The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (review)

Shortly before Thomas Jefferson died in 1826, he reminded his fellow citizens that the Declaration of Independence had been "an instrument, pregnant with [. . .] the fate of the world." In a small but elegant book Harvard historian David Armitage returns to this global perspective. As a call for independence against the British Empire, the Declaration seemed to inspire uniqueness and separation, and especially after 1815 it has been treasured and interpreted as a founding document for American nationhood. Accordingly, most scholarly work has concentrated on its singular domestic origins and legacy. As Pauline Maier and others powerfully underlined, the Declaration can be studied as "American Scripture." In particular the claim of its preamble that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" has been analyzed as the expression of a creed that Americans used to define their own society. Armitage convincingly argues, however, that this national and creedal perspective is an anachronism that overlooks the global significance and international appeal of the Declaration. His three chapters correct this narrow perspective by discussing the international intellectual foundations of the Declaration, its intended cosmopolitan audience, and the contagious consequences in many other nations that Jefferson alluded to.

Armitage rightly dismisses the rather facile view that Jefferson or his fellow drafters were inspired by specific historical precedents such as the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320 in which Scottish earls and barons defend their freedom against the English King, or the Act of Abjuration of 1581 by which the Dutch provinces abjured the sovereignty of King Philip II of Spain. When the members of Continental Congress appealed to "a decent respect to the Opinions of Mankind" in declaring the colonies free and independent states, they acted rather upon accepted concepts of statehood that were current in international law and had conveniently been outlined in a standard work on the Law of Nations that a Swiss legal expert had published a few years earlier.

As the prime goal of the Declaration had been to convince world opinion that the thirteen states should be treated on equal footing by the other "Powers of the Earth," Armitage traces the reception of these bold claims to sovereignty across the Atlantic. He entertainingly demonstrates that the American document was met with disdain, unbelief, and awe-depending on the various positions in the ongoing political debates of the Atlantic revolution—and was answered by serious legal rebuttals, intellectual assessments and some hilarious parodies. Lastly, and less convincingly, Armitage lists the many struggles for national independence and decolonization that produced documents which copied, paraphrased, or merely mentioned the American original, suggesting the emergence of a new "genre." It is difficult to see how all these diverse upheavals—from the Province of Flanders in 1790, by way of the Caribbean, the Spanish Americas, Eastern Europe and the Balkans to Southern Rhodesia in 1965—were a result of the inevitable "contagion" of American ideas about the rights of individuals and states. Yet, this book offers many new approaches to the study of the complex connections between American society and the world.