Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution

This sprawling, immersive account from historian Pearsall (Atlantic Families) explores “the effect of the world on the American Revolution” rather than the “too often” emphasized opposite. The book opens with a reflection on colonial militiamen’s powder horns, which were typically carved with “European symbols” (such as patterns derived from women’s embroidery) and Native American and African motifs (in one case, “a Maori war party canoe copied from a British magazine”). Much like the decorations on the humble powder horn, the colonists’ “demands for liberty emerged out of a wider world,” Pearsall argues. Though these “global claims of freedom... had roots in classical and biblical worlds,” they took on “novel resonance in a period of accelerating rates... of slavery.” In a roving narrative that ranges from European power politics to resistance movements of Indigenous and enslaved peoples, Pearsall spotlights many fascinating figures and milieus, among them women of the Scottish enlightenment who debated whether the pursuit of happiness “could be a radical act of equality”; the Indigenous leader Pontiac, who led a 1763 rebellion against the British in the Great Lakes region; the period’s many enslaved and indentured people convicted of murdering their masters; German peasants indentured to the British military; and American investors who looked to Guangzhou, China, for investments to shore up their fledgling nation’s economy. The result is a remarkably clarifying picture of the revolutionary spirit that swept the world in the 1770s. (May)