Not Your Fathers' Revolution: Internationalizing American Independence

Scholars from across the globe recently marked the fiftieth anniversary of Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967). The colloquia were warranted not simply for the work's longevity, but more importantly, for its capacity to expand our view of American revolutionary thinking beyond the conventional wisdom around colonial class struggles. Generations of scholars have since pushed intellectual boundaries to argue that the drive for American independence was founded, in part, upon reasoning and arguments emanating from beyond the taverns and shores of Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Charleston.

Since Bailyn's pathbreaking study, however, historians have too often ignored the contemporary developments in Canada, Spanish America, and the West Indies that influenced the early United States. Many books on the Revolution still present a myopic view on the founding story of the United States, particularly the political development of governing institutions. This method relegates existing empires in North America and native peoples who had inhabited the lands for centuries to annoyances that impeded the spread of an American destiny. Recent narratives around the Revolution have attempted to broaden perspectives of that formative period to include more than the pantheon of traditional founding fathers. Even with wonderful works like Mary Beth Norton's Liberty's Daughters (1980), T. H. Breen's The Marketplace of Revolution (2004), and David Brion Davis's The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (1975), which highlight the importance of women, commerce, and slavery in the founding of the United States, the literature of the American Revolution seems incessantly tethered to the profiles of George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. The United States' creation story can be told beyond the false dichotomy identified by Joseph Ellis as "one featuring the founders as demigods who were permitted to glimpse the eternal truths" or "the other crowded with a cast of villains who collectively comprise the deadest, whitest males in American history."¹ Both Alan Taylor and Larrie D. Ferreiro offer thoughtful contributions to this endeavor, adding to our understanding of the international nature and achievements of the American Revolution. Together, these two books show that while we have had—for obvious reasons—lots to say about how Europeans became Americans, we have had less to say about how Europeans established the United States and gave shape to Americans' sense of identity.

Alan Taylor's American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804 offers a history of the American Revolution that encompasses the broader North American continent, including territories west of the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River. It is a fitting sequel to his American Colonies (2001), which presented a continental history of colonial and native experiences. American Revolutions emphasizes the multiple and clashing visions of revolution that diverse peoples of the continent pursued. Taylor shows that the protracted debates over the Revolution—before, during, and after the military actions—by some of the U.S.'s more prolific thinkers bequeathed an ongoing legacy of revolutionary upheavals that have since led to evolving social tensions and political contradictions rather than lasting resolutions.

American Revolutions locates its story in the burgeoning continental and global dynamics of rival European empires and Native American civilizations that inhabited North America. Treating the Revolution as a "Continental" experience facilitates the presentation of a diversified human cast of colonial America. In line with scholarship that emphasizes Spanish, French, and Dutch colonies, the work shows that American relations with native peoples were pivotal in shaping colonial regions and U.S. interactions with neighboring empires. Revolutionary events happened across the American continent. White settlers' refusal to coexist on land that already belonged to others in Illinois and Kentucky led to genocidal massacres of Native Americans during the Revolution. The American South takes on a different...