TO BEGIN THE WORLD OVER AGAIN
Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund.
Copyright © 2019 Matthew Lockwood
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Lucy
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The World the American Revolution Made
1 The Revolution Comes to Britain
2 Treason, Terror, and Reaction
3 Revolution, Reaction, and Sectarianism in Ireland
4 Horatio Nelson and the Imperial Struggle in Spanish America
5 Revolt and Revolution in the Spanish Empire
6 European Weakness and the Russian Conquest of the Crimea
7 Conflict and Captivity in India
8 The Birth of British India
9 Convict Empire
10 Exiles of Revolution
11 Africa, Abolition, and Empire
12 Opium and Empire
13 The Dawn of the Century of Humiliation
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Portrait of Ignatius Sancho, Thomas Gainsborough (1768). National Gallery of Canada. History and Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo.
2. The Burning of Newgate and Setting the Felons at Liberty by the Mob, anonymous (1780). The Print Collector / Alamy Stock Photo.
3. The Dublin Volunteers on College Green, Francis Wheatley (1779–80). National Gallery of Ireland. Historic Images / Alamy Stock Photo.
4. The Union Club, James Gillray (1801). © National Portrait Gallery, London.
5. Captain Nelson with Fort San Juan, John Francis Rigaud (1781). National Maritime Museum. GL Archive / Alamy Stock Photo.
6. Genealogy of the Incas, Cuzco School (eighteenth century). Museo Pedro de Osma. Mireille Vautier / Alamy Stock Photo.
7. Joseph II, Catherine the Great, and Abdul Hamid Playing Cards, Anonymous (c. 1780). Private Collection. Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo.
8. Gentoo Buildings on the River Hooghly, Thomas Daniell (1788). Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo.
9. Portrait of Dean Mahomet, Thomas Mann Bayness (1810). Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove.
10. The Reception of the Mysorean Hostage Princes by Marquis Cornwallis, Robert Home (1793). National Army Museum.
11. Portrait of Woollarawarre Bennelong, George Charles Jenner and William Waterhouse (pre-1806). State Library of New South Wales.
12. View from the Western Side of Sydney Cove Looking to Bennelong Point, Adolph Jean-Baptiste Bayot (1841). The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo.
13. The Death of Major Pierson, John Singleton Copley (1783). Tate Britain. Lebrecht Music & Arts / Alamy Stock Photo.
14. A View of Freetown on the Sierra Leone River, Thomas Masterman Winterbottom (1803). The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo.
15. The European Factories, Canton, William Daniell (1806). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
16. British Ambassador, George, 1st Earl Macartney, Pays Homage with Bent Knee Before the Qianlong Emperor of China (1797). Everett Collection Historical / Alamy Stock Photo.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wrote my first “book,” a hand-illustrated history of Sparta, for a school assignment when I was ten. With the confident solipsism of youth, I ignored the help I had received from my teacher and my parents and dedicated the book “to myself, because I wrote it.” Thankfully, experience brings a degree of humility. Over the years I have learned that writing and publishing a book would be impossible without the contributions of scores of people, from friends and family to colleagues, archivists, agents, editors, reviewers, designers, and publicists. I have thus acquired more debts in writing this book than my ten-year-old self could have ever imagined.
The book was begun in New Haven, where I was a fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Representative Institutions, and has followed my academic wanderings to the University of Warwick and my present home at the University of Alabama. This book would not have been possible without the institutional support offered by these universities or the rich intellectual environments created and fostered by my colleagues at Yale, Warwick, and Alabama. Special thanks to Keith Wrightson, Steven Smith, Dan Branch, Peter Marshall, Mark Knights, Mark Philip, and Josh Rothman for making each institution an intellectual home.
The book only really took on its present form after a series of sparkling conversations with Bill Hamilton, my agent at A.M. Heath. Bill rescued the kernel of a good idea from the slagheap and helped polish it until it was fit for consumption. His steady hand, deep knowledge, and probing questions have shaped and reshaped this book from its inception. In many ways, this book was forged in Bill’s Socratic crucible.
Julian Loose, my editor at Yale University Press, believed in this book from the start and has expertly guided its construction. His keen judgment, unfailing acuity, and unflagging energy have worked wonders beyond measure. Marika Lysandrou, Rachael Lonsdale, Percie Edgeler, and the anonymous readers at YUP have all helped to transform a chaotic manuscript into a sharper intellectual endeavor and a wonderful physical product. That they have made the oft-frustrating publishing process smooth and enjoyable is a testament to their skill.
My friends and family have spent the last few years suffering through my latest obsession. This book would look very different without the input and support of Keith Wrightson, Richard Huzzey, Justin duRivage, Amanda Behm, Sarah Miller, Jamie Miller, Megan Cherry, Charles Walton, Steve Hindle, Lawrence Cappello, Margaret Peacock, Erik Peterson, John Beeler, my brothers Jack, Kaleb, John, Joey, and Josh, my delightful in-laws Caitlin, Emma, Eric, Donald, and Wendy, and my parents, Jack and Nancy.
