Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it within a larger British world context.

Debates surrounding mandated instruction in the origin of the United States have reemerged in recent years. This article discusses teaching the Declaration of Independence as imperial history. It evaluates how mandates like the one in my state—Nevada—to teach “devotion to American institutions and ideals” through exploring “the origin and history” of Constitutional government have fared in the actual classroom. It considers the importance of embracing both the complexity and nuance of the story of the founding of the United States in today's divisive political climate.

Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context.

As American Patriots declared their independence from Great Britain, there was one British politician whom they continued to celebrate as a hero: William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. In 1776, Chatham’s face adorned statues, portraits, swords, and even waxworks throughout the new American states. By Chatham’s death in 1778, however, Americans had cooled appreciably on the British “Patriot” leader. Why did William Pitt remain an American hero for so long? And why, after 1776, did his reputation fall so quickly? This article argues that the issue of American independence caused a political split in a once-powerful transatlantic Patriot alliance. While American Patriots viewed independence as their paramount goal, British Patriots such as Chatham could not conceive of a British Empire that did not include North America. The British Patriots’ attempts to balance imperial sovereignty and civil liberty proved unworkable, and ultimately, they chose empire. The death of William Pitt represented the end of British Patriotism’s core political ideal: to create a British Empire that was both expansive and free.

Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context.

On 28 July 1776, the German-born Philadelphia merchant Jonas Phillips enclosed a printed copy of the Declaration of Independence with a letter written in Yiddish to another Jewish merchant, Gumpel Sampson, in Europe. The letter was intercepted and today sits on display in the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, with a curatorial note that it was the first copy of the Declaration known to have been sent out of the country. Within a transatlantic economic framework, the outbreak of a war that presented new business opportunities became a field for self-making to a degree that would not have been possible for Phillips within Britain itself. This article traces Phillips’s involvement in the Revolution, his growing confidence that he and other Jews belonged in the new polity, and the assertion of his political voice to rid his state of religious tests for office.

Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context.

This article considers the significance of the US Declaration of Independence in the western hemisphere. It argues first that the influence of the Declaration was limited in an era we call “the age of imperial fracture.” Second, it contends that the former colonies that achieved independence, including the United States, did not experience a sharp break with the past. Instead, they grappled with the legacies of colonialism and imperial ambitions. Throughout the western hemisphere, independence triggered new waves of contestation and conflict and gave rise to new forms of imperialism.

Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context.

This article reinterprets 1776 not as an American event alone but as an imperial crisis that reshaped the terms of sovereignty across the British world. Focusing on Malta, Mysore, and Kedah-Penang, it argues that subordinate polities facing strategic vulnerability responded to the loss of North America by bargaining for recognized status within an unequal imperial order, converting material dependence into acknowledged standing through treaties, charters, and ceremonies. The concept of “subordinate sovereignty” is developed to capture arrangements in which rulers retained meaningful internal authority while accepting externally managed external relations. In so doing, the argument shows how practices later associated with nineteenth‑century protectorates and indirect rule were already being improvised at the empire’s margins in the decades around 1776, not as a designed policy from London but as an emergent outcome of peripheral agency and imperial necessity.

Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context.

This article links political struggle within the Church of Scotland, itself rooted in the economic dislocations brought about by British Empire from 1707, to a wider transatlantic dissenting tradition that was closely engaged with the cause of the American colonies, as well as with the radical reform of Britain's parliamentary government. Scottish dissenters both inside and outside Scotland itself helped to forge the intellectual and political conditions for the American Revolution, a revolution they did not seek to confine to the North American colonies alone.

Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context.

North America and India have often appeared as distinct, sequential chapters in the history of the British Empire. This article builds on the scholarship of P. J. Marshall and others to demonstrate the myriad ways in which these two far-flung places were bound together in British imperial plans and projects during the years leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Importantly, even before the American Revolutionary War broke out, the possible loss of North America had already begun to inform how some Britons argued about the importance of the British presence in India. In thinking of North America and India together before 1776, such Britons regularly undermined the frameworks of the Atlantic and Indian oceans and the “First” and “Second British Empires” that have either implicitly or explicitly shaped so much twentieth- and twenty-first century scholarship.

Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context.

This article examines how the American Revolution fundamentally reshaped the British press and information networks. Public hunger for news about the American crisis and conflict accelerated newspaper circulation, profitability, and competition, with metropolitan and provincial newspapers increasingly bypassing government channels to report events more quickly. The results were more robust and intricate national and global information networks, as well as a press that was more commercially driven and independent—ultimately enabling British readers to scrutinize the empire's actions with the same rigor they applied to domestic politics.

Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context.

This article examines the controversy surrounding the lightning strike at the Royal Gunpowder Magazine at Purfleet-on-Thames in 1777 to explore how political conflict shaped scientific authority during the American Revolution. Although Benjamin Franklin’s theory of electricity and pointed lightning conductors had achieved broad acceptance within the Royal Society, the Purfleet incident enabled his long-standing rival, Benjamin Wilson, to revive discredited criticisms by appealing to patriotic sentiment and royal patronage rather than experimental evidence. Drawing on correspondence, Royal Society records, published pamphlets, and committee reports, this article demonstrates that the scientific consensus remained firmly in Franklin’s favor even as political opposition to the American cause reshaped public perceptions and institutional priorities. The Purfleet controversy reveals how political allegiance could influence scientific institutions, redirect research agendas, and transform the public presentation of science without overturning established scientific knowledge.

Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context.

This article considers the challenge of staging an exhibition to mark the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in a gallery with a strong English regional identity. After setting out the context for the exhibition, the article goes on to highlight the connections between Nottinghamshire and the United States, particularly the polarizing effect of the campaign for independence on Nottingham politics. The article highlights several examples that illustrate the intersection between regional and global events, demonstrating how this material was used to engage local audiences in relevant and interesting ways.

Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context. This article outlines the methodologies informing and content of my current book project, “Called it Macaroni”: A British Queer History of the American Revolution, as I presented them in public-facing lectures for Tallahassee Pridefest in 2025 and 2026. This project examines a range of individuals, from the lowest to the highest social ranks on both sides of the American Revolution, who expressed feelings of same-sex desire or trans gender. Also, more importantly, it explores the ideologies that underpinned the American Revolution, and highlights the ways in which they contain the basis for queer and trans inclusion, as well as supporting critiques of injustice around race, class, gender, and citizenship more broadly. I argue for the value of starting the story of the American Revolution in Britain in the seventeenth century and ask whether doing so, and placing aspirational ideals at the heart of the narrative, can provide a framework for a simultaneously optimistic, historically accurate, and broadly inclusive narrative that does not misrepresent any group's struggle for the sake of forging a consensus.

Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context.

This article examines 1776 through the eyes of tribal and forest-based societies in the Bengal Presidency, including the Chuar, Paharia, Santhal, Ho, and Bhumij. It argues that the North American imperial crisis of 1762–83 drove increased fiscal reliance on Asian revenues and a renewed East India Company incursion into Bengal’s forested and tribal areas. Intensified revenue extraction and infiltration into self-governing tribal areas restructured traditional subsistence systems and fell disproportionately on women, whose forest-based labor was rendered invisible in colonial revenue accounting.

Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context.

The American Revolution transformed the political landscape of the British Atlantic far more rapidly than it transformed the social world that had long bound the empire’s regions together. Before 1776, merchants, planters, and imperial officials had built enduring ties of commerce, kinship, and property spanning North America, the Caribbean, and Britain. Drawing on the lives and correspondence of Gouverneur Morris, the Manning-Vaughan-Laurens family, and Richard Oswald, this article argues that inherited patterns of social life and interpersonal ties remained integral to the experience of cross-colonial elites, despite the constitutional rupture of independence.