Near the start of the film Jurassic Park, Jeff Goldblum's Dr. Ian Malcolm famously explains the butterfly effect: “A butterfly can flap its wings in Peking, and in Central Park, you get rain instead of sunshine.” In To Begin the World Over Again, Mathew Lockwood demonstrates that, like that Chinese butterfly, the American Revolution had knock-on effects all over the world.

Everyone knows, for example, that the loss of America as a repository for convicts encouraged the British government to establish New South Wales. But what happened during the interim between these two events? Some convicts went into the army of the East India Company, but the incarcerated percentage of London's population rose to 3 percent – triple the rate in the infamously carceral modern United States (28, 251). Why did Russia grab Crimea in 1783 (on that occasion from the Ottoman Empire)? Because “the bloodshed and turmoil of the American Revolution that had engulfed Europe … provided the cover needed for Catherine to seize her trophy” (219).

Based on his catalogue of events influenced by the American Revolution, Lockwood hazards two important generalizations. The first is that the American War of Independence was bad for several Old World empires and good for one. “For the old empires of Spain, China, the Ottomans, and the Dutch,” the American Revolution “spelt the curtain call from the grandest stage of world powers” (9). In India, too, “once vibrant, expansionist powers like Mysore and the Maratha Empire were fatally undermined by the American Revolution” (8). Many of these far-flung victims of the American Revolution were rivals of Great Britain, and their loss was its gain, leading Lockwood to the arresting conclusion that Britain “won the American Revolution” (9).

Lockwood's other principal conclusion is even more provocative: as his subtitle indicates, he thinks “the American Revolution devastated the globe.” In particular, “A revolution in favor of liberty in one corner of the map initiated a reactionary revolution in the wider world” (7). To Begin the World Over Again thus must be counted among the growing library of works that assess the net impact of the American Revolution as negative, only in this case with the entire world in the balance.

Several of Lockwood's causation chains dissolve under scrutiny. He opens the book with an English couple reaching the port of Malabar in the kingdom of Mysore on the southwestern coast of India in 1779 and being arrested. Why? “The answer lay not in Malabar, but in an unexpected source: the American Revolution.” It is true that both Mysore and thirteen of Britain's American colonies were at war with the empire in 1779 – but for Mysore, this was only the continuation of a conflict that long pre-dated the Declaration of Independence. Lockwood's introduction also mentions the Tupac Amaru II revolt in the Andes in 1781 (2), an event that specialists do not describe as an effect of the American Revolution. What they do say is that in the wake of the Seven Years War, the Spanish and British empires both tried to crack down on their American colonists, in each case with explosive results. And even instances where Lockwood's causation claims are more plausible, his insistence on his monocausal explanation paints an inaccurate picture of tyrants, rebels, and everyone in between as merely the American Revolution's marionettes.

It subtracts nothing from the value of Lockwood's provocative book to say he could have written it about the sixteenth-century Dutch revolt from Spain, England's Glorious Revolution, or any number of other turning points. In fact, I can think of at least three modern events whose immediate global effects seem just as bad and even more wide-ranging than the American War of Independence: the Seven Years War, the French Revolution, and the Versailles Treaty of 1920.

Lockwood's narrative includes excessive alliteration, a veritable feast of clichés, and, worst of all, too much repetition. Such an ambitious volume needed to be long, but not this long. Yet none of these foibles prevents Lockwood's prose from being clear and exciting. I enjoyed reading To Begin the World Over Again, and more tellingly, so did my students.