A groundbreaking global exploration of the ideas that drove the American Revolution, shining a light on the defiance of marginalized peoples all over the world

While the American Revolution is often celebrated as the birth of American "exceptionalism," award-winning historian Sarah M. S. Pearsall argues against the idea that the Founding Fathers had a unique claim on the revolutionary spirit. The thirteen colonies that became the United States, she reminds us, were not even half of the British colonies that existed in the eighteenth century.  In this powerful history, Pearsall uncovers the insurgents, freedom lovers, and dreamers in India, West Africa, North America, Europe, China, and West Indian islands who shaped the nature of American rebellion and nationhood. 

Each chapter plucks a keyword from the Declaration of Independence, finding its spark in a far-flung place. In a club in Edinburgh where women were first invited into philosophical conversations, she explores what the pursuit of happiness meant to women and men of all sorts. She traces how new forms of slavery provoked a novel emphasis on liberty-- which showed up in the New England poetry of Phillis Wheatley as well as in cries of “liberty or death.” On a Kolkata street where Indians protested ruthless taxes, Pearsall finds a critique of oppressive imperial government thatgalvanized Americans in their protests against the tea of the English East India Company. In rural Germany, boy soldiers sent abroad to die for Britain complicate who can lay claim to being “civilized” in a brutal war. And in a Six Nations cornfield, we learn that security for one rising nation can mean grave threats to others. 

In this unexpected and stirring history, Pearsall tells the extraordinary tales of Friends of Liberty from around the world, restoring these individuals to their rightful place in the story of the American Revolution and the nation it created.