One of the stranger things about living abroad is discovering which parts of your worldview you never realized were local.
Since moving to London, I have found myself paying greater attention to the assumptions embedded in the stories Americans tell about themselves: where we place the American Revolution in world history, how we understand America’s contemporaneous relationship to the wider world, even how we think about race. A few weeks ago, those questions resurfaced for me while attending the launch of my mentor Sarah Pearsall’s new book, Freedom Round the Globe: How the World Made the American Revolution (2026, Doubleday). By placing the Revolution within a broader global context, Pearsall similarly challenges readers to reconsider assumptions that can seem self-evident when America remains at the center of the story.
Indeed, the book traces the Revolution across Jamaica, France, India, and China, revealing how an interconnected world — and the diverse people who inhabited it — shaped, and were in turn shaped by, the troubled birth of a new nation. Pearsall follows Bengali farmers, Odawa mothers, Coromantee sons, Chinese merchants, and many others whose lives intersected with the age of revolution. Each chapter not only spotlights a place around the globe but is organized around key principles from the Declaration of Independence like consent, happiness, liberty, independence, or even equality.
In doing so, Pearsall destabilizes two assumptions at once. First, she challenges the notion that the American Revolution was a uniquely American story. Second, she complicates the meanings of the very words Americans invoke when they celebrate and remember the Revolution. Freedom, liberty, and equality were never universal concepts, nor did they mean the same thing to everyone who encountered them.
The book’s opening vignette captures this exact tension: a 1777 powder horn engraved with a banner reading “LIBERTY,” suspended from a bird’s beak, belonging to Prince Simbo, a Black soldier in the Continental Army (shown on the cover art pictured above). Little else is known about him. Whether he himself was enslaved remains unclear, but he lived in a world where slavery existed in every American colony and where many Black people were denied the right to bear arms. He may have had enslaved family members, friends, or loved ones. Yet he carried a musket and this powder horn through the Revolutionary War, including the brutal winter at Valley Forge. The horn, then, invited an uncomfortable question: what did liberty mean to Prince Simbo?
Liberty, as a word, had become ubiquitous among Revolutionary soldiers – many horns produced between 1775-7, like his, featured it. Yet liberty could not have meant precisely the same thing to Simbo as it did to many of the white men around him. For Simbo, freedom was not merely a political principle. It was inseparable from race and slavery. It was both immediate and elusive: a condition denied to countless Black people around him and an aspiration that hovered just out of reach. Flying above him like the bird engraved on his powder horn, liberty was a promise that had not yet landed.
Scenes like these grace the pages of Freedom Round the Globe. Written for a general audience, the book invites readers to reconsider not only the Revolution itself but the categories through which we understand it. If words like liberty and equality were experienced differently across lines of race, geography, and status, then perhaps the Revolution was never quite the singular story Americans often imagine.
As an American, it is easy for me to say how the Revolution’s transcendent importance persists. My cousins attended a Valley Forge High School; the Revolution was the starting point for most of my history classes in grade school; I even lived near (the original) Washington Monument in Baltimore. In the news, I watch MAGA politicians glorify the Revolution as we celebrate its 250th anniversary. On TikTok, I see jokes about the spirit of 1776 and the eagle’s call. Sometimes it feels as though, when there is absolutely nothing else, the Revolution functions as one of the few stories Americans still agree to tell about themselves. But Pearsall offers this familiar event from an unfamiliar perspective. In doing so, she encourages readers to wonder whether, in the broader age of revolutions, America simply did not matter as much as we would like to think it did.
Indeed, to eighteenth-century Europeans, North America was essentially wilderness. Although the continent was theoretically divided into British, French, Spanish, or even Dutch territory, this was a cartographic fiction in practice. The land was mostly Indigenous, and even in the populous British colonies of Virginia and Pennsylvania, their borders grew blurry on the western frontiers, where indistinct borders were protected by just a few forts.
For the British Crown, these frontiers were smudges on the edge of a map. More important was protecting trade and strategic interests against French competition. So when French colonists built forts in the contested Ohio Valley, King George III dispatched a young American-born officer named George Washington to challenge them.
The conflict that followed is known in the United States as the French and Indian War. Yet this was only one theatre of a much larger struggle. The fighting in North America formed part of the Seven Years’ War, a conflict that stretched across Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Atlantic world.
In traditional American narratives, the Seven Years’ War exhausted British finances, prompted higher taxes, and set colonists on the path to revolution. There is truth in that account. Resistance to measures like the Stamp Act of 1765 sparked unrest throughout Britain’s colonies. Yet the story often remains narrowly continental. Americans remember protests in Boston while overlooking resistance elsewhere in the empire. The Stamp Act, for example, fell heavily on Britain’s Caribbean colonies. In St. Kitts, a crowd assaulted a tax collector and threatened to kill him if he refused to resign. When he fled to nearby Nevis, colonists pursued him there, burning houses along the way.
In fact, Britain had twenty-six American colonies, and only about half participated in what became the American Revolution. Quebec remained loyal. So did Jamaica, Britain’s wealthiest colony. East and West Florida, though they would later be absorbed into the United States, did not join the rebellion either. Seen from this perspective, the Revolution begins to look less inevitable and less exceptional.
In both Revolutionary rhetoric and popular memory, the Founders are portrayed as reluctant revolutionaries, patriots who had endured so many abuses that they were forced to seek freedom. But taken from a more global perspective, as Pearsall argues, it becomes harder to see the colonists as uniquely burdened, aggrieved, or even particularly liberty-loving.
