Pincus: American Revolution was part of ‘global imperial civil war’

JACKSON, Tenn. — The American Revolution was about more than independence from Britain, argued Stephen Pincus, Thomas E. Donnelly Professor of British History at the University of Chicago, to a crowd of high school and college students at Union University Oct. 19.

“North America was part of a British imperial system,” Pincus said. “Any story about American independence, [that] doesn’t take into account that it was part of this broader empire, and [that] British administrators had to make calculations [that] thought about the empire as a whole, is going to be lacking.”

Pincus was the featured speaker for the 29th annual Carls-Schwerdfeger History Lectures, giving two lectures in the Carl Grant Events Center. The evening lecture was entitled “The South Asian Origins of Independence.” By examining the Revolution alongside events in India, Pincus challenged the audience to take on a non-traditional view of the American Revolution by studying it not in isolation but looking at it with broader influences in mind.

Pincus started the lecture with a question.

“The puzzle that I want to sort of begin with is: why did it take so long from the surrender at Yorktown to the end of the Revolutionary War, and to the United States finally becoming, officially, the United States of America among the nations of the earth?” Pincus asked.

Pincus explained that the gap between the surrender at Yorktown in 1781 and the official peace treaty signing in 1783 is easier to understand when the war is viewed in a broader global context.

“We completely misunderstood what the American Revolutionary War was about,” Pincus said. “It was not a colonial revolt against Britain. It wasn’t a war that [was] fought in the first instance for American independence. It was instead part of a global imperial civil war …”

Pincus said that while the revolution was occurring, there were battlefronts all over the world. The conflicts in South Asia played an important role in shaping Britain’s decisions throughout the war. While American conflict is often studied as a struggle between Britain and its colonies, he argued that British leaders also had to consider the empire’s other territories and ongoing military challenges.

Pincus is the author of four books, including “Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650-1668” and “The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders’ Case for an Activist Government.” He has also contributed to three other books and recently completed a manuscript for Yale University Press on “The Global British Empire ca. 1650-1784.”