Freedom Round the Globe
A World History of the American Revolution
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected May 26, 2026
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
In a groundbreaking global exploration of the ideas that drove the American Revolution, a prize-winning historian shines a light on the defiance of marginalized peoples all over the world.
In her powerful new history of the American Revolution, Sarah M. S. Pearsall argues that the American Founding Fathers did not have 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 her sparkling and original Freedom Round the Globe, 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.
In each fresh and compelling chapter of Freedom Round the Globe, Pearsall plucks a keyword from the Declaration of Independence—security, happiness, respect-- finding its spark in a far-flung place. In an Edinburgh club 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 novel forms of slavery provoked a new use of the word liberty in Connecticut petitions as well as in cries of “liberty or death.” On a Kolkata street where Indians protested relentless taxes, Pearsall finds a critique of oppressive imperial government that galvanized Americans in their protests and parties 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.
In telling the extraordinary tales of Friends of Liberty protesting tyranny around the world, Pearsall restores these individuals and movements to their rightful place in the vital story of the American Revolution and the nation it created. The result is a stirring and surprising revisioning of our history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
