On 4 July 2026, the United States marked the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. As part of the celebrations, the U.S. Mint issued commemorative currency.Footnote ¹ These designs include various coinage featuring Liberty, eagles, and scenes from American history, many marked with the commemorative dual date 1776–2026. It is a fitting, if unintentional, illustration of a point the books reviewed here make with considerable force: that the American Revolution was never only a matter of words on parchment or speeches in legislative chambers, but one of objects as well.Footnote ² By examining objects, artists, and imperial crises, these works reveal the Revolution as a process that unfolded through material exchanges and geopolitical upheaval across the Atlantic world. The semiquincentennial coins now jingling in American pockets are only the latest in a long line of material things that have been called upon to do the political work of revolution, and to compress enormous and contested ideals into forms that can be held, worn, displayed, and circulated among people who may construe them quite differently.

The three books under review here arrive at an opportune moment, then, not merely because of the calendar but because they collectively challenge the way most Americans are likely to encounter this anniversary. They press against bounded interpretations, situating the Revolution within a wider Atlantic and imperial world shaped by circulation, conflict, and cultural production and demonstrate how far the field has moved from a narrowly national narrative. The official commemorations tend toward the celebratory, with fireworks on the National Mall in Washington D.C., reenactments at battlefields, patriotic spectacles meant to affirm a shared civic inheritance. What Trevor Burnard and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, Zara Anishanslin, and Ashli White offer instead is a Revolution that is materially grounded, transatlantic in scope, racially fraught, and irreducibly plural in its meanings. Taken together, these works suggest that if we wish to understand what happened in the revolutionary Atlantic world of the late eighteenth century, and what it means to commemorate that era now, we must look far beyond the familiar borders of the thirteen colonies and the canonical cast of Founding Fathers.

Trevor Burnard and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy’s Republic and Empire: Crisis, Revolution, and America’s Early Independence arrives as one of the most sustained and ambitious contributions to the semiquincentennial historiography, and it carries an additional weight that no reader should pass over in silence. Trevor Burnard, one of the most distinguished historians of the Atlantic world of his generation, did not live to see its publication. This is a posthumous work, and the field mourns his loss even as it benefits from this final, formidable contribution. Building on decades of individual scholarship, Burnard’s work on Jamaica and Atlantic slavery, O’Shaughnessy’s on the loyal colonies and British imperial crisis, the book synthesises an imperial perspective on the American Revolution that is at once sweeping in geographical scope and precise in its analytical focus. Their central argument is deceptively simple and yet persistently underappreciated. They contend that the American Revolution was “an imperial civil war as much as a nationalist rebellion” (10) and understanding it requires looking outward from the thirteen colonies toward the full architecture of the British imperial world, ranging from Jamaica, Ireland, Bengal and Senegambia.Footnote ³ Their own evidentiary base is worth specifying here. It is overwhelmingly administrative and epistolary, built from imperial administrative records, colonial correspondence, assembly journals, letters, and published papers. These include the Colonial Office papers at the National Archives, Kew, supplemented by published assembly journals, the Royal Archives at Windsor, and smaller repositories such as the National Library of Wales and the Newport Historical Society. The result is a work that will be indispensable for specialists and genuinely rewarding for any reader willing to follow the authors across the full geography of their argument.

The book is organised around a set of interlocking themes that together constitute what the authors call an “imperial-revolutionary conflict” (2). Chapters 1 and 2 establish the Seven Years’ War as the true pivot of the revolutionary era, a move that places the origins of the Revolution a full decade earlier than most national narratives allow (43–96). The war remade the British Empire, expanding it so dramatically that the British governing elite found themselves managing a globally complex polity for which their administrative traditions and political imaginations were fundamentally unprepared. The costs of that war, and the fiscal crisis it produced, drove the policies of the 1760s that set the Thirteen Colonies on the path to rebellion. Burnard and O’Shaughnessy are admirably clear that this was not a conspiracy but a structural failure. Well-intentioned, if often clumsy, attempts at imperial rationalisation collided with the particular constitutional sensibilities of white Protestant settlers who had grown up understanding themselves as fully British subjects entitled to the political traditions they associated with that identity.

