The Revolution Heard Around the World

The global politics of 1776.

The Revolution Heard Around the World

The global politics of 1776.

Théodore Gudin, Naval Battle Off the Chesapeake , September 3, 1781. (Getty Images)

What a time to try to commemorate this nation’s founding! Imperialism is back. Militarized federal agents have been massing in cities to root out people deemed unwelcome or disloyal. The president styles himself more as a monarch than a civil servant, from the plans for his new golden ballroom to the parade of courtiers and oligarchs paying him homage. Given this situation, what are the options for narrating the story of the Declaration of Independence 250 years after the fact? Are we left with anything other than irony—or tragedy?

Books in review

The American Revolution and the Fate of the World

by Richard Bell

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Of course, histories of the American Revolution published to help mark the current semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence were written at least in part before the second Trump administration began. So it isn’t entirely fair to expect their authors to take the story up to the point of telling us what to make of the head-spinning past 18 months. But such histories do have an added function in this anniversary year: Their job is to tell us where we’ve been in a way that illuminates aspects of the present and, ideally, get us to think afresh about where we should be going. So far, it doesn’t seem like historians have found any real answers.

Richard Bell’s The American Revolution and the Fate of the World provides, in this regard, an opportunity to reflect on the difficulty of that charge and also the limits of the response. Bell’s primary solution in this ambitious volume is to widen his scope. Addressing the reader in jaunty, confident prose, he works hard to convince us that the American Revolution was a lot less provincial than we were taught in school. The events of 1776 and their aftermath, he argues, not only required white English settlers and British government officials to pick a side—they swept up and reshaped the lives of all kinds of other peoples in what would become the United States and around the world. That includes enslaved people of African descent and the people of numerous tribal nations native to the Americas. It also includes aristocratic French generals and Spanish navy men, Chinese dockworkers and Indian rulers, British anti-war agitators and Hessian mercenaries, convicts en route to Botany Bay and Sierra Leonean settlers, Irish American printers, farmers, and arms dealers, Jamaican washerwomen, and Loyalist wives looking for safety in British Canada.

Bell’s global approach fits broadly within several ongoing trends in academic history writing. One is treating the multiple revolutions that took place on both sides of the Atlantic in the 18th and early 19th centuries as interconnected, especially with regard to the demands of maintaining and funding commercial empires. Another is decentering the 13 original British seaboard colonies in North America in favor of what is often called “Vast Early America,” a segment of the globe stretching from the Caribbean to French Canada to the Spanish American and Native West, with links to places as far-flung as China, India, and Brazil as well as continental Europe and West Africa. And yet another is drawing attention to the uncelebrated and even the nameless as much as the famous “founders”—which has also meant emphasizing the significance of bloody power struggles on the frontier, the plantation, and the high seas as much as what happened in the meeting halls and taverns of Philadelphia. Our picture of revolutionary America is very different today, and considerably more complex, than that which accompanied the Bicentennial’s tall ships back in 1976. Bell’s synthetic account is indicative of just how much we’ve learned in the ensuing years.

What Bell does not tell us, however, is also typical of much of the newest history of the revolutionary era. Readers will discover little in The American Revolution and the Fate of the World about what to make of it all then or now. Bell declares early on that America’s turn to independence was a “geopolitical earthquake” that “shook every quarter of the globe,” sending people, goods, and news in extraordinary new patterns around the planet. The revolution, he adds, professing no exaggeration, “set much of the world as we know it in motion.” But in his episodic and kaleidoscopic telling, it’s hard to see how the many compelling pieces that Bell offers fit together as a whole—and, if they don’t, what made this particular war any different from those that preceded it, including the similarly global Seven Years’ War less than two decades earlier, or most that came after. Which is to say that The American Revolution and the Fate of the World is a global history that never really informs us how the revolution ended up defining the “fate of the world,” or what it might mean for the world at pres…