Beyond 1776: Globalizing the Cultures of the American Revolution by Maria O’Malley, Denys Van Renen (review)

The idea that the American Revolution was a global phenomenon is nearly as old as the United States itself. The earliest historians of the Revolution, like David Ramsay and Mercy Otis Warren, placed American independence in the context of British actions like the Stamp Act and events in neighboring colonies like the Quebec Act. This global perspective expanded in the twentieth century, first by Imperial School historians Charles Andrews and Lawrence Gipson, and then by Atlanticist R. R. Palmer, who argued that American independence was only one chapter in “the Age of the Democratic Revolution.” In the last generation, scholars such as Maya Jasanoff and P. J. Marshall continued the centrifugal movement of Revolutionary scholarship such that it is now impossible to explain the creation of the US without including the Haitian revolt, Loyalists’ diaspora to Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, and the British Empire in India.

Beyond 1776: Globalizing the Cultures of the American Revolution continues the efforts of scholars to internationalize US independence. An edited collection of ten essays by historians and literary scholars from around the world, Beyond 1776 offers new information and new interpretations that will surprise and intrigue even the best-read student of the Revolution. Some of the essays reach predictable destinations such as France, the Netherlands, and the Caribbean, while others incorporate unexpected locations like Australia, China, and the Arctic Ocean. Yet the editors tightly control the focus of the essays so that the essays speak to one another and make the case for reading the collection as a whole rather than a few selections.

Editors Maria O’Malley and Denys Van Renen begin Beyond 1776 with a thoughtful introduction. Arguing that the American Revolution “is under-studied in that scholarship imposes arbitrary boundaries on it,” O’Malley and Van Renen dispense with the dominant concern of most studies of the Revolution: the rise of the American nation-state (2). Instead, the United States “provides a departure point” to trace the ripples that emanated out from events in North America (12). As a result, there is very little that is American about Beyond 1776, so nonspecialists may wish to brush up on US history before engaging with this book.

O’Malley and Van Renen’s introduction successfully alerts the reader to the themes that connect the essays. Beyond 1776 follows the lead of historian Eliga Gould to look at the nation’s founding “from what we might call the ‘outside in’ perspective” of US relations with other places (3). This directive manifests itself in two themes that are repeated throughout the book. First, the authors look for connections, specifically the ways in which networks “of people, ideas, print, commodities, and money” were created, disrupted, and re-created by the Revolution (4). Second, they are attentive to issues of scale and the dialectic between the local and the global.

Part 1, “Transatlantic Cliques,” focuses on the movement of ideas across the Atlantic. In “Circulating the American Revolution,” Leonard Von Morzé investigates the work of German immigrant and Pennsylvania publisher Christian Jacob Hütter. Von Morzé’s primary concern is how changing interpretations of the American Revolution are revealed in two of Hütter’s pamphlets, the first published in 1800 and the second in 1815. Yet the essay also provides compelling insights into the business of books and the changing experiences of German immigrants in the early Republic. Wyger R. E. Velema turns to the Netherlands in “Republicanism Redefined” and asks: “[W]hat precisely was it that Dutch reformers and revolutionaries found so attractive in the American Revolution?” (51). The answer, Velema argues, was the language of natural rights and permanent sovereignty of the people. Accordingly, US independence provided inspiration for the Netherlands’ Patriot Revolution of the 1780s and Batavian Revolution of the 1790s.

Carine Lounissi visits well-trodden ground in “French Writers on the American Revolution in the Early 1780s,” yet...