What distinguishes Republic and Empire from many earlier imperial histories of the Revolution is the authors’ sustained attention to the geographical scope of the colonies that did not rebel. This is the book’s most original and consistently rewarding contribution. Rather than treating the West Indies, Canada, and Ireland as peripheral to the main drama unfolding in Boston and Philadelphia, Burnard and O’Shaughnessy place them at the analytical centre. The question they pose is not why the Thirteen Colonies rebelled but why so much of the British Empire did not. As they put it, “what needs to be explained is not why so many white colonists stayed loyal. Loyalty was the default option; what needs to be explained is rebellion” (151). Jamaica, Barbados, and the Leeward Islands faced imperial policies at least as intrusive as those imposed on Massachusetts, and yet their assemblies sent petitions of loyalty rather than delegates to a Continental Congress. Ireland’s Protestant establishment had its own long tradition of constitutional grievance against Westminster, but it contributed troops to the British war effort rather than arms to the Patriot cause. Understanding this asymmetry, the authors argue, is essential to understanding the Revolution itself. The answer the authors develop in Chapter 5, “The Loyal Colonies” (159–84) is not primarily ideological but structural. Colonies that depended on British military protection against enslaved majorities or Catholic populations, that were economically bound to metropolitan markets in ways that made independence unthinkable, and whose elites lacked the particular combination of constitutional tradition and commercial grievance that radicalised New England stayed loyal not from contentment but from calculation.

The sections on Jamaica are among the book’s most important. Burnard and O’Shaughnessy demonstrate that the island’s loyalty was purchased at a significant price: the near-constant presence of British troops, the suppression of the Hanover slave conspiracy of 1776 with characteristic brutality, and the ongoing management of an enslaved majority that outnumbered whites by ratios that made any thought of resistance to Britain existentially terrifying to the planter class. The 1776 Hanover plot, which the authors discuss in detail (6–10), serves as a kind of shadow Declaration of Independence, a reminder that the revolutionary Atlantic was simultaneously a world of racial terror in which enslaved people pursued their own forms of resistance while British and American elites argued about taxation and representation. The plot’s leaders “had meticulously planned what would happen once the plot had succeeded,” with Creoles, Ibos, and Coromantees each assigned “separate kingdoms, each with specific headmen or ethnic kings” (8), a counter-geography of freedom that the book asks its readers to hold in mind alongside Jefferson’s more celebrated declaration. That the plot was discovered by accident, that its suppression required martial law and mass trials, and that it directly coincided with the American Declaration of Independence is treated here as a structural feature of the imperial world the Revolution was reshaping. White Jamaicans could not risk the geopolitical exposure that independence would bring, as the Jamaican Assembly itself acknowledged in its 1774 address, confessing that their colony was “week and feeble” from “the encumbrance of more than two hundred thousand slaves” and could never have “intended resistance to Great Britain” (175). The Atlantic empire of coercion, as the authors describe it in Chapter 5, “The Loyal Colonies” (159–84), held the loyal colonies in place as much through mutual dependency and racial solidarity as through ideological commitment.

The book’s engagement with slavery more broadly is one of its most consequential contributions. Burnard and O’Shaughnessy are unsparing in their insistence that Britain was as fully committed to the institution as any slaveholding Patriot. As they write, “Britain showed little interest after 1763 in developing new settler colonies in North America and concentrated on establishing plantations in the southern Caribbean,” and “slavery in the British Empire survived the American Revolution because the British government wanted it to do so” (116–17). The argument that Patriot slaveholders feared British abolitionism is met here with a sharp rejoinder: the British were “an empire of coercion” (97) whose commitment to “the preservation and expansion of the Atlantic slave trade, slavery, and the plantation system” (182) was essentially total through the revolutionary period. The annual number of enslaved Africans transported on British-flagged ships had risen to over 33,000 by the third quarter of the eighteenth century, representing 43 percent of all Africans forced into the Middle Passage (116), figures that render the notion of a proto-abolitionist British Empire decisively implausible.

The global dimensions of the war itself are handled with comparable authority. The chapters on what the authors call the “War of Empires” trace the entry of France and Spain into the conflict after 1778 and demonstrate persuasively that the British defeat at Yorktown was less the result of military incompetence than of strategic overextension across an empire too large to defend against a coalition of European rivals. Britain discovered that it was fighting “not only in a war for America but in the protection of British imperial possessions in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, Africa, India, and the Channel Islands, as well as in the defence of Britain” (197), and the navy was simply “too small to protect convoys, to combat rebel privateers, to blockade the east coast of America, and to support the British army” across all of these theatres simultaneously (203). Admiral George Rodney’s victory at the Battle of the Saintes in 1782 receives the attention it deserves as a moment that preserved what remained of Britain’s Atlantic empire even as the peace negotiations at Paris confirmed the loss of the thirteen colonies. Burnard and O’Shaughnessy are perceptive about how quickly Britain recovered from what had seemed in 1781 a catastrophic defeat, and their discussion of the second British Empire that emerged from the wreckage of the first, more authoritarian, more explicitly militarised, and increasingly focused on India and the southern Caribbean, is one of the clearest accounts of that transition available in the current literature.

