Published on June 25, 2026 (Episode 460)
Introduction
In the introduction to his book Europe: A New History, Roderick Beaton argues that new histories are needed because of events. “To study history,” he writes, is to look for patterns to make sense of the things that happen and the action of our fellow humans that affect all our lives…When things change when new and unexpected events suddenly reshape the world that we thought we knew around us, the effect is like the turning of a kaleidoscope–the whole pattern changes. We look at both the present and the past, and what we see lines up differently from before.” So, then, we need a new history of Europe because of the way the present changes the perception of the past. “The story told in this book,” he writes, “has been shaped by the changed and changing perspective of the mid-2020s; it could not have been told this way before.”
That was part of an introduction I wrote for a different conversation. Yet it applies surprisingly well to this one.
The often extremely quotable Hannah Arendt once wrote that “the French Revolution, which ended in disaster, has made world history, while the American Revolution, so triumphantly successful, has remained an event of little more than local importance.”
My guest Richard Bell emphatically disagrees. In The American Revolution and the Fate of the World (Penguin, 2025), Bell argues that the Revolution was global from the very beginning. It drew participants from multiple continents, reshaped patterns of migration and trade, altered imperial policy from Canada to India, and inspired movements for liberty around the world. What Americans often remember as a national story was, in reality, a global convulsion.
(The picture above is of Vice-Admiral Pierre André de Suffren of the French Navy meeting Hyder Ali at Bahur near Puducherry in South India, 26 July 1782. It was a long way from Lexington Common.)
About the Guest
Richard Bell is Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home, was the focus of a conversation on this podcast that was published on December 30th, 2019.
For Further Investigation
Richard Bell, TThe American Revolution and the Fate of the World (Penguin, 2025)
James Kirby Martin and Mark Lender, War Without Mercy: Liberty or Death in the American Revolution (Osprey, 2026)
Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804 (W.W. Norton, 2016)
Holger Hoock, Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth (Crown, 2017)
Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (Vintage, 2011)
Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 (Hill & Wang, 2002)
Trevor Burnard & Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, Republic and Empire: Crisis, Revolution, and America’s Early Independence (Yale, 2025)
Related Episodes
Republic and Empire: Andrew O’Shaughnessy on the global causes and consequences of the American Revolution
The American Revolution in Hapsburg Lands: Jonathan Singerton onthe American Revolution’s influence on the Austrian Empire
The Hessians are Coming!: Friederike Baer on the German soldiers who fought for the British Army in the American Revolution
Tory’s Wife: Cynthia Kierner on Jane Welborn Spurgin’s American Revolution
The Great Atlantic Freedom Conspiracy: Micah Alpaugh on correspondence, revolution, and social movements
Tags
American Revolution; America 250; Global History; Richard Bell; Atlantic World; British Empire; Indigenous History; Loyalists; Slavery; Historical Thinking
