American Enterprise Institute

The American Revolution and America’s Role in the World

The Revolution and Its Precedents Notes

  1. Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776 (Houghton Mifflin, 1997); and Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs 70, no. 1 (1990–91): 23–33, https://users.metu.edu.tr/utuba/Krauthammer.pdf. Francis Fukuyama introduced the concept with an influential parallel take in Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press, 1992). Robert Kagan makes a case against McDougall’s position in Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation: America’s Place in the World from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (Knopf, 2006).
  2. The Works and Correspondence of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, ed. Charles William et al., 2nd ed. (London, 1852), 2:453.
  3. David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Harvard University Press, 2007), 13–15.
  4. Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics 1763–1848 (Clarendon Press, 1994), 38–39.
  5. G. C. Gibbs, “The Dutch Revolt and the American Revolution,” in Royal and Republican Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Memory of Ragnhild Hatton, ed. Robert Oresko and G. C. Gibbs (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
  6. There is a standard account in Geoffrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt (Cornell University Press, 1977).
  7. E. H. Kossman and A. F. Mellink, eds., Texts Concerning the Revolt of the Netherlands (Cambridge University Press, 1974), 216–28.
  8. Stephen E. Lucas, “The Plakkaat van Verlatinge: A Neglected Model for the American Declaration of Independence,” in Connecting Cultures: The Netherlands in Five Centuries of Transatlantic Exchange, ed. Rosemarijn Hoefte and Johanna C. Kardux (VU University Press, 1994), 199–200.
  9. Parker, The Dutch Revolt, 239–40, 265–66, 270. Feltham’s point resonated in 18th-century Britain and the United States amid fear of losing power or political virtue. Ironically, the Dutch Republic’s decline from great power to complacent prosperity became a cautionary tale for John Adams. See also Dennis C. Rasmussen, Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders (Princeton University Press, 2021).
  10. Lucas, “The Plakkaat van Verlatinge,” 200–2; and G. J. Schutte, “‘A Subject of Admiration and Encomium’: The History of the Dutch Republic as Interpreted by Non-Dutch Authors in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century,” in Clio’s Mirror: Historiography in Britain and the Netherlands, ed. A. C. Duke and C. A. Tamse (De Walburg Press, 1985), 111–12, 116–17.
  11. Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, ed. Richard Tuck (Liberty Fund, 2005), 1:240, 338–39.
  12. Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, 1:258, 375–78, 381; and David Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (Knopf, 2017), 105–8.
  13. Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations [. . .], ed. Bela Kaposi and Richard Whatmore (Liberty Fund, 2008), 425–26, 429–30.
  14. Armitage, Civil Wars, 133–34.
  15. J. H. Elliott, “The Spanish Monarchy and the Kingdom of Portugal, 1580–1640,” in Conquest and Coalescence: The Shaping of the State in Early Modern Europe, ed. Mark Greengrass (Edward Arnold, 1991), 65.
  16. J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660–1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 266–67, 356–68.
  17. Lucas, “The Plakkaat van Verlatinge,” 191. Armitage notes that Vattel cited William III’s 1688 expedition as a precedent for intervention. Armitage, Civil Wars, 133.
  18. H. R. Trevor-Roper, “The General Crisis of the Seventeenth-Century,” Past & Present 16 (November 1959): 31–64, https://www.jstor.org/stable/650152.
  19. Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstances of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II Until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Harvard University Press, 1959).
  20. Reed Browning, Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Court Whigs (Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 196–97; H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Holmes and Meier, 1977), 143, 149–50; and Angus Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture: “Habits of Heart and Mind” (Oxford University Press, 2015), 34–35.
  21. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660–1832, 9.
  22. Hamish Scott describes the period to Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 as the Seventy Years War, with intense peacetime rivalry punctuating open conflict. He argues that larger protracted struggle is important for understanding the American Revolution and its global impact. Hamish Scott, The Birth of a Great Power System, 1740–1815 (Routledge, 2006), 74.
  23. Lawrence Henry Gipson, “The American Revolution as an Aftermath of the Great War for the Empire, 1754–63,” Political Science Quarterly 65, no. 1 (1950): 87, 89, https://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=6095; and Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (Yale University Press, 1992), 87–102.
