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This weekend marks 250 years since the Second Continental Congress, representing the 13 American colonies, assembled in Philadelphia to sign the Declaration of Independence. The country had already been at war for more than a year and would continue its armed struggle against Britain for another seven. But on July 4 1776, the United States of America was born.

The ideas that found expression in the Declaration were not new. Tensions between the British crown and its American colonies had been percolating for years. And the philosophical ideas behind America’s revolutionary fervour were also finding expression in Europe, particularly in France and Britain.

As Tom Cutterham, a professor of American history at the University of Birmingham, writes, the sort of ideas that inspired America’s revolutionary thinkers had for some years “been closely tied to questions about corruption, oligarchy and executive tyranny in Britain itself”. He points to the likes of Thomas Paine, John Wilkes, Granville Sharp and Catharine Macaulay who were writing passionate arguments against British despotism.

Macaulay argued that the authority of a monarch rests on a contract between ruler and ruled which, if broken by the monarch, is void. It’s an idea which is said to have inspired Benjamin Franklin’s contribution to the Declaration of Independence. Cutterham tells the stories of the Britons who supported America’s struggle to throw off its colonial masters.

Read more: America at 250: the Britons who supported the War of Independence

This weekend’s........

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