As ever, Lucy Kaufman deserves my perpetual and eternal gratitude. An intellectual whirlwind with the patience of a saint, Lucy read and edited the entire manuscript, line by line, word by word, more than once, expertly hacking away at its initial monstrosity until a book at last emerged. She did not simply listen to my incessant droning, but constantly, brilliantly, engaged with my ideas and my writing. Her insight, vision, and forbearance are of truly Herculean proportions. This book, and I myself, would be nothing without her. This book, and all past and future books, is for her.
INTRODUCTION
THE WORLD THE AMERICAN
REVOLUTION MADE
We have it in our power to begin the world over again.
—Thomas Paine, Common Sense
Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny; they have only shifted it to another shoulder.
—George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
In 1779, after a month-long journey across Europe, through the Mediterranean Sea, across the Sinai Desert, and down the Red Sea, after weeks on a crowded ship in the storm-tossed Indian Ocean, Eliza Fay arrived on the sun-kissed shore of Mala
bar in south India. The tropical tranquility that greeted Eliza and her husband Anthony after their trying ordeal was, however, a mirage. With war spreading from the Atlantic to the subcontinent, the British embassy had fled, leaving Eliza and Anthony at the mercy of William Ayers, an English convict and one-time soldier now employed by the ferociously anti-British Sultan of Mysore. As Ayers escorted the pair to prison, Eliza Fay must have wondered just how she had come to such a pass. In the years to come, tens of thousands of captives and refugees—Muslims, Hindus, and Indian Christians as well as countless British, French, and Indian soldiers—would ask themselves similar questions. The answer lay not in Malabar, but in an unexpected source: the American Revolution.
On May 18, 1781, Micaela Bastidas stood in the square in Cuzco in a pool of her own sons’ blood defiantly awaiting her fate. Her rebellion against the Spanish Empire had failed and so now, as her husband Tupac Amaru II, co-leader of the uprising, looked on in horror, it was her turn to face the executioner. At least she would be spared the awful sight of what the Spanish had planned for her husband. After her death he would be pulled apart by horses, then quartered and beheaded, his limbs sent across Peru as symbols of Spanish vengeance. With her death, and the death of her husband, an indigenous rebellion would end, but a spark had been lit and a pair of martyrs had been born. Their fates too were rooted in the struggle for American independence.
In 1810, Britain’s first Indian restaurant, the Hindoostane Coffee House, opened its doors in George Street in London. Entering the establishment, patrons might well have thought themselves transported to the Orient itself. Reclining on bamboo-cane sofas, guests gazed upon walls covered with rich paintings of Indian landscapes and scenes of Indian life. As the aroma of curries and seasoned rice wafted in from the kitchen, the scent of Indian herbs and spices mixing with the fragrant tobacco of the ornate hookahs lining the floor of the smoking room, ‘India gentlemen’, Britons who had lived and worked in India, must have harkened back to their previous lives half a world away.
With Britain’s ever-expanding empire and its growing involvement in the affairs of the subcontinent, it was perhaps no surprise that such an establishment might grace the crowded streets of the imperial capital. Its proprietor, however, was no British nabob newly returned from plundering the crumbling empires of the east, no British soldier hoping to recreate the sights, smells, and tastes of his formative years, no British merchant hoping to expand his interests from shipping spices to cooking with them. Instead, as an advertisement in The Times made clear, the restaurant was owned and operated by Dean Mahomet, a Muslim Bengali soldier from Patna and his Irish Protestant wife. The more literary among the advertisement’s readers may well have recognized the proprietor’s name. Nearly two decades earlier, the very same Dean Mahomet had been involved in another first, becoming the first Indian to publish in English when his Travels were released in 1793. How did Mahomet come to find himself opening England’s first curry house, publishing the first English-language book by an Indian, and marrying the daughter of an Irish Protestant? Once more the War for American Independence had intervened.1
Nearly two centuries later, on a cold January day in 1988, two men stood in solemn ceremony over a grave in the churchyard of St. John’s church in Eltham in south-east London. One of the men standing before the headstone was the parish priest, whose predecessor had conducted the burial service nearly two hundred years before. The other had come much further to stand in the winter chill contemplating events now centuries old. His name was Burnum Burnum, an athlete, actor, and activist of Wurundjeri people, and he had made the pilgrimage from his native Australia to retrieve a body and right an injustice. A few days earlier, to mark the bicentennial of Britain’s first colonization of Australia, he had planted a flag on the white cliffs of Dover and issued a proclamation full of biting, tragic humor. In mocking parallel of British actions in 1788, Burnum Burnum announced that he was claiming Britain on behalf of Aboriginal people and that though Britons would henceforth see Aboriginal figures on their money and stamps “to signify our sovereignty over this Domain,” he could promise that “we do not intend to souvenir, pickle, and preserve the heads of 2,000 of your people or to publically display the skeletal remains of Your Royal Highness” as the British themselves had done.2