  24. Patrick Griffin, America’s Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2012), 7–8, 30–35; and Jack P. Greene, “The Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution: The Causal Relationship Reconsidered,” in The British Atlantic Empire Before the American Revolution, ed. Peter Marshall and Glyn Williams (Routledge, 1980), 87–102.
  25. Max Savelle, “The American Balance of Power and European Diplomacy, 1713–78,” in The Era of the American Revolution: Studies Inscribed to Evarts Boutell Greene, ed. Richard B. Morris (Columbia University Press, 1939), 140–41, 158.
  26. Matt Schumann and Karl W. Schweizer, The Seven Years War: A Transatlantic History (Routledge, 2008), 105; Julian S. Corbett, England in the Seven Years War: A Study in Combined Strategy, 2 vols. (Longmans, Green, 1907); Savelle, “The American Balance of Power and European Diplomacy, 1713–78,” 160; and Charles Jenkinson, A Discourse on the Conduct of the Government of Great-Britain in Respect to Neutral Nations During the Present War (London, 1758).
  27. Hugo Grotius, The Free Sea, ed. David Armitage (Liberty Fund, 2004). The English jurist John Selden challenged his claim in John Selden, Mare Clausum (London, 1635). Selden argued the sea could be appropriated for exclusive use as much as territory on land.
  28. Savelle, “The American Balance of Power and European Diplomacy, 1713–78,” 160–61.
  29. Richard Middleton, The Bells of Victory: The Pitt–Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years’ War, 1757–1762 (Cambridge University Press, 1985), 158–60; Andrew Roberts, The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III (Viking, 2021), 93, 96, 101–3; and Tim Blanning, Frederick the Great: King of Prussia (Random House, 2016), 325–26.
  30. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848, 3–5; and H. M. Scott, British Foreign Policy in the Age of the American Revolution (Clarendon Press, 1990), 67, 85.
  31. Andrew Roberts rightly defines “finding a stable ministry which had the confidence of both King and Parliament” as the decade’s central problem. Roberts, The Last King of America, 109, 171; and Charles Jenkinson, “Heads of Defense of the Extra Estimate of the Navy,” British Library Additional Manuscript 38336, 366–67.
  32. Samuel Flagg Bemis, The Diplomacy of the American Revolution (Encounter Books, 2023), 13–15.
  33. Jonathan R. Dull, A Diplomatic History of the American Revolution (Yale University Press, 1985), 36–39; and Scott, British Foreign Policy in the Age of the American Revolution, 194–95.
  34. Jack P. Greene lays out this interpretation in Jack P. Greene, The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
  35. J. H. Elliott, “A Europe of Composite Monarchies,” Past & Present, no. 137 (November 1992): 48–71, https://www.jstor.org/stable/650851; and Jenny Wormald, “The Creation of Britain: Multiple Kingdoms or Core and Colonies?,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 2 (1992): 175–94, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3679104.
  36. Benjamin Franklin, “Marginalia in Protests of the Lords Against Repeal of the Stamp Act,” March 1766, in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 13, January 1, 1766, Through December 31, 1766, ed. Leonard W. Labaree (Yale University Press, 1969); and Benjamin Franklin to Lord Kames, February 15, 1767, in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 14, January 1, 1767, Through December 31, 1767, ed. Leonard W. Labaree (Yale University Press, 1970), 65.
  37. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 88; and Greene, Constitutional Origins, 109–10.
  38. Peter D. G. Thomas, Tea Party to Independence: The Third Phase of the American Revolution, 1773–1776 (Clarendon Press, 1991), 167–69, 174–75; and Horst Dippel, Germany and the American Revolution, 1770–1800 (University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 73.
  39. T. H. Breen, The Will of the People: The Revolutionary Birth of America (Belknap Press, 2021), 12.
  40. Piers Mackesy, The War for America, 1775–1783 (University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 29.
  41. Armitage, The Declaration of Independence, 31–36, 41.
  42. Scott, British Foreign Policy in the Age of the American Revolution, 221.
  43. Larrie D. Ferreiro, Brothers at Arms: American Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Saved It (Knopf, 2016), 35, 42, 54.
  44. N. A. M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (Penguin, 2005), 331; and Scott, British Foreign Policy, 214–15.
