The chapter discusses human rights in history. It addresses the question of whether insights into rights are historically relative. Are beliefs about the legitimacy of rights the mortal children of time? To approach an answer to this question, the chapter outlines the proper methods to study the history of rights. It shows that it is not sufficient to focus on explicit conceptions of rights. Rights can form the implicit content of social struggles and may be expressed by the means of art. Conceptions of history underlying human rights histories are discussed. The development of the human rights idea since the American and French revolutions is reconstructed. The chapter recalls the genesis of the post-1945 system of protection of human rights in the context of major geopolitical developments, including the Cold War und decolonization. It addresses, moreover, the thesis that human rights originated in the Global North. It tries to do justice to the many contributions of the Global South to the development of human rights and to dispel the fog of amnesia hiding the policies of mayor powers of the Global North violating human rights, including but not limited to colonial wars.

This chapter treats the early modern roots counterrevolutionary war, in Johann Ewald’s (1785) Treatise on Partisan War and (1790) Treatise on the Duties of Light Troops. A Hessian (German) mercenary officer, Ewald served in of one of the earliest and most consequential modern counter-insurrectionary conflicts: the American Revolutionary War. I locate Ewald’s ideas in the intellectual and political context of early modern, absolutist central Europe. He believed in military honor and duty, linked to premodern socio-political hierarchies. In America, he confronted modern ideological warfare, backed by a mobilized populace, for the first time. Gradually, he came to empathize with his opponents and distain the English officers he served. In his diaries, he advocated emulating insurgent tactics—transposing the tools of revolutionary warfare into the military-ideological project of counterrevolution. The two manuals he wrote on returning to Europe alloyed his European and American experiences. They resonated well into the nineteenth century, influencing Clausewitz and informing British conduct of the Peninsular War.

This chapter examines the American Revolution in the territory of the Six Nations and in colonial New York as an example of the shift in power to settlers and settler rejection of Indigenous modes of alliance that also typified the expansion of settler colonialism elsewhere. In borderland regions, the American Revolution was also a land war. