April 23, 2020 47
New York, he crewed on a pilot boat,
only to be captured by Americans and
returned to slavery, this time in New
Jersey. Escaping back across Staten
Island, he was eventually evacuated,
with four hundred other former slaves,
to Nova Scotia, where he worked as a
ship builder and became a Methodist
preacher. Then, in 1792, the British of-
fered him the chance to take part in a
new colonial venture: the resettlement
of former slaves in Sierra Leone. Even
as the effort struggled, King became
a missionary, and died in 1802 while
serving among the Sherbro people on
the African coast.
With each of these characters, Lock-
wood traces the disruptions in their
lives back to the American Revolu-
tion and the shock it delivered
to the British Empire (includ-
ing the British Isles them-
selves). The connections are
obvious for Aitken and King,
but Lockwood finds them in
the other cases as well. For in-
stance, the revolution made it
impossible for Britain to punish
criminals with transportation to
the American colonies, prompt-
ing it to colonize Australia as
an alternate destination for con-
vict labor—and eventually to
disrupt the life of Bennelong.
Meanwhile, the fighting that
swept up the young Dean Ma-
homet formed part of the ongo-
ing worldwide conflict among
empires, thereby tying it “with
unseen tendrils to the battle-
fields of North America.” Lock-
wood adds that the American
Revolution “spurred Britain to
rethink the nature and aims of
imperial governance,” leading
to “an authoritarian revolution”
that would firmly subordinate
India to its colonial master for
the next century and a half.
Lockwood also ventures well be-
yond the bounds of the British Empire.
During the last third of the eighteenth
century, Spain faced the challenge of
preserving, and keeping solvent, an
empire that in theory included roughly
half the landmass of the Americas,
stretching from Cape Horn all the way
to present-day Montana. To do so, its
government imposed punishing new
taxes on its American possessions,
while also stripping their elites of much
of the political autonomy they had pre-
viously enjoyed. The pressure ratch-
eted up still further after 1779, when
Spain joined France in supporting the
American Revolution.
One result, Lockwood writes, was
the huge rebellion of indigenous and
mestizo peasants launched in Peru in
1780 by a local official named José Ga-
briel Condorcanqui, a descendant of
the Incas who claimed the title Túpac
Amaru II. Lockwood recounts the
events less through the figure of Túpac
than through that of his fearless wife,
Micaela Bastidas, who helped him
lead the insurrection and then shared
his fate after the Spanish succeeded in
crushing it. On May 18, 1781, after she
saw her son hanged in front of her, her
tongue was cut out and she was gar-
roted to death in the central plaza of
Cuzco. Ultimately, though, her cause
would triumph with the independence
of the Spanish American states, and
Lockwood cites as illustration an en-
thusiastic letter written by Túpac’s
brother in 1825, congratulating Simón
Bolívar as “the Hero of Colombia and
the Liberator of the vast countries of
South America.”
Lockwood even credits the Amer-
ican Revolution with Russia’s rise to
great-power status, and with China’s
decline. In the first case, he argues
that the American war so badly dis-
tracted the traditional European allies
of the Ottoman Empire that Catherine
the Great could seize Crimea from the
Turks, providing Russia with warm-
water ports on the Black Sea. In the
second, he suggests that the revolu-
tion so badly damaged British trade
that British merchants could no lon-
ger come up with the silver demanded
by China as payment for its tea. As a
result, they searched desperately forcommodities the Chinese might want
to buy. Canadian furs offered one pos-
sibility, but ultimately the British found
a far more profitable good to lubricate
its Chinese trade: opium. And in the
nineteenth century, Britain’s success in
pushing opium on the Chinese in two
“opium wars” would fatally weaken the
Chinese Empire.Taken together, these chapters pres-
ent a colorful and engaging fresco of
a world in turmoil. But how well does
Lockwood’s story hold together in the
end? His book, for all its appeal, is also
hobbled, in a particularly acute man-
ner, by the limitations of global history
as it is currently practiced.
First, there is the issue of causal-
ity. Christopher Bayly recognized
the difficulties of tracing causes and
effects in complex global phenom-
ena, invoking “the concatenation of
changes produced by the interactions
of political, economic and ideological
change at many different levels.” Lock-
wood, impatient with such vague and
unsatisfying formulae, insists on the
priority of a single causal factor: the
American Revolution. He compares
the event to a stone making a splash
in the water, with “waves and ripples
that radiated out from its epicenter.”
The trouble, though, is that far more
than one large stone landed in the sea
of eighteenth-century history. TheAmerican Revolution derived in many
ways from the rippling effects of an
earlier episode in the century’s impe-
rial crisis: the globe- spanning Seven
Years’ War of 1756–1763, in which
France lost its North American land
empire and also most of its posses-
sions in India. As any serious student
of American history knows, Britain
emerged from that conflict victorious
but fiscally exsanguinated, leading it
to impose wildly unpopular new taxes
on its North American colonies. And
just six years after the United States
achieved independence there began
the French and Haitian revolutions,
whose wide-ranging effects—including
nearly a quarter- century of horrifically
destructive warfare—swamped those
of their American predecessor in many
parts of the globe.
Again and again, Lockwood
holds the American Revolution
responsible for an event, only
to qualify the assertion with
phrases such as “had a long pe-
riod of gestation,” “of growing
concern... before the Ameri-
can crisis intervened,” or “was
long in the making.” Again and
again, he takes his story up into
the period where the rippling
effects of the French Revolution
overtook those of the Ameri-
can one. Did Latin American
independence owe more to the
pressures that the American
Revolution put on the Iberian
empires, or to the enormous
disruptions caused when Napo-
leon Bonaparte, that son of the
French Revolution, occupied
Spain and Portugal? Why, for
that matter, in discussing the
opium wars of the nineteenth
century, place the emphasis
on the American Revolution’s
disruptions of Britain’s China
trade as opposed to the growth
of that trade in the first place?
Why privilege one link above
others in several long, overlapping
chains of cause and effect?
When identifying causes, Lock-
wood also tends to put almost exclu-
sive emphasis on financial and military
factors—to the neglect, especially, of
ideas. As I said, this is a book on the
global effects of the American Revo-
lution that says virtually nothing about
its ideas, and bluntly asserts that most
human beings at the time “did not give
a damn” about them. When discussing
the Túpac Amaru rebellion, Lockwood
notes that the Spanish authorities in
South America saw Enlightenment
ideas as a threat and adds: “It would
have been surprising if Condorcanqui
was not aware of the more radical cur-
rents in European thought.” But he
makes little attempt to integrate the
point into his subsequent analysis.
Would the rebellion have taken the
form it did without the influence of
these radical ideas? Would it have oc-
curred at all?
Unfortunately, when it comes to an-
swering this sort of question, another
limitation of global history comes into
play: that of expertise. Lockwood cites
very little original material. In his sec-
tion on the Túpac Amaru rebellion,
for instance, he makes use of just two
primary sources, both in English trans-
lation. Indeed, this long book does not
cite a single source in a language other
than English. Lockwood has read care-
fully in the English-language second-ary literature. But this literature comes
with its own assumptions and empha-
ses, which are not always easy to eval-
uate without the ability to consult the
original source material. For instance,
Lockwood’s section on Túpac Amaru
relies heavily on a book by Charles F.
Walker, whose characterization of the
rebellion as “anti-colonial” and a pre-
cursor to Latin American indepen-
dence movements was criticized by
J. H. Elliott in these pages.^3Global history remains entirely worth
doing, which means accepting some of
these limitations (although American
history departments should really do a
better job of training their doctoral stu-
dents in foreign languages). But it needs
to be done with the recognition that con-
nections between different parts of the
globe can operate on several distinct lev-
els. Most obviously, people in one place
can exert a direct influence on people in
others through the use of force, through
the diffusion of information and ideas,
through the sale or purchase of goods,
or through migration. But there is also
indirect influence, as events in one re-
gion set off a chain of reactions—often
unexpected—elsewhere. In Lockwood’s
example, the revolution in North Amer-
ica led Spain to go to war with Britain,
as a result of which Spain placed new fis-
cal burdens on its South American pos-
sessions. And there are cases in which
large-scale economic or cultural change
affects different regions simultaneously
and alters the relation between them,
as when the “consumer revolution” of
the eighteenth century expanded mar-
kets in both Europe and the Americas
for a wide range of products, dramati-
cally increasing trade possibilities.
These different types of connection
also tend to occur on different time
scales, for different sorts of reasons.
Direct influence tends to make itself
felt quickly, and most often involves
conscious decisions on the part of in-
dividuals or organizations to deploy
armies, publish books, sell goods, and
so forth. Indirect influence, mean-
while, generally occurs on an interme-
diate time scale, as large organizations
(governments, military forces) adapt to
new circumstances, as with the Spanish
Empire during the American Revolu-
tion. Large-scale economic or cultural
change most often happens in response
to far slower rhythms, as entire societ-
ies evolve, as with the birth of modern
capitalism.
Matthew Lockwood, in keeping with
current trends in global history, looks
above all at the second, intermediate
sort of connection. His book concen-
trates on how European empires re-
acted to the American Revolution, and
the often disastrous effect these reac-
tions had on individual lives. But this
is not the full story. A more complete
account of the American Revolution’s
global impact would take in as many
different types of connections as pos-
sible and track how they influenced
one another as well. History is not just
a matter of the ripples on the surface
of events, but of the currents beneath
them, and the slow, steady tides. QNational Library of Australia /Trove Digital LibraryA portrait of Bennelong, an Aboriginal Australian
who was kidnapped by British colonists in 1789
to help them learn local languages and customs(^3) Charles F. Walker, The Tupac Amaru
Rebellion (Belknap Press/Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2014); J.H. Elliott, “The
Huge, Ignored Uprising in the Andes,”
The New York Review, October 23, 2014.