But now, as he stood before the resting place of a fellow native Australian, his righteous humor was gone, replaced by sadness tinged with indignation. On the simple headstone were inscribed the barest of facts about the young man it memorialized: “In memory of Yemmerawanyea a Native of New South Wales who died the 18th of May 1794 in the 19th year of his age.” Newspapers at the time gave little more detail. The Morning Post reported that “one of the two natives of Botany Bay, who came over with Governor Phillip, is dead: his companion pines much for his loss.” It was Burnum Burnum and many of his countrymen’s hope that two hundred years after the British first began their penal colony at Botany Bay, the body of Yemmerrawannie might at last be returned to his native shores. But there would be no symbolic homecoming for Yemmerrawannie, no peaceful rest, no symbolic righting of colonial wrongs, for unbeknownst to priest and activist alike, by 1988 there were no bones beneath the headstone in Eltham churchyard. Yemmerrawannie’s body had been lost. How had this young man of the Eora people come to be buried in a churchyard in suburban London, a symbol of Britain’s imperial sins? Here too, the roots of this modern tragedy lay not just in the Pacific, or even in London, but in the aftershocks of the American Revolution.3
The American Revolution is blessed with some of the most dramatic, most soul-searing stories and images in all of history: Paul Revere riding through the night-black streets of Massachusetts to warn his fellow Americans that the British were coming to seize their arms; The Sons of Liberty creeping aboard a British ship disguised as Native Americans to cast its cargo of over-taxed tea into Boston Harbor; George Washington and his ragged band of Continental soldiers freezing, but surviving, at Valley Forge; General Cornwallis and his defeated British army playing “The World Turned Upside Down” as they surrendered to Washington’s victorious army at Yorktown. These tales of daring deeds and noble sacrifice have a tendency to crowd the mind, overshadowing other less well-known stories and images of the Revolutionary War beyond America’s shores.
Most previous accounts of the American Revolution have by and large restricted their attention to the thirteen colonies that declared independence from Great Britain in 1776. In so doing they have limited their focus to the stone that caused the splash rather than the waves and ripples that radiated out from its epicenter, the quick, sharp, shock rather than the enduring reverberations. This stubbornly national focus has largely obscured the wider ramifications of America’s struggle for independence. Stories like those of Micaela Bastidas, Dean Mahomet, and Yemmerrawannie provide a unique window onto a world at war and the new world that war created. These stories are no less important to the story of the American Revolution, no less a part of its history, but they are largely forgotten, disconnected from the more stirring, glorious, triumphant tales of Washington and Jefferson, Bunker Hill and Yorktown.
As compelling as these heroic stories are, limiting our focus to the familiar, even comforting, tales of the American Revolution not only skews our understanding of what was in fact a global crisis, but also molds our understanding of America’s national history in dangerous ways. The idea of American exceptionalism, of the United States as a uniquely moral and chosen nation, in many ways began with the revolution itself and has been forged and strengthened by the telling and retelling of the familiar stories of that mythic birth. The portrayal of the American Revolution as a noble movement that created an incomparably just, enlightened society has long been the cornerstone of such ideas. But while the popular belief in America’s unique status has at times provided a welcome sense of unity, it has had pernicious effects as well. In an increasingly globalized world, a stubborn adherence to the idea of American exceptionalism has helped create a na
rrow, jingoistic worldview and a selfish pursuit of American interests above all else. In order to undermine such a solipsistic isolationism in foreign affairs we must complicate and challenge the lazy idea of America’s exceptionalism, and to do this we must complicate the story of its foundational moment.
In recent years historians like Gary Nash, Carol Berkin, Holger Hoock, and Alan Taylor have begun to undermine the simplistic narrative of the American Revolution, highlighting forgotten stories of women, Native Americans, and African Americans, and exposing the contradictions and hypocrisies of our founding. Though such accounts provide an important corrective, they do not entirely upend the myths of America’s conception. They still allow us to believe that though the founding fathers were flawed and imperfect in many ways, and though the blessings of the revolution were not shared equally among the inhabitants of North America, the goals and ideals of the revolution remain an example of America at its best, as it sought to be. Indeed, even those accounts that aim to explain the wider, international story of the American Revolution have largely failed to adequately complicate the story of American exceptionalism.4
From Justin du Rivage and Nick Bunker we have learned that the American Revolution had global, imperial causes, that the outbreak of war in North America had as much to do with developments in Europe and Asia as it did with events in the American colonies. C.A. Bayly, P.J. Marshall, and Maya Jasanoff have similarly expanded our understanding of the consequences of the war for the British Empire. Despite these pathbreaking contributions, however, most accounts of the revolution’s international impact have still dealt solely with its place in the wider Age of Revolutions. Important works by R.R. Palmer, Lester Langley, Janet Polasky, and Jonathan Israel have certainly broadened our horizons and helped to situate the American Revolution within a shared Atlantic context, but by focusing exclusively on the ideological facets of the American struggle for independence and that struggle’s role in shaping similar revolutions in France, Poland, Haiti, and South America, such histories have not only neglected much of the world, but have often reinforced and reified the belief in America’s unique legacy as the first swelling of a global democratic wave.5
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