Perhaps the least commented upon feature of the dystopian Trump banners adorning parts of Washington D.C. is the red, white, and blue number—“250”—emblazoned just beneath the president’s Windsor-knotted tie. These ribbon-shaped digits are the emblem of the “America 250” campaign, a public-private enterprise established by Congress in 2016 to spearhead the celebration of the 250th birthday of the United States in 2026. The banners are thus part of what will likely be a long contest to shape (and profit from) the narrative around this round-number anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution. This will not be a product of the government alone, of course—we haven’t arrived at that dystopia just yet—but will involve numerous editorials, books, documentaries, and public events.

Richard Bell’s The American Revolution and the Fate of the World is one such entrant in this field, an entertaining history of the Revolution that encourages readers to see it as an event defined by “interdependence” as much as independence, a “creation story” not just for the United States but for “our modern world.” More successful in making this first point than the second, the book nevertheless provides—almost inadvertently—a good reminder of what made the Revolution distinctive, and why that distinctiveness deserves renewed attention at a time when some might otherwise use the memory of an anti-monarchial revolt to crown a new king. 

A professor of history at the University of Maryland, Bell wants to challenge what he calls the “tightly blinkered” perspective on the Revolution found in “most basic textbook histories.” This narrative, he suggests, focuses too much on the “simple story of rebels versus redcoats,” obscuring the conflict’s true “transnational scope and complexity.” He proposes instead an account that includes not just the Founding Fathers and their Continental Congresses but also “Black American freedom seekers … Chinese tea-pickers, Mohawk warriors, Sierra Leonian separatists … [and] Asian rulers.”

The American Revolution, he argues, cannot be understood as merely an “American” event. Bell does not reject the traditional story of the Revolution—what we might call the Schoolhouse Rock tale of American “Patriots” shouting, “No more kings.” But, he argues, it must be seen as a global upheaval, one that began because British trade policy in China triggered a civil war in North America, launching a global war for empire that reached from the Caribbean to India, leading slaves to take arms against their masters and tens of thousands to flee across continents and oceans.

Bell starts with the traditional sequence of revolutionary-era events—the Boston Tea Party, the Battles of Lexington and Concord, etc.—but he shows how they fit into Britain’s tea trade with China. Seeking to maintain commercial advantages in China and India, London wanted the colonists to buy only British-shipped tea (and not the cheaper, smuggled Dutch tea they preferred). The colonists resented the implication that their economic choices should be subservient to Britain’s. Trade, money, and tea prices were the initial sticking point, not the existence of the monarchy. And by shifting the focus in this way, Bell reveals how the American........

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