Their taxes were comparatively light. The historian Robin Einhorn has observed that colonial taxation was generally lower, more progressive, and less aggressively enforced than taxation elsewhere. American colonists also avoided the devastating famines that periodically struck places such as Ireland and Bengal. Pearsall describes one famine in Bengal that killed at least a million people and perhaps many more.
Even the war itself was profoundly international. The greatest American hero after Washington was arguably the Marquis de Lafayette, who arrived in 1777, barely speaking English. Victory at Yorktown in 1781 depended not only on Washington but on Comte de Rochambeau’s French soldiers and Comte de Grasse’s French ships. And about a quarter of the British Army troops, meanwhile, were actually German – the Hessians.
When I first began helping Pearsall as a research assistant on this project, much of this perspective was still new to me. In one book she’d ask me to read and annotate about British foreign policy in the eighteenth century, the American Revolution took up but two pages of the 400-page text, and was merely described as the “War for American Independence” (the Seven Years’ War, not labeled in that text once as the ‘French and Indian War,’ took up a far larger sum).
So hearing Pearsall discuss the book in London made me reflect on what it means to adopt a global perspective myself, particularly as an American historian living abroad. In a broad sense, my interests in Macaulay are actually quite similar to Pearsall’s questions. Ultimately, we both want to make sense of how ideas and histories have been shaped, adapted, and re-imagined across time and space. For me, studying Macaulay means examining how the texts, material culture, and political traditions of ancient Greece and Rome were adopted in the eighteenth-century world. What began as an interest in early American receptions of the Classics has gradually become a transatlantic study of the communities that allowed those ideas to circulate and flourish.
But these questions extend far beyond scholarship. One of the most powerful aspects of Pearsall’s book is the way it demonstrates that concepts we often assume to be self-evident are historically contingent, taking on different meanings in different places for different people. Living abroad has led me to think about another category in much the same way: race. If Freedom Round the Globe asks us to reconsider what liberty means to different people in different places, my experience in London has forced me to confront how arbitrary racial categories can be, as well.
In the United States, where race structures so much of our history, politics, and social life, it is easy to assume that our racial categories are universal. Yet living in London has made me acutely conscious of the difference between nationality and race. Here, I am usually read as American before anything else. In the United States, I suspect my race would register first.
To think through this difference more critically, I often find myself returning to classicist Mathura Umachandran’s essay, “More Than a Common Tongue: Dividing Race and Classics Across the Atlantic,” a particularly resonant analysis of British and American racecraft. Her central thesis is a deceptively simple one: race is not universal. Instead, it takes different forms in different places. To assume otherwise is to grant racial categories an artificial permanence. To historicize race, to make it a phenomenon construed in particular forms to particular cultures, is to take the first step in unpicking its cruel and dehumanizing logic.
Her point becomes clearest when we examine categories that many people assume are self-explanatory. Terms that appear straightforward in one context often shift dramatically in another. “Asian,” for example, commonly refers to East Asian identities in the United States but is more likely to refer to South Asian identities in Britain. Categories that feel natural in one society can become confusing or even unintelligible in another. As Umachandran illustrates:
“Asian — Other,” the box I choose to check when I identify on any given administrative form, presents an interesting instance of the Gordian knot of race because of its shifting referent between US and UK contexts; ditto “Indian.” (In the US, Asian refers to East Asia primarily, whereas in the UK, it refers to South Asia. Confusingly, “Indian” in the US is a clunky term that hides foundational genocidal violence, where in UK “Indian” is primarily understood as South Asian nation, though might be used as a catch-all for “vaguely brown”).
Even as a white American, I have found myself unexpectedly uncertain when confronted with British racial classifications. On official forms, ticking “White” is often only the beginning. I may be asked whether I am English, Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish, Irish, or Irish Traveller, or “Other White.” Occasionally, there is a broader “European” category. Yet none of these descriptors quite captures my experience. When prompted to explain what “Other” means, I find myself hesitating. White American?
Race, then, is no portable analytical tool. It is shaped by local histories, colonial legacies, migration patterns, and national myths. European racial hierarchies emerge from different histories than American ones. Britain’s relationship to race cannot simply be mapped onto the United States, nor vice versa.
Living in London has made this impossible to ignore. In Cleveland, conversations about race and belonging are inseparable from the legacies of slavery, segregation, and settler colonialism. In London, a city where so many residents were born outside of the country, questions of identity often revolve around migration, nationality, and ethnicity instead. Indeed, England is no one-to-one translation of America. Its understandings of race, religion, nationality, and class emerge from different histories. Looking across the Atlantic can expose how provincial our assumptions have been all along.
That, ultimately, is why Pearsall’s book feels so timely.
The tendency toward American exceptionalism extends beyond the Revolution itself. It is the belief that our particular history is so singular, so important, or so self-evident that it can stand in for everyone else’s. The danger of American exceptionalism, then, is not merely that it exaggerates the significance of the United States. It is that it encourages us to mistake American experiences for universal ones. Yet just as Pearsall demonstrates that the Revolution cannot be understood solely through the lens of the thirteen colonies, we should be cautious about treating American experiences as templates for the rest of the world.
So when we think about the exceptional, perhaps we should follow Pearsall’s lead and look outward. We should ask how seemingly local stories connect to global histories. We should interrogate the categories we inherit rather than assume they are universal. And we should remain attentive to the people who disappear when nations place themselves at the center of the narrative.
I do not have clear answers for how to build a more inclusive, anti-racist, or decolonized future. But Pearsall’s book suggests a place to begin. By viewing the American Revolution from a global perspective, one that decenters the exceptional and foregrounds the interconnected, we become better equipped not only to think more critically about the past but to recognize the historical contingency of the categories through which we understand the present.