Freedom Round the Globe

A fresh and surprising history that reckons with a defining global moment: The American Revolution.

In 1776, the world was in flux. Winds of change were blowing far beyond the shores of the nascent United States of America, whether in the debating clubs of Edinburgh, where women were demanding happiness along with men, or the brutal sugar plantations of the Caribbean, where enslaved Africans were rising up in rebellion.

In this authoritative revisionist history, Sarah M. S. Pearsall restores the shock and drama of that epoch-defining moment, revealing how the fires of change that sparked the American Revolution were igniting all around the world. From St. Kitts to Kolkata, Ghana to Guangzhou, all kinds of people, not just the men declaring independence in Philadelphia, asserted their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Revolution, Freedom Round the Globe tells a story the world needs to hear, of the fraught origins of a nation that by turns perplexes, fascinates and horrifies us. It is a story of global transformation and revolutionary fervour, of triumph as well as tragedy, and of the insurgents, lovers, and dreamers who dared to imagine better societies.

About the Author

Sarah M.S. Pearsall is Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University; she previously taught for nearly a decade at Cambridge University. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Distinguished Fellow in the American Revolution at the Eccles Institute, British Library. She holds degrees from Yale, Cambridge, and Harvard. Her first book, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century, received the Women’s History Network Prize. Her second book, Polygamy: An Early American History, received multiple commendations/awards from the Organization for American Historians and the Western History Association. Her scholarship has been supported by the British Academy and the National Endowment for the Humanities.