For all the differences in outcome, the closest historical parallel to the American War of Independence may well be the Boer fights against the British. Both Afrikaner and Anglo-American colonists were engaged in a settler revolt on non-European land against the British crown. Both understood their societies as racially exclusionary, and key landowners in both societies saw British interference with slaveholding as a threat to economic well-being and broader ethno-racial control. Both viewed access to land and their territorial ambitions vis-à-vis Native peoples—mentioned explicitly by Thomas Jefferson in the U.S. Declaration of Independence—as key motivating grievances. And both tended to treat the preservation of their settler supremacy over enslaved and other colonized groups as a precondition for internal freedom.
Ultimately, perhaps the defining difference between these settler revolts is how outside observers invested them with meaning. Each revolt may have been a local eruption of internal conflicts among European colonial actors, a story of imperial centers confronting restive settler societies. But only the American Revolution acquired a global significance independent of these colonial dynamics. In his 1949 speech to the U.S. Congress two years after Indian independence, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru called the American founders the “torchbearers of freedom, not only for this country but for the world.” Indonesian President Sukarno opened the famed 1955 Bandung Conference of Asian and African states by highlighting the anniversary of Paul Revere’s midnight ride, which informed settler militias of advancing British forces prior to the battles of Lexington and Concord. Sukarno declared the Third World’s anticolonial struggle to be the culmination of a “battle which began 180 years ago” with “the American War of Independence, the first successful anti-colonial war in history.”
During the twentieth century, U.S. independence became a symbolic touchstone for many communities in the Global South that would have been excluded from that revolt. It stood for the idea that all people have the right to govern themselves and to fundamentally change the conditions of their own societies. For all the flaws of the American Century, its great attraction was the degree to which economic, political, and cultural life seemed to exist in a dynamic relationship with the will of its changing people. Above all, it was this relationship that gave world-historical significance to the events of 1776 for outsiders. Rather than a local political conflict unleashed by restive settlers, the long-term engine of American renewal meant that an eighteenth-century spark could be linked to an unfolding global story of human freedom.
Nehru called his three-week visit to the United States in 1949 “A Voyage of Discovery.” He described it as an opportunity to learn from the country’s “great achievements,” chief among them its capacities for democratic evolution. Yet one would be hard pressed to find a visitor now describing their time in the country in this way, even for the benefit of U.S. interlocutors. More so than at any point in the last century, U.S. independence now seems like a parochial affair.