There are moments where the book’s ambition strains against its architecture. The sections on Senegambia (87–9) and India (212–3, 242–4), though necessary to the authors’ argument about the truly global character of British imperialism, feel somewhat compressed beside the richer treatments of the Caribbean and Ireland, and readers unfamiliar with those regions may find the analytical connective tissue thinner than they would like. The discussion of slavery’s relationship to the causes of the Revolution, while carefully argued and attentive to the existing historiography, occasionally pulls in directions not entirely resolved by the book’s framework. The authors are right to insist that “proslavery revolutionaries had little reason to expect that Britain would not continue its wholehearted support of slavery whatever other issues divided Britain from the Thirteen Colonies” (182), but the question of how that shared commitment both bound and divided the empire does not always receive the extended treatment it merits. These are the reservations of a reader who wishes the book were longer rather than evidence of genuine analytical failure.

Republic and Empire is ultimately a work of synthetic ambition that succeeds on its own terms. It insists, with the force of two distinguished careers behind it and the melancholy distinction of being one of Trevor Burnard’s final contributions to a field he shaped profoundly, that the American Revolution can only be understood as an imperial crisis, one whose consequences were felt “from Kingston to Calcutta” and whose causes lie as much in the fiscal wreckage of the Seven Years’ War as in the pamphlet culture of Boston. The book’s closing formulation captures its animating conviction with admirable directness: “Imperialism and revolution went together in the British Atlantic world” (31). It is a fitting and formidable contribution to a commemorative moment that deserves exactly this kind of unflinching, expansive, and genuinely Atlantic perspective, and it stands as a testament to the scholarly vision Trevor Burnard brought to this field across his career.

Where Burnard and O’Shaughnessy work at the level of empire, tracing the geopolitical structures, military calculations, and imperial loyalties that shaped the revolutionary Atlantic from above, Zara Anishanslin’s The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution descends to a different register entirely, asking not how empires held together or fell apart but how individual men and women, brush and chisel in hand, fought the Revolution from within its cultural life. The shift in scale is deliberate and productive. Republic and Empire reminds us that the Revolution was an imperial crisis with consequences stretching from Jamaica to London, and The Painter’s Fire insists that it was also a transatlantic cultural struggle waged by artists as well as soldiers, and that recovering those artists changes what we think patriotism meant. Anishanslin argues that the American Revolution was “fought on both sides of the Atlantic by artists as well as soldiers,” and that “art too could be a weapon” in a conflict shaped by public opinion (2). Together these books, one trained on the macropolitics of empire, the other on the intimate world of artistic production, illuminate complementary dimensions of a revolutionary Atlantic that neither geopolitical nor cultural history alone can fully account for.

Anishanslin’s central intervention is to shift attention away from the canonical trinity of Charles Willson Peale, John Trumbull, and John Singleton Copley, toward three lesser-known artists: the enslaved portrait painter Prince Demah, the wax sculptor and spy Patience Wright, and the British-born painter Robert Edge Pine.Footnote ⁴ Through examining these figures, she argues that American patriots “declared their independence with paint, canvas, wax, and wit as well as muskets and pamphlets” (5). This is a compelling reorientation, and the book’s contribution to the recovery of marginalised artistic voices, particularly Prince Demah, acknowledged here as “America’s first identifiable enslaved portrait painter” (15), represents some of its most valuable work.Footnote ⁵

Anishanslin is at her best reconstructing the world of Demah’s mother Daphny, enslaved by Henry Barnes, and tracing the circumstances by which Demah’s evident talent was recognised, cultivated, and ultimately directed toward a transatlantic network of Patriot culture. Chapter 1, “Daphny’s Son” (13–27), is moving in its reconstruction of an almost entirely undocumented life, and Anishanslin is working in a methodological tradition that scholars will recognise. Marisa J. Fuentes, in Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (2016), has argued compellingly that historians of enslaved people must read fragmentary and biased archives against the grain, pressing sources beyond their intended purposes to recover what institutional and slaveholder records systematically obscured.Footnote ⁶ Anishanslin’s probabilistic reconstructions of Daphny’s and Demah’s inner lives sit within this tradition, and judged by its standards the Demah chapters are largely defensible. Chapter 2, “A Tarred and Feathered Horse” (28–44), focuses on the tarring and feathering of Barnes’s horse, though diverting, reads as an anecdotal detour that, while charming, comes at some cost to narrative momentum.

The treatment of Patience Wright is one of the book’s most vivid sections, and readers who then turn to Ashli White’s Revolutionary Things will find a productive dialogue between the two accounts. Anishanslin’s sustained attention to the performative and embodied dimensions of Wright’s practice, like the famous detail of Wright warming her wax “between her thighs,” working beneath her apron, renders her labour beyond a colourful biography into an index of how female artistic production could simultaneously transgress and exploit the gendered expectations of eighteenth-century public life.Footnote ⁷ Wright’s subsequent career in London as an intelligence gatherer for the Patriot cause, though Anishanslin acknowledges she was not an especially effective spy, illustrates with particular clarity the book’s argument about the expansive geography of Patriot politics. That artists like Wright were denied exhibition at the Royal Academy while still managing to insert themselves into London’s cultural and political networks encapsulates the gendered and institutional constraints that shaped transatlantic Patriot artistry.

