The New York Review of Books - 24.04.2020

46 The New York Review

Did Britain Win the American Revolution?

David A. Bell

To Begin the World Over Again:
How the American Revolution
Devastated the Globe
by Matthew Lockwood.
Yale University Press, 523 pp., $30.00

In the late eighteenth century, few
places in the world were more remote
from Europe than Vancouver Island.
The closest major European outpost
lay nearly a thousand miles to the
south, in Spanish California. Traveling
to Europe took at least six months, in
wind-powered ships making a weary-
ing, dangerous voyage of
nearly 15,000 miles around
the tip of South America
and back north through
the Atlantic. Nonetheless,
British traders who had
explored the region had
high hopes of harvesting its
bountiful furs for shipment
across the Pacific to sell in
China. They planned to use
the proceeds to purchase a
Chinese commodity for
which their compatriots
had developed an insa-
tiable taste: tea. So when
reports finally reached
London in January 1790
that a Spanish ship had
seized two British vessels
off Vancouver Island the
previous spring, the two
countries nearly went to
war. The speed limits of
the preindustrial age did
not prevent far-flung parts
of the world from knitting
themselves into a tight web
of connections.
Many of the most reveal-
ing and innovative works of history
in recent years have taken these early
global connections as their subject.
Some have done so in miniature, craft-
ing finely detailed studies of individuals
whose odysseys map out earlier cur-
rents of global trade and imperial com-
petition: Linda Colley’s The Ordeal of
Elizabeth Marsh (2008) traced the life
of an obscure eighteenth- century En-
glishwoman, possibly of mixed race,
as these currents swept her between
the West Indies, Europe, Africa, and
South Asia. Others have made use of
the largest possible canvas: Christo-
pher Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern
World , 178 0 –1914 (2003) showed how
connections changed and intensified
across the globe as steam power sup-
planted sail, telegraph cables made the
transmission of news instantaneous
(even across oceans), industrial econo-
mies burgeoned, and empires extended
their often murderous sway.
The impulses behind these works are
not hard to discern. The surging global
flows of capital, information, goods,
and people in our own age—widely
hailed a generation ago as liberating
but whose dangerous effects have since
become all too visible—have stirred
a powerful curiosity about their long-
term origins. Emphasizing global inter-
actions also helps us see non-Western
peoples as participants in their own
history, rather than as passive objects
of Western attention.
The limitations of the new global

history, however, are as notable as its

illuminations. Change on a global scale

is easier to describe than to explain.

Even Bayly, in his magisterial volume,

had trouble giving reasons for the

enormous transformations he chron-

icled. The pressure to situate every

event in the widest possible setting

can also lead writers to forget that the

most intense and consequential forms

of historical change often do not take

place on the scale of the globe, but in

small, crucible- like locations: Paris in

1789, St. Petersburg in 1917. And few

historians have the time and resources

to properly master the many different

historiographies, bodies of source ma-

terial, and—not least—languages that

a global history may entail. A full treat-

ment of the Vancouver Island incident,

for instance, would require consulta-

tion of sources in English and Span-

ish, and several archives, as well as a

knowledge of the indigenous history of

the region. Criticism of the new global

history for overreach has by now occa-

sioned more than a few lively debates.^1

Matthew Lockwood’s To B egin the

World Over Again exemplifies both the

illuminations and the limitations of the

global approach. His subtitle, “How

the American Revolution Devastated

the Globe,” meanwhile, provides per-

haps the most egregious case yet of a

global historian’s overreach—or at

least overmarketing. The book itself

does not actually hold the revolution

responsible for global devastation. In-

deed, Lockwood says little about the

revolution itself, and seems somewhat

confused about how it should be under-

stood. At one point he calls it “a revolu-

tion in favor of liberty” that provoked a

“reactionary counter-revolution in the

wider world” by traditional authorities

anxious to prevent their own countries

from imitating it.

