Global Revolutions

Abstract

How the Old World Ended: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution, 1500-1800. By Jonathan Scott. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. 392. $35.00 hardcover, $16.99 Kindle).To Begin the World Over Again: How the American Revolution Devastated the Globe. By Matthew Lockwood. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. 506. $30.00 hardcover, $15.71 Kindle).WHEN future historians write the history of our own time, a major theme, it seems safe to say, will be the awareness that we live in a moment of disruption on a planetary scale. Exactly what the historians of tomorrow make of that fact is hard to say. As Jonathan Scott and Matthew Lockwood argue in the books under review here, two things seems clear. The disruptions of the twenty-first century did not begin yesterday, and the North American colonies that became the United States are an important part of the story.As the long title of How the Old World Ended suggests, Scott's focus is the early modern Netherlands and England, with North America playing an increasingly important role as the eighteenth century progressed. It was here, Scott maintains, in what he calls the “water world” of the North Sea and its Atlantic periphery, that Europeans first liberated themselves from the “production and demographic limits of pre-industrial agriculture” (3, 37). Key to this transformation was a shared Anglo-Dutch culture of commercial, agricultural, and industrial innovation, which allowed the two western European powers to feed populations far in excess of what their own farmers had been able to produce during the Middle Ages. Access to water mattered too, giving Dutch and English merchants, producers, and consumers the ability to buy and sell goods in markets elsewhere in Europe and, eventually, across the Atlantic and around the world. By the sixteenth century, the Dutch had already escaped the “Malthusian trap of finite resources,” and the English were not far behind (37).In the second of the book's three parts, Scott turns to the Calvinist-dominated Protestantism that England, Scotland, and the Netherlands all had in common. From the late sixteenth century, that shared culture opened the way for innovators in each country to exchange ideas in politics, theology, science, agriculture, manufacturing, banking, and commerce, sometimes doing so competitively but often acting in concert. During the second half of the seventeenth century, entanglements between the two powers triggered the Anglo-Dutch wars of 1652–1654, 1665–1667, and 1672–1674. As Scott correctly notes, all three were in important respects civil wars. Of even greater moment, in what Scott labels the Anglo-Dutch Revolution of 1649–1702, the same ties produced two political unions: the federated Anglo-Dutch Republic of 1649 to 1653 and the personal union that accompanied the accession of the Dutch Stadtholder William of Orange and his wife Mary Stuart to the thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1689.This Anglo-Dutch moment led to the consolidation of what, in the book's third and final section, Scott terms Britain's “maritime monarchy” (215). As its place in his tripartite structure suggests, Scott sees the eighteenth-century British Empire as an Anglo-Dutch creation, like its French and Spanish rivals a maritime dominion but with a cultural, economic, and political dynamism that the Bourbon powers lacked. Feeding that dynamism were Britain's North American and West Indian colonies, whose growing wealth and population played an enormously important role—thanks in no small part to the Navigation Laws first enacted during the Anglo-Dutch wars of the previous century—in the industrialization of England and Scotland. By the time of the American Revolution, the British Empire had become an “English-speaking empire of customers” (283). Although doomsayers predicted that the loss of the thirteen American colonies would be the empire's undoing, the commercial relations forged by more than a century of “supply and demand [were] sufficiently robust to survive independence” (275). Rather than destroying the British factory system and the global commercial dominance that was the result, the American Revolution ensured its success.As he makes his way through this narrative, Scott frequently notes the “eye-watering human cost of early modern European empires,” directing readers to Africa and the Americas in particular (161). Scott is also cognizant of industrialization's ecological and environmental toll (28). Ultimately, however, the story that he tells is one of individual liberation and empowerment. In the conclusion, he has this to say of the Industrial Revolution: Without it we would still be peasant farmers living in a village rather than inhabitants of a city. Our lives would still be governed by the seasonal agricultural calendar, and the constantly evolving daily cycle of light and darkness, rather than the never-ending flow of hourly work time, glow of electricity, and electronic devices which [sic] never sleep, accompanied by aircraft which fly us from one season to another (300).Scott does not ask his readers, even rhetorically, which world they would rather inhabit, the old or the new. But there seems to be little doubt how he thinks most would answer.If Scott makes the case for modernity, one way to read Matthew Lockwood's To Begin the World Over Again is as an extended brief against it, especially modernity as enshrined in the democratic principles of the American Revolution. Although Britain does not appear in the title, Lockwood's chief concern is the British reaction after the entry of France and Spain turned the Revolutionary War into a global struggle for imperial dominance and, many Britons feared, survival. The result, according to the book's title, “devastated the globe.” In thirteen chapters, Lockwood surveys the effects of this devastation, from the Gordon Riots that literally devastated London during the spring of 1780 to Ireland, Honduras, Peru, the Crimean Peninsula, Sierra Leone, India, Australia, and China. For readers versed in British and imperial history, some parts of this story will be familiar, others not so much. Regardless of the details, the outcome was the same. Wherever the effects of the American Revolution were felt, writes Lockwood, the ensuing turmoil inaugurated “an authoritarian counter-revolution that expanded Britain's empire while fatally weakening France and Spain” (7).Having written about Britain's counter-revolution myself, I am sympathetic with what Lockwood wants to do.1 There are, however, problems with attributing most of the agency for that reaction to the American Revolution. Although