The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (review)

This “Global History” is an important little book. By “little,” I mean both that it is short, only 144 pages of text, and also a small-format codex—though larger than the Princeton University Press version of Harry Frankfurt’s Bullshit. In a normally formatted book, this text would run to fewer than 100 pages—a point worth remarking because it shows how much more flexible academic publishers are becoming in presenting work that would not otherwise be thought a “book.” Indeed, The Declaration of Independence probably began life as a provocative article (for which I think I was a reviewer) in the William and Mary Quarterly, which stimulated a Harvard University Press editor to suggest expanding it for book publication.

Well, it is not a book in the usual sense, but rather three loosely and cleverly connected essays, each reflecting on the international character of the Declaration of Independence: the world in the Declaration, the Declaration in the world, and a world of declarations. Written by someone less bright and knowledgeable than Armitage, this publication might have been little more than cute. If it is, as I say, important, its significance is more as a prod to reflection than as a definitive scholarly statement. Armitage is a specialist in early American history. He is also a representative of the interest in what Bernard Bailyn has long promoted as “Atlantic” history—based on the understanding that North America is part of the North Atlantic system, bounded on the east by Europe, on the southeast by Africa, and on the south by the Caribbean and Latin America. With this conception in mind, Armitage places the American Declaration in a genuinely international context. We will probably not need another domestic history of the Declaration for a long time, given the brilliant account American Scripture, published in 1997 by Pauline Maier. But Maier was interested in why the Americans constructed such a document and how they did it. Instead Armitage treats the Declaration, successively, as an event, a document, and “the beginning of a genre.” The “event” he situates among ideas of international law emergent in eighteenth-century Europe. The “document” he describes as a nonconstitutional international proclamation. As for the “genre” (and this is the book’s least developed essay), Armitage is interested in the proliferation of the type in space and time.

Even if not strictly speaking “original,” this account is fresh and new, wonderfully readable and engaging. It will henceforth be hard to regard the Declaration as merely an elegant final page of the New York Times come every Fourth of July.