FREEDOM ROUND THE GLOBE

History of the American Revolution as it played out in other theaters around the world.

“The American Revolutionary War was in fact a Russian doll of a war, with wars nested in other wars, far beyond the thirteen colonies,” writes Johns Hopkins history professor Pearsall. Indeed, she notes, Britain’s colonies in North America included 13 others besides the 13 that would rebel—and it’s a matter of some curiosity that while there were plenty of stirrings, those other 13 remained under the British aegis. Some of the extraterritorial rebellions that figure in Pearsall’s account are those mounted by Indigenous peoples west of the Appalachians, who had stronger ideas about liberty, as one British observer noted, than any other “people on the face of the earth.” That demand for liberty was well matched elsewhere in the world, when another revolutionary war broke out in India, one that “ended in a stalemate in 1784.” Bernardo de Gálvez, a renowned Spanish soldier and Apache fighter, helped divert British resources in Florida; French and Spanish forces did the same at Gibraltar, tying down a garrison and war matériel that might otherwise have been sent to the American colonies; French fleets made a failed attempt to invade Jamaica, but all the same kept the British defenders busy. Pearsall’s narrative extends even to China, with American traders making the case for an extension of credit that Alexander Hamilton would run with. Pearsall herself does good work in chronicling that “a revolutionary spirit was alive across the British Empire,” one that accused the empire’s leaders of being enslavers—and that would play out in later abolitionist movements. Less smoothly integrated into the narrative, but provocative, is her suggestion that the revolutionary spirit inspired colonial women to practice birth control “because these revolutions unleashed a sense that women, too, should be able to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.”

A revealing study of the global dimensions of America’s war for independence.