Review: A revolutionary history
"The Surrender of Lord Cornwallis," an oil painting by John Trumbull. The United States government commissioned Trumbull to paint patriotic paintings, including this piece, for them in 1817.Books about the American Revolution are endlessly fascinating—and fascinatingly endless. In To Begin the World Over Again, Matthew Lockwood presents an entirely fresh thesis, one well summed up in the subtitle: How the American Revolution Devastated the Globe.
Americans brought up to believe that our founding was a blessing for posterity, with its promise of liberty and freedom for all, will find the very idea that the American Revolution was a negative event discombobulating. And yet Lockwood presents the revolution not through a narrow prism but through a wide-angle lens, showing how the events of the 1770s had reverberations far beyond American shores. Or, as he puts it, “the most urgent lesson taught by America’s founding moment” was the fact that “Americans’ actions have, and always had, unforeseen, unimagined global consequences.”
The American Revolution was a political, social and moral earthquake. While the tremors began in places like Boston, Philadelphia and New York, the aftershocks reached far beyond, to be felt in places like England, Ireland, Spain, Russia, China, India, Africa and Australia. On the surface, it had immediate effects upon statesmen and empires, for it created threats to their prestige and power, sometimes resulting in regressive measures and culminating with repression and retrenchment—the opposite of what the revolution intended.
The American Revolution was a political, social and moral earthquake.
But the lasting ramifications were felt by the people who inhabited other lands, the people who lacked the means to achieve power and influence or just the wherewithal to achieve a better life. Lockwood, while acknowledging the great and powerful figures like George Washington and King George III, focuses on the ordinary people by telling their stories and how they reacted to the events around them.
There are so many arrestingly told stories that it would be unfair to mention just a few of them; they all deserve to be recounted and discussed. But Lockwood vividly recounts how certain individuals played seminal roles in the affairs of their nations, from peasants, philosophers, criminals and publicans to aspiring politicians. Through their actions, policies on criminal justice, taxation and political representation came to prominence as never before. Once populations got a whiff of that democratic air, there was no turning back. Nations and empires felt the shiver of that breeze, and the ramifications are felt to this day.
Readers with preconceived notions about the founding of the United States will find cause to revise their views and perhaps see our history—indeed world history—in a new light.
This article also appeared in print, under the headline “Revolutionary History ,” in the June 22, 2020, issue.
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