Chapter 6 on “Black Boston” and its network of intersecting lives of Prince Demah, Phillis Wheatley, and the wider circle of Black Bostonians with transatlantic connections represents another genuine accomplishment. One of the book’s bolder claims is the suggestion that Demah, rather than Scipio Moorehead, may have been the artist behind the well-known portrait of Wheatley. Argued circumstantially but with evident care, Anishanslin concedes that “although Scipio as the image’s artist cannot be ruled out,” the attribution to Demah is supported by additional internal evidence (149–56). Scholars will debate this attribution, as they should, but raising the question is itself a contribution.Footnote ⁸ The chapter on “Black London” comparing Demah’s experience with that of the Jamaica-born Francis Williams while fascinating is somewhat meandering, as the thin archival record for Demah’s time in England requires considerable speculative bridging, but the comparative framework is intellectually suggestive.

The book’s most significant evidentiary difficulties cluster around its treatment of Robert Edge Pine. Anishanslin introduces Pine as a committed Patriot and presents a striking claim: “What they didn’t know was that Pine was likely of African descent” (8). This assertion rests primarily on visual evidence derived from William Hogarth’s image of Pine’s father, John Pine, a slender foundation for so consequential an affirmation. The author seems aware of the tension, noting in a footnote that her University of Delaware colleague Jennifer Van Horn disagrees with this reading.Footnote ⁹ The acknowledgment of scholarly dissent is welcome but insufficient, given how much the argument of the surrounding chapters depends on Pine’s racial identity as a mediating factor in his relationship with Demah. Even Anishanslin herself concedes that “whether or not Pine was of African descent, then, is almost beside the point” (53), a retreat that reads as a rhetorical escape hatch from a claim the evidence cannot firmly support, particularly after the substantial architecture built around it in the preceding chapters. The suggestion that “if Demah saw Hogarth’s portrait of his new teacher’s father” (52) is marked by the author as speculative, but the conditional framing does considerable work in a chapter that otherwise treats the racial connection as established.

The Pine chapters also raise a question the book does not fully resolve about his motivations for emigrating to America. Pine painted Admiral George Rodney and exhibited the work at the Royal Academy in 1784 celebrating the British naval victory over the French at the Battle of the Saintes, and yet the work did not receive widespread acclaim or recognition. One wonders whether Pine’s subsequent embrace of the American cause reflects principled political commitment, wounded professional pride, or some mixture of the two. Anishanslin marshals correspondence between George William Fairfax and George Washington to document Pine’s Patriot credentials, and the chapter on Pine in Bath, as a centre of pro-American sentiment and American residents, is richly evocative. But the Rodney painting, one of Pine’s significant extant works now in Jamaica, is never discussed.Footnote ¹⁰ The omission is notable both because it complicates the portrait of Pine as an unwavering Patriot and because it represents a substantial surviving piece from an artist whose legacy otherwise largely went up in flames, literally, when his collection burned in 1803. Similarly, the allegorical print “America,” which features prominently in the Bath chapter, is not reproduced as an illustration. For a book so committed to the visual as evidence and argument, the omission is frustrating.

These critical notes should not obscure the book’s considerable achievement. The connecting thread between Franklin’s celebrity, his face appearing on everything from “snuff boxes to vases, handkerchiefs, clocks, rings and medallions” (245–46) across France, and the wider transatlantic circulation of Patriot visual culture is handled with confidence and élan. The argument that figures like Demah, Wright, and Pine “crafted a form of patriotism that faced up to the injustice of slavery and the challenges of a patriarchal society” (7) is made with genuine historical weight. And the book’s closing formulation deserves quotation for its clarity of purpose: “Not all Patriots were white. Not all Patriots were men. Not all Patriots wielded words or swords as their primary weapons. And not all Patriots fought the war in North America” (267).

The Painter’s Fire belongs to an energetic and growing body of scholarship, represented elsewhere in this review by works in material culture and transatlantic studies, that is fundamentally reshaping how we understand the revolutionary Atlantic. It is a work that will generate productive controversy, and it is most valuable precisely where it is most ambitious: in insisting that “the full story of American patriotism is only visible through a transatlantic lens” (5). Specialists will press on its evidentiary claims, but its broader argument that “folding the transatlantic story of these creative Patriots into the wider story of the nation’s origins both complicates and enriches it” (267) will prove difficult to dismiss. It is to the broadest expression of that material and transatlantic argument that Ashli White’s Revolutionary Things now turns, and in doing so, offers what may be the most expansive framework yet for understanding what the revolutionary Atlantic looked, felt, and moved like for the people who lived through it.

