Beyond 1776

Historical lore surrounding figures such as Andrzej Kościuszko, Baron von Steuben, and the Marquis de Lafayette has long lent an international tincture to the American Revolution. But individual biography often fails to capture the global networks that made this colonial rebellion an event with effects that have extended across oceans and hemispheres. In ten chapters plus an introduction, Beyond 1776 describes how the influence of the Revolution waxed and waned as it spread to places as far-flung as the Scottish Highlands and Australian penal colonies. If the schoolroom phrase about a “shot heard round the world” has some truth to it, the contributors here stipulate that worldwide echoes varied according to local conditions. Chapters on Dutch radicals and Irish landholding elites, for instance, show how people on the ground gleaned very different lessons from the spirit of democratic upheaval in the air. It would be a disservice to represent the essays in this edited collection as a set of passport stamps showing that the significance of the Revolution has traveled to the antipodes as well as the metropole. Instead, the volume's most intellectually engaging feature is the way it illuminates the networks, supply chains, and linguistic circuits that provided the material integuments for experiments in and reactions to republican thinking. In his chapter on the proliferation of American revolutionary ideas in German-language texts, Leonard Von Morzé examines how transatlantic book distribution embodied “free circulation itself as a revolutionary ideal” (p. 30). Turning to the epistolary routes that Benjamin Franklin exploited, Maria O'Malley offers a fine reading of the “shadow sites” that made St. Eustatius in the Dutch Caribbean an important source for munitions and other contraband (p. 174). Looking at the thousands of piculs of tea exported from China, Jeng-Guo Chen tracks how notions of independence flickered intermittently from the decline of the Qing dynasty to the birth of the Republic of China. Attention to these and other networks helps anchor chapters, such as Ed Simon's essay on political theology, speculative fiction, and the poet William Blake, that are attuned to figurative language as another sort of linkage

Antipodes · Colonialism · Democracy · Geography · German · Irish · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Philosophy