What the American Revolution Owes the Rest of the World
Perhaps the least commented upon feature of the dystopian Trump banners adorning parts of Washington D.C. is the red, white, and blue number—“250”—emblazoned just beneath the president’s Windsor-knotted tie. These ribbon-shaped digits are the emblem of the “America 250” campaign, a public-private enterprise established by Congress in 2016 to spearhead the celebration of the 250th birthday of the United States in 2026. The banners are thus part of what will likely be a long contest to shape (and profit from) the narrative around this round-number anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution. This will not be a product of the government alone, of course—we haven’t arrived at that dystopia just yet—but will involve numerous editorials, books, documentaries, and public events.
Richard Bell’s The American Revolution 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 as an event defined by “interdependence” as much as independence, a “creation story” not just for the United States but for “our modern world.” More successful in making this first point than the second, the book nevertheless provides—almost inadvertently—a good reminder of what made the Revolution distinctive, and why that distinctiveness deserves renewed attention at a time when some might otherwise use the memory of an anti-monarchial revolt to crown a new king.
A professor of history at the University of Maryland, Bell wants to challenge what he calls the “tightly blinkered” perspective on the Revolution found in “most basic textbook histories.” This narrative, he suggests, focuses too much on the “simple story of rebels versus redcoats,” obscuring the conflict’s true “transnational scope and complexity.” He proposes instead an account that includes not just the Founding Fathers and their Continental Congresses but also “Black American freedom seekers … Chinese tea-pickers, Mohawk warriors, Sierra Leonian separatists … [and] Asian rulers.”
The American Revolution, he argues, cannot be understood as merely an “American” event. Bell does not reject the traditional story of the Revolution—what we might call the Schoolhouse Rock tale of American “Patriots” shouting, “No more kings.” But, he argues, it must be seen as a global upheaval, one that began because British trade policy in China triggered a civil war in North America, launching a global war for empire that reached from the Caribbean to India, leading slaves to take arms against their masters and tens of thousands to flee across continents and oceans.
Bell starts with the traditional sequence of revolutionary-era events—the Boston Tea Party, the Battles of Lexington and Concord, etc.—but he shows how they fit into Britain’s tea trade with China. Seeking to maintain commercial advantages in China and India, London wanted the colonists to buy only British-shipped tea (and not the cheaper, smuggled Dutch tea they preferred). The colonists resented the implication that their economic choices should be subservient to Britain’s. Trade, money, and tea prices were the initial sticking point, not the existence of the monarchy. And by shifting the focus in this way, Bell reveals how the American Revolution was initially more about economic policy than monarchial power or political rights.
From there, Bell largely leaves behind the familiar story, touring instead the global landscape that shaped, and was shaped by, the better-known events in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. The kingdoms of France and Spain, he proposes, did as much to deliver victory for the colonists as the would-be republicans in the Continental Army. French troops and ships provided the bulk of the military power behind the climactic rebel victory at Yorktown in 1781. Spanish military aid, in turn, helped keep colonial troops in the field. Many rebel guns at Lexington and Concord, it turns out, literally bore the mark of Spain’s King Carlos III, sent from then-Spanish New Orleans—while Carlos’s soldiers made their impression, as well. Almost entirely forgotten Spanish campaigns along the Gulf Coast dragged London into yet another theater of war, forcing the surrender of British Florida and dramatically escalating the costs of the conflict in the months before the British collapse in Virginia.
Still more disruptive to the traditional narrative of white Continentals fighting their white British cousins are Bell’s accounts of lesser-known figures, like Molly Brant, an influential Mohawk woman married to a British diplomat, and Harry Washington, an enslaved West African man who fled George Washington’s plantation to join the British war effort against his former master. Brant’s struggles to maintain an anti-Patriot alliance between the Iroquois Confederacy and the British illustrates well how the Revolutionary War was no mere contest among Europeans. Native leaders like Brant saw the conflict as a chance to partner with the British Crown to reassert their own sovereignty against colonial encroachment. A brutal fight for the interior resulted, culminating in a horrific scorched-earth campaign against the Iroquois in upstate New York (ordered by General Washington), forcing Brant to flee to Canada. Harry Washington’s life, meanwhile, reveals another forgotten aspect of Washington’s war against Britain—that it precipitated one of the largest slave rebellions in American history, as more than 25 thousand Black people fled to British lines, many taking up arms for the king.
After fighting up and down the East Coast, Harry was among the handful of former slaves evacuated by British forces after Yorktown. He eventually settled in Sierra Leone, part of a new wave of European-backed imperialism in Africa. He and his 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, while numerous British convicts previously destined for hard labor in North America were instead transported by the British to yet another new colony, this time in Australia.