Where Anishanslin recovers the individual artists who gave the Revolution its visual and imaginative life, White steps back to the broader world those artists inhabited and the Atlantic networks of objects, consumers, and meanings through which revolutionary politics were experienced. Revolutionary Things: Material Culture and the Politics of the Atlantic World is a study of the lived, tactile dimensions of the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions between 1770 and 1810. Eschewing constitutions, declarations, or military campaigns, White unfolds the story through items ordinary people handled, wore, displayed, and coveted. Ceramics, furniture, military uniforms, cockades, maps, prints, and wax figures are White’s central actors, and her argument on their behalf is a serious one. White argues that objects and everyday practices mediated political ideals rather than simply expressing them through texts or speeches. Revolutions unfolded not only in legislative halls and on battlefields but in parlours, marketplaces, and taverns. Through things, Atlantic populations promoted and perpetually redefined the ideals they were supposedly living through.

Rather than treating commodities as indicators of status, taste, or class identity, White is interested in the political work they performed as they moved through Atlantic systems of production, trade, seizure, display, and use. White’s intervention also deserves to be situated within the broader historiography of material culture and the American Revolution. Earlier studies, most notably T. H. Breen’s The Marketplace of Revolution, demonstrated how consumer politics and participation in an expanding commercial marketplace helped forge a shared revolutionary consciousness.Footnote ¹¹ White accepts the importance of consumption but shifts the analytical focus from consumers and markets to the unstable political lives of objects themselves. In doing so, she extends material culture history beyond consumer politics toward a more fully Atlantic history of objects in motion. Historians, she observes, have long assessed revolutions through battles and declarations, yet objects shaped how people understood these same events “in the thick of the moment” (10). Her study attends to the contexts in which things functioned: who used them, where they circulated, and how their meanings shifted as they passed from hand to hand. The result is deliberately, in her own phrase, “thick with messy complications and thin on definitive arguments” (8), and this methodological candour is one of the book’s genuine strengths. White is consistently alert to the fact that things cannot simply be “read” like texts, as people encountered them through touch, display, performance, and social context, and the same plate or ribbon could mean radically different things depending on who possessed it and where it appeared. The revolutionary Atlantic emerges as a contested world in which meanings were constantly negotiated through material encounter.

White’s evidentiary base is geographically dispersed rather than archivally concentrated. Rather than relying on a single archive or museum collection, she assembles evidence from an array of repositories in Britain, France, and the United States, combining museum objects, manuscript maps, prize papers, manufacturers’ correspondence, newspapers, and visual materials to reconstruct the political lives of revolutionary things. Papers at the National Archives, Kew, correspondence preserved in the Wedgwood Museum, political prints at the British Museum, maps in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and newspapers ranging from the Daily Advertiser in Kingston, Jamaica to papers published in Philadelphia and New York collectively allow her to trace how objects and their meanings circulated across the Atlantic. Significantly, although many of the objects she studies originated in or passed through the Caribbean, the surviving material record is today largely dispersed among metropolitan collections in Britain, France, and the United States. The geography of the archive thus mirrors one of White’s central arguments that revolutionary objects acquired new meanings through movement, conquest, collecting, and imperial circulation.Footnote ¹²

The book is organised around categories of objects and their particular qualities of circulation and use, a structure that reinforces rather than simply illustrates White’s argument. Part I, “What’s Old Is New” (17–96), explores decorative wares, furniture, and the seizure of luxury goods during revolutionary upheaval, and here White immediately complicates the obvious assumptions. Many supposedly revolutionary items were not revolutionary in their ornamentation at all. They became politicised through the circumstances of their production and consumption rather than through explicitly political imagery. British manufacturers such as Josiah Wedgwood and Matthew Boulton figure prominently, and White is especially adept at illuminating the precarious balance such men attempted to strike between novelty, profitability, and political relevance. Often, transfer-printed ceramics bearing revolutionary slogans turned out to represent speculative ventures or bespoke commissions rather than mass-market successes. Wedgwood worried about the disruptive effects of excessive novelty. Consumers, for their part, often preferred decorative versatility over overt political symbolism. Manufacturers were, in White’s formulation, “more often concerned with profit” than ideology (8). Yet she never dismisses the political significance of these goods. A tea set without a single revolutionary slogan could acquire political meaning depending on who owned it, how it was displayed, and where it circulated, and revolutions persistently destabilised older assumptions about who could legitimately possess certain goods at all. As middling consumers, women, free people of colour, and enslaved populations adopted and adapted objects once associated with elite privilege, those objects became sites of genuine contestation.

