A groundbreaking global exploration of the ideas that drove the American Revolution, showing how widespread revolutionary impulses actually were in the 18th century, and shining a light on the defiance of marginalized peoples all over the world.

While the American Revolution is often celebrated as the birth of American "exceptionalism," historian Sarah Pearsall argues against the idea that the Founding Fathers had a unique claim on the revolutionary spirit. The thirteen colonies that became the United States were just half of the British colonies that existed in the 18th century, and in this unique history Pearsall uncovers events and people in India, Scotland, Ireland, Georgia, Florida and the islands of the West Indies that had great bearing on the path of the American rebellion.

Pearsall uses a clever organizing device, borrowing 13 ideals plucked from the Declaration of Independence, and finding the spark of each value in far-flung places. In a club in Edinburgh where women were first invited into philosophical conversations, she explores what the pursuit of happiness meant to married women and the enslaved. She traces the New England poetry of African-born Phillis Wheatley to a castle in Ghana where new forms of slavery created new ideas about liberty. On a Kolkata street where starving Indians protested ruthless taxes with their ebbing strength, Pearsall finds a critique of fair governement. In rural Germany, boy soldiers sent abroad to die for Britain complicate who can lay claim to principle in an uncivilized war. And in a Six Nations cornfield, we learn that security for one rising nation can mean extirpation for another.

In this fresh and surprising history, Pearsall restores Friends of Liberty from around the world--women, South Asians, Native Americans, the enslaved-- to their rightful place in the American story.