  45. Roberts, The Last King of America, 273; Peter H. Wilson, Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples Since 1500 (Harvard University Press, 2023), 217–20; Friederike Baer, Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War (Oxford University Press, 2022), 82, 294; David M. Griffiths, “Nikita Panin, Russian Diplomacy, and the American Revolution,” Slavic Review 28, no. 1 (1969): 4–5, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2493035; and Scott, British Foreign Policy in the Age of the American Revolution, 217–20, 228–30.
  46. Mackesy, The War for America, 1775–1783, 61–62; and Baer, Hessians.
  47. Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire (Yale University Press, 2014), 7.
  48. Samuel Adams to Elizabeth Adams, December 9, 1776, in Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789, ed. Paul H. Smith (Library of Congress, 1976–2000), 5:509–10; and George Washington to Samuel Washington, December 18, 1776, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-07-02-0299.
  49. Scott, British Foreign Policy in the Age of the American Revolution, 311–12; and George Washington to John Laurens, April 9, 1781, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/resource/mgw3h.002/?sp=206.
  50. Savelle, “The American Balance of Power and European Diplomacy, 1713–78,” 166.
  51. Ferreiro, Brothers at Arms, 99–100; and Dull, A Diplomatic History of the American Revolution, 90–94.
  52. Scott, British Foreign Policy in the Age of the American Revolution, 268–72.
  53. Kevin J. Weddle, “‘A Change of Both Men and Measures’: British Reassessment of Military Strategy After Saratoga, 1777–1778,” Journal of Military History 77, no. 3 (2013): 837–65, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291332064_A_Change_of_Both_Men_and_Measures_British_Reassessment_of_Military_Strategy_after_Saratoga_1777-1778.
  54. William Anthony Hay, “An End to Empire? British Strategy in the American Revolution and in Making Peace with the United States,” in Justifying Revolution: Law, Virtue, and Violence in the American War of Independence, ed. Glenn A. Moots and Phillip Hamilton (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017), 277.
  55. David Syrett, Neutral Rights and the War in the Narrow Seas, 1778–1782, Combat Studies Institute, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/combat-studies-institute/csi-books/neutral-rights-and-the-war-in-narrow-seas-1778-82.pdf.
  56. Jonathan Singerton, The American Revolution and the Habsburg Monarchy (University of Virginia Press, 2021), 91.
  57. Bemis, The Diplomacy of the American Revolution, 129–31.
  58. Scott, British Foreign Policy in the Age of the American Revolution, 303–4; Syrett, Neutral Rights and the War in the Narrow Seas, 1778–1782; and Isabel de Madariaga, Britain, Russia, and the Armed Neutrality of 1780 (Hollis & Carter, 1962).
  59. Dippel, Germany and the American Revolution, 61; and Blanning, Frederick the Great, 333–34.
  60. Bemis, The Diplomacy of the American Revolution, 158–65; Griffiths, “Nikita Panin, Russian Diplomacy, and the American Revolution,” 12–14, 17; and Singerton, The American Revolution and the Habsburg Monarchy, 133–34.
  61. Scott, British Foreign Policy in the Age of the American Revolution, 314–16.
  62. O’Shaughnessy, The Men Who Lost America, 3.
  63. Dull, A Diplomatic History of the American Revolution, 139–51, 158–60, 170–71.
  64. Angelo M. Codevilla, America’s Rise and Fall Among Nations: Lessons in Statecraft from John Quincy Adams (Encounter Books, 2022), 24–25.
  65. Armitage, The Declaration of Independence, 85–88.
  66. Franco Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1776–1789, Part I: The Great States of the West, trans. R. Burr Litchfield (Princeton University Press, 1991), 4, 13, 17–18.
  67. Singerton, The American Revolution and the Habsburg Monarchy, 51–53.
  68. J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (Yale University Press, 2006), 367–68.
  69. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848, 39.