This argument grows more compelling still in Chapter 2, “Seizing the Status Quo” (58–96). Her discussion of the British capture of St. Eustatius in 1781 is among the book’s most vivid episodes. Admiral George Rodney’s controversial confiscation and auctioning of merchant property reframes plundered luxury goods as revolutionary objects in their own right, and Rodney appears here as an avatar of imperial rapacity, his obsession with plunder a reminder that the revolutionary Atlantic produced opportunists as readily as patriots. White effectively demonstrates how contemporaries interpreted Rodney’s actions at St. Eustatius as evidence of avarice and personal greed, but she does not situate those accusations within Rodney’s well-documented history of financial instability and indebtedness. Greater attention to Rodney’s personal financial circumstances might have complicated her analysis by showing how the pursuit of prize wealth was shaped not only by the structures of imperial warfare and Atlantic commerce but also by the economic pressures facing individual naval commanders.Footnote ¹³ What White demonstrates so effectively, however, is that confiscation did not drain objects of their political significance so much as it transformed and intensified it. Luxury items auctioned after military conquest became entangled in debates about sovereignty, legitimacy, and imperial authority. Their circulation reflected both the opportunities and the contradictions that revolutionary warfare created.

The book’s strongest section is arguably Part II, “Political Appearances,” where White’s Atlantic framework and material methodology align most effectively. Clothing possessed a unique duality, at once intimate and public, personal yet immediately visible. Uniforms therefore offer a rich point of comparison across the French, American, and Haitian Revolutions, because each revolutionary movement depended upon military mobilisation and the visual assertion of authority. White demonstrates that a uniform was a material declaration of loyalty, discipline, and political identity. Drawing on soldiers’ letters, official dispatches, and commentary on dress and appearance, she shows how military clothing connected local revolutionary struggles to larger Atlantic networks of production and exchange, with fabrics, dyes, buttons, and insignia crossing imperial boundaries even as revolutionaries proclaimed their political distinctiveness.Footnote ¹⁴ White’s account of military clothing as one of the few forms of property over which common soldiers, and especially Black soldiers, enslaved or formerly enslaved, could exercise enforceable claims, draws on Laura Edwards’s argument that textiles constituted an alternative property regime for people excluded from full legal personhood, including the enslaved and married women.Footnote ¹⁵ White extends this insight into a martial register. The same textile economy that gave enslaved people and women a toehold of ownership in civilian law also gave Black soldiers a toehold of contractual claim against the armies that clothed them.

Chapter 4, “Dangerous Trifles” (140–80), offers perhaps the clearest illustration of White’s central thesis. Cockades, ribbons, cameos, and medallions possessed a responsiveness that larger or more expensive goods lacked. These items were relatively cheap, quickly produced, immediately visible, and capable of adapting to rapidly shifting political circumstances. They were, as White puts it, “popular in both senses of the word,” circulating widely across class lines and reaching broad segments of Atlantic consumers (142). Her treatment of the cockade is the book’s most vivid case study. White unfolds this object’s varied life across the three revolutions. The identical accessory, worn in different revolutionary spaces and on different bodies, communicated conflicting ideological claims. White insists that this instability is not an interpretive weakness but the central point. Objects revealed the tensions and contradictions embedded within Atlantic revolutionary politics rather than resolving them. Her discussion of Wedgwood’s rapid production of cameos honouring Admiral Augustus Keppel following his court-martial acquittal further illustrates the speed and opportunism of revolutionary material culture (148). Political celebrity operated according to market rhythms. Revolutionary fame had to be monetised quickly, and objects became essential instruments in disseminating and sustaining public recognition.

Part III, “Seeing Revolutions” (181–304), turns to visual culture and representation. White’s chapter on maps is one of the book’s most innovative contributions, arguing that cartography was not a neutral instrument of navigation but a deeply political genre that instructed viewers how to imagine revolutionary space.Footnote ¹⁶ Her reading of visual representations depicting Toussaint Louverture holding a map situates Haiti within the broader Atlantic visual imagination in ways that feel genuinely new (Figure 5.8; 221). Chapter 6, “People in Print” (224–67), examines how portraits and celebrity images enabled viewers across the Atlantic to visualise political actors they would never encounter in person, with these observers assessing Washington or Franklin through pose, clothing, and expression, effectively judging the revolutionary movements with which such figures were associated, a dynamic Anishanslin traces from the production side, showing how artists like Pine and Demah shaped those very images. This chapter also foregrounds one of the book’s most important interventions: the strikingly uneven visual representation of the Haitian Revolution. Compared to its American and French counterparts, relatively few prints depicted Haitian revolutionary leaders or crowds. White argues, convincingly, that this absence was itself politically meaningful. European printmakers frequently rendered Haitian subjects through the lens of white anxieties and racist assumptions, and many avoided depicting Black revolutionary sovereignty altogether. By rendering Haitian revolutionaries visually marginal or simply unseeable, European visual culture attempted to contain the radical implications of the revolution. Silences in the archive become as historically significant as the objects that survive.

