Whose liberty and how much equality?

Academic historians of the US are made up of a large majority who are reluctant to place the history of the country they study  in conversation with that of the rest of the world, and a small minority who are happy to do so. The exceptions to the rule can be found most obviously in domains such as diplomatic history and its variants. Even the most conventional student of the careers of, say, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski or Condoleezza Rice cannot afford to ignore the rest of the world while constructing a historical narrative. But the way they approach the issue is usually through the idea of American “influence” or interference elsewhere, whether in Mexico, the Caribbean, Korea, Vietnam or South Asia.

An alternative perspective is that of immigration history, which emphasises how individuals and groups from different parts of the world entered the United States and played a part in its social, political and even entrepreneurial history. This perspective often comes to be enshrined in American universities in the form of “hyphenated histories”, propelled by the identity politics of the groups in question, and sometimes financed directly by them. It usually does not involve paying much attention to the complex history of the countries of origin of these immigrants.

Fifty years ago, when the second centenary of the American Revolution was being celebrated during the lame-duck presidency of Gerald Ford, little attention was paid to the world at large, except to assume that this event of the late 18th century must somehow have had a momentous global impact. This is the point of departure of the new book by the Johns Hopkins University professor Sarah Pearsall. 

Unlike her chief predecessors from a half-century ago, she eschews the path of American exceptionalism and also steers clear of the style of “great-man history” that still can be found in biographical studies of the Founding Fathers. Instead, she casts her net wide, not only in terms of geography but social class, ethnicity and gender, peopling her history with a vast and unusual array of personalities. As even those who wrote the great-men versions of the American Revolution were aware, the cast of characters was multinational and included men like the Marquis de Lafayette, Johann de Kalb, Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben and Tadeusz Kościuszko. Many of the well known Americans of the time, such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, had spent time across the Atlantic, and their thinking bore traces of the European Enlightenment. Nevertheless, writing “a World History of the American Revolution” remains a challenge and confronts the historian with a number of choices.

These are in part literary choices. Pearsall has decided to organise her book neatly into 13 relatively short chapters, reflecting the 13 American colonies that rebelled. Every chapter begins with a reference to a location somewhere in the world: from Sierra Leone to St Kitts, Kolkata to Edinburgh. Further, each chapter is oriented around a “positive keyword from the Declaration of Independence”: words such as “consent”, “respect” and “civility” as well as “independence”, “governments” and “happiness”. However, unpacking the meaning and connotations of even these relatively simple terms turns out to be no simple matter. What can one make of “equality” and “liberty” as slogans when so many of the leaders of the American Revolution were unrepentant plantocrats and slave-owners, whose descendants then underwrote the ruthless westward expansion of the American frontier at the cost of indigenous polities and the sister Mexican republic? Whose liberty and how much equality?

Today’s historian must thus face up to the fact that the American Republic was deeply flawed at birth, and that while some of these flaws (such as slavery) were partially addressed and resolved, others have persisted and even been magnified, such as a voracious appetite for other people’s resources. Pearsall is well aware of this, and many of the striking vignettes in her book concern such thorny issues.

She begins with a tragic moment, namely the summary hanging in Bkejwanong (now Detroit) of an unnamed indigenous slave woman in 1763, who was accused of killing her white master. This judicial murder may have been a factor behind a sizeable indigenous uprising often known as Pontiac’s War. Pearsall argues that “indigenous women and men were among the first North Americans to push back hard against the British empire”, and suggests that the British were obliged to increase their fiscal extraction as a consequence of the uprising, with well known consequences in the 1770s. The underlying argument here is that many individuals and groups had “agency” in determining the shape of the American Revolution, but that establishing this requires careful excavation in the sources, and a proper attention to detail.

Multiplying the number of significant actors requires much additional labour, both with primary sources and the wider historiography. Besides English, Pearsall has accessed materials in French and Spanish and also takes on board recent historical writings on many parts of the world in the period. Nevertheless, the attentive reader will find at the end of the 13 chapters that they have strayed very little from the Atlantic orbit. The larger world is referred to in chapters based on Kolkata and Guangzhou, as also in several mentions of the rulers of Mysore in the chapter on Versailles. The connections to India that are proposed are twofold. One concerns the British conquest of Bengal, and the subsequent famine of 1769-70, which is rightly taken to be an indictment of the feckless policies of the East India Company, and the greed of its employees, with parallels to the tax grievances of the American colonial subjects. A second more complex set of links is drawn to the de facto ruler of Mysore, Haider Ali Khan, and his successful wars against the East India Company in southern India in the 1760s and 1770s. Pearsall argues that the challenge from Haider meant British military resources could not fully concentrate on America, noting that “few Americans know about the help they got from the South Asian fighters who drew away British resources”. It might have been worthwhile here to enter more deeply into Haider Ali’s strategic vision, including recent analyses of his contacts with the Spanish empire, in order to place him in the same frame as the American rebels. The mentions of Guangzhou (and China more generally) are more of a stretch and require the book to enter into the mid and late 1780s, after American ships had begun to frequent Chinese ports. On the other hand, it would hardly do to write a world history of the American Revolution without China, given the symbolic significance of tea in sparking the rebellion.

Written in a fluent and engaging style, Pearsall’s book thus offers a decentred, somewhat kaleidoscopic view of the events around the American Revolution. It also offers far more prominence to actors who have been kept on the sidelines in traditional histories and is thus clearly influenced by trends such as history from below, and studies of gender, ethnicity and race. As a consequence, it will undoubtedly irritate those who believe in a properly Red, White and Blue version of American history, and not in what Pearsall terms a “wonky celebration” of 1776. On the other hand, sceptical readers may still be troubled by the lingering presence not far below the surface of the book of an uncritical strand of apologetic nationalism, which seems reluctant to recognise that what was often at stake in the American Revolution was not freedom as such, but freedom for the white American colonists from what they saw as British tyranny. Indeed, a perspicacious contemporary thinker like Edmund Burke recognised there were many elements of continuity between the American political project and political thought in the colonial metropolis.

While one may applaud Pearsall’s efforts to go “beyond simple hero worship or propaganda”, we have to recognise the painful reality that a “history of global resistance to tyranny” cannot merely be about the resistance to older colonial powers like Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal, but must attend to the peculiar empire-nation that has proclaimed liberty long and loud but often practised its opposite. Not for nothing does a famous American song tell us: “And you’ll be sorry that you messed with the US of A/’Cause we’ll put a boot in your ass/It’s the American way.”

Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s books include Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640 (Saqi Books)

Freedom Round the Globe: How the World Made the American Revolution
Sarah MS Pearsall
Picador, 432pp, £22

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