Yet he does not discuss the spread

of American political ideas and barely

mentions the most obvious case of the

American Revolution inspiring revolu-

tionary change elsewhere: the French

Revolution. And just two pages after

the remark about liberty, he dismis-

sively insists that “the vast majority of

Earth’s inhabitants... did not give a

damn about a civil war in British North

America or the ideas and ideals that

inspired it.” He pays considerable at-

tention to American slavery, but unlike

The New York Times’s much debated

“1619 Project,” he does not claim that

the Americans revolted in large part to

preserve slavery in the face of growing

British abolitionist sentiment. To the

contrary, he argues convincingly that

the British only found it advantageous

to move seriously toward abolition

once the revolution had deprived them

of their largest slave colonies.

The source of the supposed global

devastation lies elsewhere. In keeping

with a great deal of recent global his-

tory scholarship, Lockwood sees the

“age of revolution” less as a moment of

ideological rupture than as one of cri-

sis in European imperial governance.^2

The enormous fiscal demands of a

global imperial competition that had

intensified throughout the eighteenth

century, principally among Britain,

France, and Spain, placed intolerable

pressures on each. The explosive re-

sult, starting in 1775, was more than a

half-century of nearly continuous revo-

lution, counterrevolution, and warfare

on a vast scale. Lockwood portrays the

American Revolution not merely as the

first major act in this drama, but as the

one that unleashed the tragic violence

that followed and that set the scene for

Great Britain’s eventual emergence

as the first true world power. He calls

the book “very much the story of how

Britain won the American Revolu-

tion,” and this intriguingly counterin-

tuitive statement would have made a

far better subtitle (the title itself comes

from Thomas Paine’s Common Sense).

From this point of view, the ideological

content of the American Revolution is

almost irrelevant.

Like Colley in The Or-

deal of Elizabeth Marsh,

Lockwood uses individual

life stories to tell his global

history. Many of them are

familiar to historians of the

period, but he has assem-

bled a remarkably diverse

collection and writes about

them vividly. Dean Ma-

homet, one of his examples,

was a Bengali who served in

the army of Britain’s East

India Company during its

wars against the Maratha

Confederacy. In 1784, at age

twenty-five, he accompa-

nied his Irish commanding

officer back to Europe and

later opened London’s first

Indian restaurant, the Hin-

doostanee Coffee House.

It failed, but Mahomet

bounced back, starting a

series of profitable, South

Asian–themed bathhouses

that featured the newly

fashionable Indian hair

and body massage called

“shampoo.” He eventually became the

official “shampooing surgeon” to two

British kings and lived into his nineties.

Lockwood also recounts the story

of Bennelong, an Australian of the

Eora people whom British colonists

kidnapped in 1789 to help them learn

Aboriginal languages and customs. He

traveled to Britain in 1792 but returned

to Australia three years later and re-

fused to remain among the colonists.

“He fell off spontaneously into his early

habits,” one observer recorded, “in

spite of every thing that could be done

to him in the order of civilization.”

John Aitken, meanwhile, was a Scot-

tish petty criminal who emigrated to

Virginia as an indentured servant in

1773, one step ahead of the law. Re-

turning to Britain two years later, he

decided to help the Americans win

their struggle for independence. With

some assistance from an American

agent in France, he cobbled together a

series of ingenious incendiary devices

and carried out what Lockwood calls

terrorist arson attacks on British naval

shipyards. These caused widespread

panic and a security clampdown that

lasted even after the authorities caught

and executed Aitken.

Most traveled of all the book’s char-

acters was Boston King, born into slav-

ery in South Carolina in 1760. During

the American Revolution he fled to

British forces who promised him free-

dom in return for helping their war ef-

fort. Having moved to British-occupied

John Trumbull: The Sortie Made by the Garrison of Gibraltar, 1789

Metropol

itan Museum of Art

(^1) See for instance Richard Drayton
and David Motadel, “Discussion: The
Futures of Global History,” with re-
sponses by Jeremy Adelman and David
A. Bell, Journal of Global History,
Vol. 13, No. 1 (2018).
(^2) See notably Jeremy Adelman, Sover-
eignty and Revolution in the Iberian
Atlantic (Princeton University Press,
2006), and Justin duRivage, Revolu-
tion Against Empire: Taxes, Politics,
and the Origins of American Indepen-
dence (Yale University Press, 2017).