Chapter 7, “Terrible Amusements” (268–304), traces the macabre dimensions of revolutionary material culture through wax figures, guillotines, and public displays of death. White examines how violence itself became a form of Atlantic entertainment and political instruction, with waxworks depicting Louis XVI, Marat, and Charlotte Corday circulating into Britain and the United States and transforming revolutionary brutality into consumable spectacle. The treatment of Patience Wright here is particularly resonant read alongside Anishanslin’s account. Where Anishanslin restores Wright as a biographical and political subject, a Patriot spy, a transgressive performer, an agent in her own right, White situates her work within the broader economy of spectacle and commodified violence that gave wax portraiture its Atlantic audience (276–78). The two readings are complementary rather than competing, and together they suggest how much remains to be said about Wright as a figure at the intersection of art, politics, and popular culture.

Throughout all of this, one of the book’s most consequential moves is structural rather than argumentative. White places the Haitian Revolution at the centre of Atlantic material culture studies rather than relegating it to a separate chapter or peripheral treatment. She is candid about the archival difficulties, how fewer objects survive from Haiti, and many extant representations were created by hostile outsiders, but demonstrates that the absence of material evidence can itself reveal structures of racial exclusion and political anxiety. This insistence reshapes the geography of the Age of Revolutions in ways that feel both overdue and entirely earned. If there is a limitation to Revolutionary Things, it is one common to ambitious material culture scholarship generally. The interpretive leap from object to political meaning occasionally asks readers to place considerable trust in the historian’s framework. Yet White is unusually transparent about these evidentiary challenges, and her willingness to engage with fragmentary archives and unstable meanings ultimately strengthens rather than weakens the study.

In her conclusion, White reiterates that objects became politicised through acquisition and context, as well as through ornamentation and affiliation, and that material culture was not only illustrative of political debate but essential to the content of revolutionary politics itself. The claims are compelling, but a reader may wonder why they are being restated here rather than demonstrated one final time. White’s conclusion is more summary than culmination, rehearsing the book’s interventions in terms that will feel familiar by this point, and the brief turn to the “afterlives” of revolutionary things, though evocative, arrives too late and too quickly to carry the weight it promises. That said, the book’s contribution is real. Revolutionary Things demonstrates that revolutions were lived through objects as much as through texts or battles. By recovering the material worlds of the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions together, White reveals an Atlantic world bound not only by ideas and armies but by ribbons, maps, ceramics, uniforms, portraits, and spectacles of violence. In doing so she offers a genuinely new materialist history of the Age of Revolutions, one as attentive to the instability and circulation of things as to the grand ideological claims made in their name.

Taken together, the three books reviewed here, Republic and Empire, The Painter’s Fire, and Revolutionary Things, mark a decisive moment in how historians are approaching the revolutionary Atlantic as the 250th anniversary of American independence arrives. These works contribute to how the history of the revolutionary Atlantic ought to be written at this commemorative moment, and the strands that connect them are worth drawing out explicitly.

The most fundamental common thread is their challenge of methodological nationalism, and to any view of the American Revolution as a self-contained national event. This impulse is hardly new. Atlantic historians from Bernard Bailyn’s generation onward challenged exceptionalist national narratives by situating the Revolution within broader imperial, commercial, and intellectual networks, while scholars such as David Armitage, Eliga Gould, and others further emphasised the international and transnational dimensions of revolutionary change.Footnote ¹⁷ What distinguishes this cluster of books are the different analytical instruments each deploys to make that case, and the way those instruments produce a more comprehensive account of the American Revolution’s transatlantic character than any single approach could achieve. Burnard and O’Shaughnessy work at the level of imperial structure, demonstrating through the loyal colonies, the global war, and the economics of slavery that the Revolution was a crisis of empire before it was the founding of a republic. Anishanslin engages individual lives and transatlantic careers, showing through Prince Demah, Patience Wright, and Robert Edge Pine that Patriot culture was made in London and Bath as readily as in Boston and Philadelphia. White’s intervention comes at the level of objects and their circulation, demonstrating that revolutionary politics were lived through cockades, ceramics, and wax figures moving across the Atlantic in ways that neither national histories nor ideological analyses can fully account for. The scale and method differ, but the fundamental argument is the same. The Revolution was a transatlantic process, not a national event, and recovering that process requires looking beyond the familiar geography of the thirteen colonies.

