As we approach the 250th anniversary of America’s traditional birthday, the Declaration of Independence, it is likewise traditional to extol the revolutionary nature of both the declaration and the war to secure that independence. After all, it is our literal origin story, and its ideological underpinnings are the basis for our belief in American exceptionalism. Ken Burns has even repeatedly called it “the most significant event in human history since the birth of Christ.”
Events over the succeeding fifty years, which John Adams labeled “the Age of Revolutions and Constitutions,” seem to uphold that claim. The French Revolution followed in the next decade, and then revolutions in Ireland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy, and Poland. In the Americas, over a dozen former colonies gained independence, including the Estados Unidos to our immediate south.
But what if, in the global scheme of things, the American Revolution wasn’t really all that important?
In a recent New Yorker article, Daniel Immerwahr reviews several books which make that argument, presenting views of the Revolutionary War from the British standpoint and broader foreign perspectives in his examination, “The American Revolution Wasn’t the Main Event,” published in The New Yorker, May 4th, 2026.
“Since 1776, Americans have been insisting that they were the protagonists of a new world order. Yet “the sad truth of the matter,” Hannah Arendt wrote, is that, whereas France’s revolution “made world history,” America’s was “of little more than local importance.” - Daniel Immerwahr
His overview starts with the prequel to the American Revolution, what we call the French and Indian War, but which was part of a much larger, global conflict (The Seven Years War), involving all the European powers of the day and extending as far as Africa and Asia. The British won that war at enormous cost, leading them to levy ruinous taxes (in the colonists’ view), which loom large in the explanations for the colonists’ subsequent revolt. But they weren’t the only ones affected.
At the time, Britain had 26 colonies in the Americas, the most prosperous of them located in the Caribbean. The new taxes fell much harder on them than the 13 that revolted, who also had a higher standard of living, even compared to England itself. While the other colonies did not join the 1776 rebellion, there had been uprisings across the British empire in the preceding decades. These ranged from American Indigenous nations west of the Appalachians, to a slave revolt in Jamaica, to Scotland and Ireland, and to the Sultanate of Mysore, in India proper.
Later, as the rebelling American colonists began to be successful on the battlefield in 1778, other conflicts erupted with Britain’s European enemies, including the French, Spanish and the Dutch, not to mention the Sultan of Mysore, who launched the next of four revolts. As war expanded across its empire, Britain was forced to reallocate resources elsewhere, abandoning their occupation of Philadelphia in 1778 and reducing naval assets by 80% between 1778 and 1781. In the climactic battle at Yorktown, Lord Cornwallis was unable to get reinforcements because, as Immerwahr points out, British troops and ships were diverted to Mysore to fight battles that “far surpassed those of America.”
Immerwahr also notes that, while military conflict in America ended with Yorktown in 1781, the war wasn’t concluded until the Treaty of Paris, in 1784, due to the ongoing and more bruising warfare elsewhere. At that point, however, despite losing its Atlantic coast colonies, Britain emerged much stronger than its enemies. France was broke, and its monarchy would fall in five years. Spain was so weakened its empire eventually broke apart. Britain, on the other hand, kept its other American possessions, retained trade with the newly “united States,” and prospered economically. Even its monarchy survived, as it does today (if in reduced scope), providing a brutally ironic contrast to our current, supposedly constitutional chief executive. As Immerwahr sums up, one can even “argue that Britain won the American Revolutionary War.”
Looking at the larger picture, if the Americans were first, weren’t they responsible at least partly for the revolutions that followed?
That’s been the view, domestically, since Adams’ and Jefferson’s time. The problem is that the Americans seceded from the British monarchy, they didn’t bring it down. What happened in France was another order of magnitude, historically, ideologically, and particularly in terms of civil destruction. Both revolutions drew from the same Enlightenment philosophy, but in France its application led to the demolition of institutions, norms, and the social contract itself, not to mention wholesale loss of lives. The increasing radicalism of the French revolutionaries eventually repelled their supposed American forebearers, and their governments grew increasing opposed as the 19th century turned. There were even naval skirmishes – the so-called “Quasi-War’ – with France between 1798 and 1800.
Likewise, the widespread wars of independence in the Americas to the south drew little support from the newly United States. To begin with, most followed the more radical model of France, in particular outlawing slavery and freeing large populations of the enslaved, notably in Haiti. The United States became increasingly isolated by the mid-19th century among American democracies, with only Cuba and Brazil also refusing to abolish slavery. It would take nearly until the first Centennial – Lincoln’s famous “four score and seven years” – for the US finally to cross that threshold.
Add to that what Immerwahr terms its “violent expansionism” – expropriating Native nations and forcibly annexing a third of its southern neighbor’s territory (including California, let’s not forget). The United States had become “a rising empire among republics,” less interested in exporting freedom to its neighbors than protecting itself from what Jefferson, terrified by events in Haiti, had come to see as “the revolutionary storm sweeping the globe.”
Immerwahr concedes that after the Second World War Americans finally became the “protagonists of world history” that they had claimed since 1776 but argues that was due as much to coincidence (or “profound luck”, as he puts it) as the apparent precedence for Adams’ Age of Revolutions that followed our own. This “historical egotism” is all too obviously still active today, and unfortunately with far less idealistic motivations.
It is easy to agree, especially lately, with Immerwahr’s wish that “the United States were a little less central in world affairs.” Would that we “were one people among many, just like everyone else.”