Independent empires

Viewing the British empire through an American lens provides an intriguing alternative perspective on the 'Land of the Free', says DAVID ARMITAGE

- 

"America is lost! Must we fall beneath the blow? Or have we resources that may repair the mischiefs?" These are the opening words of a memo in the hand of George III in the wake of the 1783 Peace of Paris, which ended the American Revolutionary War. The king copied them from a contemporary reflection by the agricultural writer Arthur Young, but they captured his own distress and reflected his broad vision of the crisis. As the king totted up the dominions he had left, he feared for the future. “The East and West Indies,” he wrote, “are conceived to be the great commercial supports of the empire” - yet, so distant from Britain, each depended precariously on the nation’s navy.

George had to see his empire whole, so put the American Revolution in a global context. If historians for the next two centuries largely failed to follow him, it was because the revolution mostly interested Americans. Understandably, they wanted to learn where their own national history began. The story of the empire they had left belonged to others.

The king got it right, and Americans missed a trick. At least, so British imperial historians Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy and the late Trevor Burnard argue in their new book. “The American Revolution was an imperial event as much as it was an event in American history,” they claim, adding that it was “Britain's imperial problem as much as the birth of the American republic.”