The American Revolution is often considered a parochial drama: 13 colonies squaring off against the British Crown in a spirited bid for independence. But this version of the story is only half the truth—and perhaps not even the most interesting part. Historian and author Richard Bell reevaluates the Revolution as a world war that unleashed chaos, opportunity, and transformation across six continents.
From the sugar fields of the Caribbean to the court of the King of Mysore, refugee camps on the Canadian frontier to political uprisings in Sierra Leone and Peru, the war that gave birth to the United States was never simply America’s own, says Bell. It was a seismic global event that redrew maps, toppled hierarchies, catalyzed migration, and accelerated new movements for liberty—and for empire.
Bell traces the far-flung reverberations of the war through the lives of the people it displaced, empowered, or destroyed. He introduces a Native matriarch struggling to preserve a transatlantic military alliance, a Prussian officer reinventing himself in a foreign army, and a Boston schoolteacher shipwrecked thousands of miles from home. Along the way, Bell explores how the Revolution stirred a transoceanic refugee crisis, ignited antislavery activism, and inspired uprisings from Ireland to India.
Bell offers a new framework for understanding the Revolutionary War not as a tidy founding moment but as a sprawling, complex, and high-stakes struggle fought on land and sea, shaped by commerce, diplomacy, propaganda, and contingency.
Bell is a professor of history at the University of Maryland. His book The American Revolution and the Fate of the World (Riverhead Books) is available for purchase.
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