World Wide Reb

THE REVOLUTION WAS NEVER just between Redcoats and rebels; it was a world war in all but name, UMD history Professor Richard Bell argues in his newest book, “The American Revolution and the Fate of the World.”

Bell, who grew up in London where discussion of the war was taboo, presents a panorama of nations and individuals navigating the cataclysm: a Native American woman holding together an American alliance in Niagara; a Philadelphia debutante who becomes a loyalist in London; a Boston schoolteacher who joins a privateering mission and ends up in a British-run detention site across the Atlantic.

In a conversation with Terp, he recounts a conflict that disrupted trade, restructured penal systems, stirred famine, toppled empires and shaped the world as we know it.

The only way the Continental Army could win was by diverting British forces into military campaigns across the world. They sent their best man, Benjamin Franklin, to Europe in 1776 to meet a team of Britain’s foes—France, Spain, the Dutch Republic and others—who formed a grand alliance to take on British forces in places like the Caribbean and India, where George Washington could not. By the war’s final stages, 70% of Britain’s 100,000 troops were bogged down outside North America.

The 18th century was a world of empires, and some drew lessons from Britain’s loss, prompting them to increase oversight over their subjects. We see a giant crackdown on colonial insurgency in the Spanish Empire, British Empire, Ireland, India and Sierra Leone. At the same time, the American rebellion is an inspiration to colonial rights-seekers, so you see uprisings in those same countries along with Haiti, France and South America during what soon becomes known as the Age of Revolutions.

John Moseley was a Black man enslaved in Virginia when the war breaks out in 1775. He throws in his lot with the king’s cause, hoping Britain will guarantee his liberty when its mighty army wins. Well, it loses, and he becomes a refugee in London, where he’s caught committing a crime of poverty. Before the revolution, Britain banished felons to hard labor in Maryland and Virginia, but that ceased after the war. So Moseley boarded the very first prison transport ship to Botany Bay, Australia—the first American to set foot on that continent.

He called me, but I told him I couldn’t talk right now, I gotta talk to Terp instead.