Friday Reflection: Republic & Empire
Andrew O’Shaughnessy on the "Great War for Empire", the colonies that remained loyal, and the Global American Revolution
Published on October 17, 2025
Synopsis
In this conversation, historian Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy reflects on his final collaboration with the late Trevor Burnard, Republic and Empire: Crisis, Revolution, and America’s Early Independence. The book reframes the American Revolution as part of a broader imperial crisis that stretched across the eighteenth-century world. When rebellion broke out in 1776, the thirteen colonies that chose independence represented only half of Britain’s empire. The other half—Quebec, Nova Scotia, Jamaica, Bermuda, and beyond—remained loyal to the Crown. Understanding why some provinces revolted while others did not, O’Shaughnessy argues, reveals the Revolution as both a national struggle and a global event.
The conversation begins with O’Shaughnessy’s remembrance of Trevor Burnard: a generous collaborator, independent scholar, and master of the Atlantic world. Burnard’s ability to connect local and imperial histories shaped their joint project. Together they sought to revive the “imperial history” tradition that once dominated early American scholarship but faded after 1970. As O’Shaughnessy explains, historians like Charles Andrews and Lawrence Henry Gipson once treated the colonies as part of a global British system—but rarely carried the story past 1776. Republic and Empire picks up that thread, tracing how the Revolution fit into Britain’s effort to reform and rationalize an empire strained by victory and debt.
The Seven Years’ War, O’Shaughnessy notes, was the true “Great War for Empire.” Its outcome left Britain with vast new territories—from Bengal to Quebec—but also enormous costs. Defending, taxing, and governing this expanded empire proved nearly impossible. Colonial grievances were not unique to North America: elites in the Caribbean, Canada, and Ireland all protested imperial policies. But only in the thirteen colonies did those grievances lead to rebellion. O’Shaughnessy suggests that geography, security, and economic dependence played decisive roles. Jamaica, for example, depended on Britain’s navy to protect its plantation economy; Canada’s Catholic population had little desire for Protestant revolution.
The discussion turns to slavery and loyalism. Burnard’s long study of the Caribbean, O’Shaughnessy says, demonstrated that slavery was not simply an American issue but the economic core of Britain’s first empire. While American historians often interpret slavery as a cause of revolution, in imperial context it functioned as a stabilizing force—binding colonies to Britain through shared profits and dependence.
In the closing section, O’Shaughnessy and Al explore the Revolution’s global implications. France and Spain’s intervention transformed the conflict into a world war—the key to American victory. Yet, paradoxically, Britain’s empire emerged stronger elsewhere. The loss of the thirteen colonies led to tighter imperial control over the remaining ones and ultimately to new forms of governance that culminated in the “Dominion model” a century later. As O’Shaughnessy puts it, the Revolution was not merely a colonial rebellion but a test of empire—and its aftermath reshaped both Britain and the modern world.
Questions for Discussion
Why did some colonies rebel while other colonies remained loyal?
How did the Seven Years’ War create the conditions for imperial crisis?
In what ways did the costs of the new empire after 1763 outweigh its rewards?
What made the Caribbean colonies, though often aggrieved with London, stay within the empire?
How did geography, defense, and slavery shape loyalty and rebellion differently?
What can the “imperial historians” of the early 20th century teach us today?
Why does O’Shaughnessy argue that the Revolution was an episode in a global war for empire?
How does considering Ireland, India, or Jamaica complicate traditional narratives of American independence?
What does the Revolution reveal about the tension between liberty and empire?
If the American colonies had remained loyal, what kind of empire might have evolved?
For Further Investigation
Trevor Burnard & Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, Republic and Empire: Crisis, Revolution, and America’s Early Independence (Princeton University Press, 2024)
Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire (Yale University Press, 2013)
Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (North Carolina, 2004)
David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000)
Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (North Carolina, 2007)
Jack P. Greene, The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, 2010)
Eliga Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Harvard, 2014)
Tags: Andrew O’Shaughnessy; Trevor Burnard; American Revolution; British Empire; Loyalism; Imperial History; Slavery; Historically Thinking