debunking the American founding has a long and distinguished pedigree, most such accounts focus on the costs that the revolution imposed in North America and its immediate vicinity. By expanding the revolution's costs to include actions that Britain took in India, Australia, and Asia, Lockwood asks his readers to accept a much more capacious litany of woe—one where a “revolution in favor of liberty in one corner of the map initiated a reactionary revolution in the wider world, inflicting new suffering and new restraints on people for whom freedom and independence were not available” (7). Because the American Revolution in the quoted passage is the subject, the thing that activates the British reaction in the predicate, the revolution is also what produces the suffering on the part of people who were neither free nor independent in the participle that follows. Britain, of course, was the power that inflicted most of the suffering—and much of the suffering that it inflicted occurred on the opposite side of the world—but the sentence's structure casts the British as supporting actors, who played the roles that they did because the revolution's American and pro-American dramatis personae gave them no choice. Is that really “how” the American Revolution devastated the globe?Similar questions of agency and causation arise from Lockwood's discussion of the Tupac Amaru revolt in Spanish Peru and the Russian annexation of Crimea. There is no question that both crises were devastating. The Tupac Amaru revolt claimed an estimated 100,000 Indigenous and 40,000 Creole lives (177). In neither case, however, were Britain and America directly involved, nor did the two crises have anything to do with the principles of the American Revolution—or for that matter with each other. Tupac Amaru's main grievance involved fiscal burdens imposed by the Spanish Bourbon reforms of the 1760s and 1770s, while the Crimean conquest of 1783 was one episode in the centuries-long rivalry between the Russian and Ottoman empires for control of the Black Sea. While Lockwood is aware of both sets of facts, what matters is that the two crises occurred during the War of American Independence. “Once more,” he writes of Crimea, “the American Revolution had played an important role” (232).What Lockwood hopes to achieve with this sprawling analysis is not entirely clear. In the introduction, he says that one of his goals is to move past the “idea of American exceptionalism, of the United States as a uniquely moral and chosen nation,” yet the American Revolution is at the center of his book's argument and title (4). The result is not so much a repudiation of the idea as a reworking, one that replaces exceptional triumph with exceptional catastrophe while keeping Americans in the leading roles and with most of the agency. In the book's final chapter, “The Dawn of the Century of Humiliation,” Lockwood retells the familiar story of Britain's forced opening of China during the 1780s and 1790s. Although Americans were sometimes present, notably during the 1784 Lady Hughes affair, when merchants from the East India Company and Imperial officials at Canton nearly came to blows after a Company ship accidentally killed a Chinese sailor during an artillery salute, the British were the ones who took the initiative and played the dominant role in shaping the outcome. Undaunted, Lockwood sees the Chinese humiliation that followed the Lady Hughes affair as yet another indication of how “the effects of the American Revolution … rippled out from the Atlantic, aiding the expansion of the British Empire, and undermining its imperial rivals” (480).When a book so obviously misses the mark, it is tempting to look for ways to improve it. One suggestion would be to replace the “devastation” in the title with something along the lines of “fragmentation” or “fracture.” During the half century after the revolution, the period covered by Lockwood's book, the United States lacked the capacity to project its power much beyond its own borders. Its democratic example extended farther, but there too the political challenge to Britain and Europe's other anciens régimes paled in comparison to the threat posed a decade later by the revolution in France. To say that the American Revolution caused devastation in either area on a global scale strains credibility. What the revolution did do was to fragment the world's leading maritime power, with the independent United States claiming perhaps a third of Britain's prewar merchant marine. The response of Britain and Europe's other colonial powers to that fragmentation most certainly did have global consequences, some of which, though by no means all—for example, the rise of antislavery in Britain and the United States—were devastating. Although not the book that Lockwood's title suggests, the apparent near death and subsequent recovery of the British Empire is closer to the storyline in the book that he has written.Ironically, despite his positive take on modernity, Jonathan Scott has the stronger case for the American Revolution as a globally devastating event. Whereas it would take nearly a century for the United States to rival and eventually surpass Britain as a world power, Scott's American empire of consumers played a role in the industrialization of Britain that was both immediate and direct. The origins of that pairing of supply and demand lay in the decades before the revolution, but the transatlantic relationship reached its zenith during the global Anglo-American “settler revolution” that began, according to James Belich, with the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783 and lasted until the Second World War.2 It does not require much imagination to see a straightforward connection between the Industrial Revolution; the intensification of African slavery and the slave trade, both in the United States and elsewhere in the Americas; the dispossession of Indigenous peoples on a global scale; and the climate crisis of our own time.If there is one point on which Scott and Lockwood concur, it is that the world that the American Revolution created was indeed new. That new world is also, they would surely agree, the world that we inhabit today. What will future historians make of that fact? Will they emphasize the cultures of invention that loom so large in the final section of Scott's book, and will they say that industrial capitalism's restless spirit of innovation, which was what brought humanity to the brink of disaster, was also what pulled us back? Or will the costs, environmental as well as human, seem like the only things worth talking about? The answer, unfortunately, is terrifyingly difficult to predict. Only time will tell.