"To Begin The World Over Again-How the American Revolution" Topic

…Devastated the Globe.

"Growing up as an American, you're bound to be all-but-suffused with triumphalist histories of the American Revolution. Those histories might have a tough of the Hegelian to them, asserting that the Revolutionary War was part of the inevitable development of freedom worldwide. More academic histories have focused more critically on the war itself and what it meant for American society, such as the fact that a war allegedly fought for freedom also involved the ongoing oppression of slaves. The war's global dimensions have similarly been discussed, dating back at this point to Samuel Flagg Bemis' The Diplomacy of the American Revolution.

Matthew Lockwood's To Begin The World Over Again: How the American Revolution Devastated the Globe (Yale University Press, 2019) pushes this analysis farther, looking at the global consequences of the American Revolution. Lockwood shows that the war, whatever its debatable effects for the residents of the thirteen colonies, unleashed a whole host of catastrophes for people elsewhere. Those living under British rule found their relationship with their government dramatically revised. British distraction allowed some European powers to undertake conquests of their own, while the United Kingdom in turn sought new commercial opportunities. Meanwhile, the effects of the war spilled into India and South America, setting off a new wave of global unrest…"
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Amicalement
Armand

Chicken/egg. Rousseau. Tom Paine. It's a distortion to think the AWI started anything. It simply advanced ideas already current elsewhere.

The world was ripe for change and I'd argue the French Revolution that was brewing well before the American thing, is far more significant….or "culpable" if you want to give the OP thesis oxygen.

(smile)

Amicalement
Armand

I am currently trying to dig my way through it. So far I would say it is not well written if the goal was to appeal to a mass audience.