When is a history lesson not a history lesson? These days, pretty much never. History is now a “hot vertical” for publishers, often outselling thrillers.
So it’s no surprise that the 250th anniversary of the United States should be celebrated by this spiffing new book from Sarah M S Pearsall.
If you’re interested in the Revolutionary War that culminated in the creation of the independent United States of America, then this book might be the thing for you. In a sweeping reinterpretation of the American Revolution, this acclaimed historian reveals that the struggle for freedom was never really confined to the 13 colonies. Across the 18th-century world ordinary people were challenging imperial power and imagining new forms of liberty.
Freedom Round the Globe puts a spin on the familiar story of the American founding by placing it within a kind of mass international movement of resistance.
Pearsall shows that the revolutionary ideals later celebrated in the Declaration of Independence emerged from a much broader and more contested world. The American colonists were only one group among many confronting empire, inequality, taxation, enslavement and war.
Each chapter traces a revolutionary idea to a different corner of the globe. In Connecticut and the Caribbean, for instance, she examines how slavery transformed the meaning of liberty, giving rise to new political language and radical demands for freedom. The book is a litany of revolt, a kind of world tour of grievances, from Edinburgh to Guangzhou to Kolkata, and from St Kitts to Sierra Leone.
I loved the chapter about the Indian resistance to aggressive taxation and the monopolistic power of the East India Company helping crystallise American fears about imperial corruption and unaccountable government. The same tea system that angered the Bengalis also fuelled the outrage leading up to the Boston Tea Party. The narrative fair barrels along. It is, in fact, a cracking read.
Dylan Jones is an author and journalist
Freedom Round the Globe by Sarah M S Pearsall is out now (Pan Macmillan, £22)