As these displacements suggest, what might surprise readers of The American Revolution and the Fate of the World the most is what that fate was: more empire and more inequality. Harry Washington for one would disappear from the historical record after participating in his own anti-British revolt, this by the Black residents of Freetown against the tyranny of the London-backed Sierra Leone Company in 1800. Two years earlier in Ireland, the British had also brutally cracked down on the “United Irishmen,” largely Protestant Irish nationalists inspired by the example of the United States to try to throw off the king’s yoke. In India, Haidar Ali—the leader of the independent kingdom of Mysore—used the opportunity opened by colonists to strike against growing British power on the subcontinent. Allying with the French and Dutch, Haidar won a number of battles across southern India before dying of cancer in 1782. Though his son, Tipu Sultan, maintained the war for a time, the British eventually turned the tide, conquering Mysore and further securing their dominant position in South Asia. The new United States also made its own imperial moves as a result of the Revolution, using its victory over pro-British Native Americans to further expand frontier settlement in North America, absorbing once-sovereign Indigenous nations into its own burgeoning continental empire.
What clearly emerges from these stories is an American Revolution that, as Bell rightly argues, cannot be fully contained within national borders or traditional narratives, an event that occurred across a much broader and already startlingly integrated world, one bound together by globalized networks of trade, migration, and power that spanned from Philadelphia and London to Freetown and Madras. Bell’s work will no doubt help many readers understand the Revolution more completely than they had before. Yet it’s hard not to think that most will also close the book feeling a bit dissatisfied, as if Bell starts his narrative too late and ends it too early.
This is because, from a global perspective at least, Bell enters and exits the story in the middle. France and Spain did not go to war with Britain because of the American colonists, they went to war because the colonists provided an opportunity to do what France and Spain had long been doing: waging war for empire. The Revolution appeared to offer a chance to wrest control of the international system from an increasingly dominant Britain. Both had fought Britain before and would fight again before the century was out. The same can be said for Haidar Ali—an aggressive statesman with a strong military, he fought, as he would have anyway, to defeat the British threat to his own independence. The colonists gave him an opportunity, not a reason. Harry Washington, meanwhile, may only have ended up in Sierra Leone because of American independence, but that’s certainly not the sole reason Britain expanded its reach in West Africa. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine Europeans not attempting to colonize Australia at some point in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries, regardless of whether the British government found itself in need of a new escape valve for its penal system. The American Revolution also did not begin the expansion of empire in North America—or the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans—that was already well underway.
While it’s inarguably a significant moment in world history, Bell’s claim that the American Revolution offers an origin story for the modern world—that it was an event that threw “much of the established world order into chaos”—thus seems too strong. Indeed, the very global perspective he advocates for undercuts such claims. 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 actually throwing the planet into chaos in the eighteenth century: European imperialism and the violent form of globalization it was forcing on the world. In the long run, American independence did little to disrupt that process or alter geopolitical outcomes for those living in non-European spaces like Mysore, Sierra Leone, China, or—in the near term at least—in Latin America. Even for Native Americans, the difference is less significant than we might think. It’s difficult to imagine a victorious post-Revolutionary British government truly restraining further white settlement of North America, while British Canada itself hardly proved a much better protector of Indigenous rights than the United States. The Revolution disrupted empires, economies, and lives, but it didn’t really threaten the world order based on expanding white European power; in many ways it reinforced it.
If we want to claim singular importance for the American Revolution, in fact, it can really only be done by keeping a steady eye on the very Schoolhouse Rock “no more Kings” version of the story that Bell deliberately moves away from. Though in a much more limited way than mythologized renderings of American history tend to suggest, the Revolution’s liberal rhetoric of freedom and representation did inject new strength into an emerging discourse about political rights, one that within a few generations would produce a novel mass democracy in the United States. Though horribly limited by race and gender, that democracy, and the discourse of freedom it helped maintain, offered a foundation on which many of the more decent aspects of modernity are at least partly built.
The American Revolution and the Fate of the World mentions this—reminding readers that the Patriots’ “call to liberty would push questions about human rights, citizenship, and sovereignty toward the top of the global agenda for the first time”—but that point is lost amid the book’s whirl of global stories. Bell is right to suggest that liberal ideas were far less important to the colonial cause than most Americans like to believe, but they were also among the few things produced by the Revolution that truly disrupted the empire-dominated world order of the late eighteenth century. The new United States, after all, did anything but. Bell’s version of the American Revolution is neither satisfyingly global enough (which would require more attention to the history of European imperial expansion) nor American enough (which would require more rebels, redcoats, and battle cries of freedom).
This dichotomy of empire and freedom in American history is important to remember as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this year. Though many in and out of the government will try to say otherwise, what is uniquely worth celebrating about the American Revolution is not so much the United States it created—which, in many respects, became just another empire in a long list of empires extending back to antiquity. It’s instead the boost the colonists gave to another 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 a little Schoolhouse Rock too.