously destined for hard labor in North America wereinstead transported by the British to yet another new colony, this time inAustralia.

As thesedisplacements suggest, what might surprise readers of The AmericanRevolution and the Fate of the World the most is what that fate was: moreempire and more inequality. Harry Washington for one would disappear from the historicalrecord after participating in his own anti-British revolt, this by the Blackresidents of Freetown against the tyranny of the London-backed Sierra LeoneCompany in 1800. Two years earlier in Ireland, the British had also brutallycracked down on the "United Irishmen," largely Protestant Irish nationalistsinspired by the example of the United States to try to throw off the king'syoke. In India, Haidar Ali—the leader of the independent kingdom of Mysore—usedthe opportunity opened by colonists to strike against growing British power onthe subcontinent. Allying with the French and Dutch, Haidar won a number ofbattles across southern India before dying of cancer in 1782. Though his son,Tipu Sultan, maintained the war for a time, the British eventually turned thetide, conquering Mysore and further securing their dominant position in SouthAsia. The new United States also made its own imperial moves as a result of theRevolution, using its victory over pro-British Native Americans to further expandfrontier settlement in North America, absorbing once-sovereign Indigenousnations into its own burgeoning continental empire.

What clearlyemerges from these stories is an American Revolution that, as Bell rightlyargues, cannot be fully contained within national borders or traditionalnarratives, an event that occurred across a much broader and already startlinglyintegrated world, one bound together by globalized networks of trade,migration, and power that spanned from Philadelphia and London to Freetown andMadras. Bell's work will no doubt help many readers understand the Revolution morecompletely than they had before. Yet it's hard not to think that most will alsoclose the book feeling a bit dissatisfied, as if Bell starts his narrative toolate and ends it too early.

This isbecause, from a global perspective at least, Bell enters and exits the story inthe middle. France and Spain did not go to war with Britain because of theAmerican colonists, they went to war because the colonists provided anopportunity to do what France and Spain had long been doing: waging war forempire. The Revolution appeared to offer a chance to wrest control of theinternational system from an increasingly dominant Britain. Both had foughtBritain before and would fight again before the century was out. The same canbe said for Haidar Ali—an aggressive statesman with a strong military, hefought, as he would have anyway, to defeat the British threat to his ownindependence. The colonists gave him an opportunity, not a reason. HarryWashington, meanwhile, may only have ended up in Sierra Leone because ofAmerican independence, but that's certainly not the sole reason Britainexpanded its reach in West Africa. Similarly, it's hard to imagine Europeansnot attempting to colonize Australia at some point in the late eighteenth or early nineteenthcenturies, regardless of whether the British government found itself in need ofa new escape valve for its penal system. The American Revolution also did not beginthe expansion of empire in North America—or the ethnic cleansing of NativeAmericans—that was already well underway.

TheRevolution disrupted empires, economies, and lives, but it didn't reallythreaten the world order based on expanding white European power; in many waysit reinforced it.

While it'sinarguably a significant moment in world history, Bell's claim that theAmerican Revolution offers an origin story for the modern world—that it was anevent that threw "much of the established world order into chaos"—thus seemstoo strong. Indeed, the very global perspective he advocates for undercuts suchclaims. When it comes to the broad sweep of global history that produced the present,the Revolution was more consequence than cause, a by-product of what was actuallythrowing the planet into chaos in the eighteenth century: European imperialism andthe violent form of globalization it was forcing on the world. In the long run,American independence did little to disrupt that process or alter geopoliticaloutcomes for those living in non-European spaces like Mysore, Sierra Leone,China, or—in the near term at least—in Latin America. Even for NativeAmericans, the difference is less significant than we might think. It's difficultto imagine a victorious post-Revolutionary British government truly restrainingfurther white settlement of North America, while British Canada itself hardlyproved a much better protector of Indigenous rights than the United States. TheRevolution disrupted empires, economies, and lives, but it didn't reallythreaten the world order based on expanding white European power; in many waysit reinforced it.

If we wantto claim singular importance for the American Revolution, in fact, it canreally only be done by keeping a steady eye on the very Schoolhouse Rock "nomore Kings" version of the story that Bell deliberately moves away from. Thoughin a much more limited way than mythologized renderings of American historytend to suggest, the Revolution's liberal rhetoric of freedom andrepresentation did inject new strength into an emerging discourse aboutpolitical rights, one that within a few generations would produce a novel massdemocracy in the United States. Though horribly limited by race and gender, thatdemocracy, and the discourse of freedom it helped maintain, offered afoundation on which many of the more decent aspects of modernity are at leastpartly built.

TheAmerican Revolution and the Fate of the World mentions this—reminding readersthat the Patriots' "call to liberty would push questions about human rights,citizenship, and sovereignty toward the top of the global agenda for the firsttime"—but that point is lost amid the book's whirl of global stories. Bell isright to suggest that liberal ideas were far less important to the colonialcause than most Americans like to believe, but they were also among the fewthings produced by the Revolution that truly disrupted the empire-dominatedworld order of the late eighteenth century. The new United States, after all, didanything but. Bell's version of the American Revolution is neither satisfyinglyglobal enough (which would require more attention to the history of Europeanimperial expansion) nor American enough (which would require more rebels,redcoats, and battle cries of freedom).

This dichotomyof empire and freedom in American history is important to remember as we approachthe 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this year. Though manyin and out of the government will try to say otherwise, what is uniquely worthcelebrating about the American Revolution is not so much the United States itcreated—which, in many respects, became just another empire in a long list ofempires extending back to antiquity. It's instead the boost the colonists gave toanother equally ancient phenomenon: the impulse to pull down the banners of kings.People should read Bell's book, certainly, but it also wouldn't hurt to watch alittle Schoolhouse Rock too.