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.

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 places the Anglo-American events of 1776 in the context of developments in France and the French Caribbean. It argues that both French efforts to exploit the imperial crisis and the American patriots’ tenuous intercolonial unity were inseparable from the rapid, brutal expansion of slavery and the economic power generated by unfree labor in the French Caribbean. Although elided in the period's texts, the French Empire's enslaved population generated racial politics that influenced developments in the United States and Great Britain into the nineteenth century.

In recent years the idea that the assemblage of territories accumulated by the king of England at the end of the thirteenth century should be considered as “the first English empire” has found favor among historians of the medieval British and Irish Isles. However, from the late fourteenth century onward the English monarchy’s imperial project began to come under considerable strain, facing intensifying resistance from native populations in Ireland and Wales. Irish kings, in particular, proved to be extremely effective in this regard, winning back considerable amounts of territory and influence in Ireland. Traditionally, studies of the Irish recovery have focused on its cultural and political aspects, paying little attention to the financial requirements associated with the cost of making war against the English. By drawing on a range of Gaelic, Anglo-Irish, and English sources this article will argue that it was the integration of Irish rulers and their subjects into English commercial networks emanating from Anglo-Irish port cities such as Limerick and Waterford, and their connections to English commercial centers such as Bristol that enabled Irish kings to challenge the political and military supremacy enjoyed by the king of England and his ministers in Ireland since the thirteenth century.