A second shared thread is the centrality of slavery and race to the revolutionary Atlantic. This is perhaps most explicit in Burnard and O’Shaughnessy, whose analysis of why the loyal colonies did not rebel turns fundamentally on the relationship between plantation slavery and imperial loyalty. The West Indies stayed British because their white minorities could not survive without British troops. In Virginia, Lord Dunmore’s proclamation offering freedom to enslaved people belonging to rebels who joined the British cause intensified Patriot fears about the relationship between slavery and imperial authority. The Hanover plot of 1776 demonstrates that Black Jamaicans pursued their own revolutionary politics simultaneously with, and largely invisible to, the debates between Patriots and Loyalists. Anishanslin’s recovery of Prince Demah insists that Black artists participated in the making of Patriot visual culture, complicating the whiteness of the canonical revolutionary narrative, while her attention to the contradictions of a patriotism proclaimed in the same society that held Demah’s mother in bondage gives the book its most unsettling undercurrent. White’s foregrounding of the Haitian Revolution as an Atlantic counterpart to the American and French experiences pushes that undercurrent to the surface. Together, these three books make it impossible to commemorate 1776 without acknowledging that the revolution was embedded in the racial structures it proclaimed to transcend.

A third thread connects these works through their shared interest in what might be called the infrastructure of revolution, or the networks, markets, material circuits, and cultural economies through which revolutionary ideas and identities actually moved. Burnard and O’Shaughnessy trace those circuits at the level of Atlantic trade, military logistics, and imperial administration; Anishanslin follows them through correspondence networks, artistic commissions, and the transatlantic celebrity of figures like Benjamin Franklin; White reconstructs them through the material life of objects, the manufacturing decisions of Wedgwood and Boulton, the auction houses where seized goods from St. Eustatius changed hands, and the printshops where Keppel’s face was reproduced on cameos within days of his acquittal. What emerges across all three books is a picture of the revolutionary Atlantic as a world of extraordinary material and cultural density, in which the circulation of things, images, people, and information was not incidental to revolutionary politics but constitutive of it.

Finally, all three books share a serious engagement with the limits of their own evidence. Burnard and O’Shaughnessy are frank about the difficulty of recovering the perspectives of the enslaved and Indigenous peoples whose lives were most dramatically shaped by the imperial crisis they describe. Anishanslin shares this struggle in attempting to recover figures like Demah from archives not designed to preserve their experiences. White is unusually candid about the speculative dimensions of material culture interpretation and about the silences in the Haitian archive. This shared methodological honesty is itself a contribution to the field.Footnote ¹⁸ These books also demonstrate three different ways of writing Atlantic history. Burnard and O’Shaughnessy synthesise an imperial archive of states and empires. Anishanslin reconstructs lives from fragmentary personal records scattered across multiple repositories. White follows objects whose own dispersal across museums and collections forms part of the history she tells. The revolutionary Atlantic was a world of profound asymmetries in who left records and who was recorded, and these books are most valuable precisely where they grapple most directly with that asymmetry rather than looking away from it.

As the semiquincentennial unfolds in the United States, the explosion of commemorative objects offers an opportunity to test the kinds of interpretations these books encourage. Museums and historic sites have commissioned artisans to reproduce Revolutionary-era objects using eighteenth-century techniques such as a tailor at Colonial Williamsburg hand-stitching a replica of George Washington’s inauguration coat, a shipwright in Philadelphia rebuilding a Durham boat for the Delaware crossing, and a textile conservator in South Carolina stabilising a rare militia flag.Footnote ¹⁹ One conservator has described working with historical techniques as a way of building trust in the process itself, a sentiment that could almost serve as an unintended commentary on White’s method. Both assume that close attention to how an object was made, handled, and used can bring us closer to understanding what it once meant. Alongside these carefully researched recreations, however, has come a far less curated flood of semiquincentennial merchandise. These flags, bumper stickers, novelty T-shirts, and other souvenirs are sold through Amazon and Walmart alongside the official U.S. Mint coinage mentioned at the beginning of this essay. The appearance of the American Historical Review’s “‘76 Objects” special issue during the semiquincentennial suggests that all three books belong to a broader historiographical moment reckoning with the limits and possibilities of the archive, whether that archive is documentary, as for Burnard and O’Shaughnessy, or material, as for Anishanslin and White. It is here that the insights of White, Anishanslin, and Burnard and O’Shaughnessy become most revealing. Their books insist that revolutionary objects and ideas acquired meaning through circulation and context, with significance that shifted according to who possessed them and how they were understood. Much of today’s mass-market commemorative material, by contrast, presents the Revolution through a comparatively uncomplicated patriotic vocabulary. Where the meaning of an eighteenth-century cockade depended on its wearer and the political moment, the significance of a 250th-anniversary flag pin generally offers far less room for interpretive ambiguity. That contrast may ultimately tell us as much about how Americans commemorate the Revolution in 2026 as these books tell us about how eighteenth-century people experienced it.