America’s fight for independence reverberated around the world in significant ways, which University of Maryland history professor Richard Bell explores in his engaging new book, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World. We talked to him about what he found.
I always thought of the Revolutionary War as kind of a landlord-tenant dispute. I never realized it had such an effect on the larger world.
There’s no more important story in American mythology than the idea that the American Revolution is rebels versus redcoats, that all Americans were united under the patriot banner, fighting off a foreign invasion force. That’s an oversimplification. Plenty of Americans were not so sure about independence. And then when we go digging, we find out that many other groups of people, even other nations, were major players, too. It turns out that our founding fight is actually an example of America’s longstanding global entanglements.
America’s founding fight was never solely “America first” or “America alone.” It was always “America among.” We can even see that in Britain: There was a fiery debate going on in Britain about whether the government’s American war was worth all the British blood and British treasure being poured in to win it. We see King George III nurse some doubts. And we see a vibrant opposition in Parliament. There was a vibrant debate happening among ordinary British people. Even working-class folks who usually volunteered to fight Britain’s global wars were very hesitant.
You’re a naturalized US citizen. Do you think your outsider’s perspective helped you ask questions we might not think of?
I’ve been lucky. Growing up in Britain, I didn’t learn anything about American history or the Revolution. So I was a total blank slate by the time I got to college and graduate school and learned from some excellent historians about just how complex and wide-ranging and global it was. But I’ve been living in the US now for 25 years, so I’m well aware of the educational offerings they’ve had at the K–12 level and how our curriculums haven’t always done a good job pushing back against the mythology of rebels and redcoats.
You write about the stories of some lesser-known people who were involved in the war. What’s one that particularly captivated you?
There’s no more remarkable story than Harry Washington, who was enslaved at Mount Vernon by George Washington, runs away to join the British army during the war, ends up evacuating first to Nova Scotia and then eventually to be resettled in a supposedly post-racist paradise, the new colony of Sierra Leone. It proves not to be a post-racist paradise by any stretch of the imagination, leaving Harry and his fellow exiles from revolutionary America to launch their own campaign for independence from the British Empire. That’s a global story.
This article appears in the November 2025 issue of Washingtonian.
Andrew Beaujon joined Washingtonian in late 2014. He was previously with the Poynter Institute, TBD.com, and Washington City Paper. He lives in Del Ray.