  70. Quoted in T. C. W. Blanning, “‘That Horrid Electorate’ or ‘Ma Patrie Germanique’? George III, Hanover, and the Fürstenbund of 1785,” Historical Journal 20, no. 2 (1977): 314–15, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/historical-journal/article/abs/that-horrid-electorate-or-ma-patrie-germanique-george-iii-hanover-and-the-furstenbund-of-1785/1E914CA52E676A96428CF0B8602A48A4; George III to Lord North, June 13, 1781, in The Correspondence of King George III from 1760 to December 1783, ed. John Fortescue (Frank Cass, 1967), 5:247; Earl of Buckingham to Sir Henry Clinton, December 1781, in Report on the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Lothian Preserved at Blickling Hall, Norfolk (Wyman and Sons, 1905), 404; Singerton, The American Revolution and the Habsburg Monarchy, 50; and Scott, British Foreign Policy in the Age of the American Revolution, 339.
  71. P. J. Marshall, Remaking the British Atlantic: The United States and the British Empire After American Independence (Oxford University Press, 2012), 17.
  72. The Parliamentary Register [. . .], vol. 21 (London, 1787), 176–77.
  73. Franco Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1768–1776: The First Crisis, trans. R. Burr Litchfield (Princeton University Press, 1989), ix–xii.
  74. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848, 6–10.
  75. Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (Knopf, 1989), 24–31, 43–48; and David A. Bell, Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolutions (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), 73–76.
  76. Armitage, The Declaration of Independence, 113–14; and Robert A. Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526–1918 (University of California Press, 1974), 205–7.
  77. John Adams, Discourses on Davila [. . .] (Boston, 1805).
  78. Friedrich von Gentz, The Origins and Principles of the American Revolution Compared with the Origins and Principles of the French Revolution, trans. John Quincy Adams (Liberty Fund, 2010).
  79. The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston, 1856), 10:505.
  80. George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (Oxford University Press, 2008), 68–73; Lindsay M. Chervinsky, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution (Harvard University Press, 2020); and Morton J. Frisch, ed. The Pacificus–Helvidius Debates, 1793–1794 (Liberty Fund, 2007).
  81. Howard W. Cox, American Traitor: General James Wilkinson’s Betrayal of the Republic and Escape from Justice (Georgetown University Press, 2023).
  82. Edmund Randolph to George Hammond, May 1, 1794, in American State Papers, class 1, Foreign Relations, ed. Walter Lowrie and Matthew St. Clair Clarke (Washington, DC, 1832–61), 1:451–52.
  83. Robert H. Ferrell, American Diplomacy: A History (W. W. Norton, 1979), 87–93.
  84. Francis D. Cogliano, Emperor of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson’s Foreign Policy (Yale University Press, 2014), 71, 679.
  85. C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (Longman Group, 1989), 72–73.
  86. Gentz, The Origins and Principles of the American Revolution [. . .]; and Friedrich von Gentz, “Mémoire,” in Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of J. B. Fortescue, Esq., Preserved at Dropmore (John Falconer, 1908), 6:375.
  87. A. D. Harvey, Collisions of Empires: Britain in Three World Wars, 1793–1945 (Bloomsbury Academic, 1991).
  88. Cogliano, Emperor of Liberty, 3.
  89. Dominic Lieven, Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Viking, 2010), 70.
  90. Harvey, Collision of Empires, 101.
  91. Lieven, Russia Against Napoleon, 16–17.
  92. J. P. Riley links the two wars in 1813 as parts of a larger global conflict in J. P. Riley, Napoleon and the World War of 1813: Lessons in Coalition Warfighting (Frank Cass, 2000).
  93. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State, 35–36.
  94. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 364–65.
  95. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848, 340–43.
  96. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 395–96.
  97. Armitage, The Declaration of Independence, 115–16, 118–21.
  98. Federalist, no. 51 (James Madison); and Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (Yale University Press, 1968), 7.
  99. John Quincy Adams to John Adams, December 21, 1817, in Writings of John Quincy Adams, ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford (Macmillan, 1916), 6:276.
  100. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 393–94; and Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848, 630–34.
  101. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848, 634.
  102. Charles N. Edel, Nation Builder: John Quincy Adams and the Grand Strategy of the Republic (Harvard University Press, 2014), 168–80.
  103. I take this phrase from Fareed Zakaria, From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role (Princeton University Press, 1999).
  104. John Quincy Adams to Richard C. Anderson, May 27, 1823, in Writings of John Quincy Adams, 7:460.