Richard Bell’s The American Revolution and the Fate of the World provides, in this regard, an opportunity to reflect on the difficulty of that charge and also the limits of the response. Bell’s primary solution in this ambitious volume is to widen his scope. Addressing the reader in jaunty, confident prose, he works hard to convince us that the American Revolution was a lot less provincial than we were taught in school. The events of 1776 and their aftermath, he argues, not only required white English settlers and British government officials to pick a side—they swept up and reshaped the lives of all kinds of other peoples in what would become the United States and around the world. That includes enslaved people of African descent and the people of numerous tribal nations native to the Americas. It also includes aristocratic French generals and Spanish navy men, Chinese dockworkers and Indian rulers, British anti-war agitators and Hessian mercenaries, convicts en route to Botany Bay and Sierra Leonean settlers, Irish American printers, farmers, and arms dealers, Jamaican washerwomen, and Loyalist wives looking for safety in British Canada.
Bell’s global approach fits broadly within several ongoing trends in academic history writing. One is treating the multiple revolutions that took place on both sides of the Atlantic in the 18th and early 19th centuries as interconnected, especially with regard to the demands of maintaining and funding commercial empires. Another is decentering the 13 original British seaboard colonies in North America in favor of what is often called “Vast Early America,” a segment of the globe stretching from the Caribbean to French Canada to the Spanish American and Native West, with links to places as far-flung as China, India, and Brazil as well as continental Europe and West Africa. And yet another is drawing attention to the uncelebrated and even the nameless as much as the famous “founders”—which has also meant emphasizing the significance of bloody power struggles on the frontier, the plantation, and the high seas as much as what happened in the meeting halls and taverns of Philadelphia. Our picture of revolutionary America is very different today, and considerably more complex, than that which accompanied the Bicentennial’s tall ships back in 1976. Bell’s synthetic account is indicative of just how much we’ve learned in the ensuing years.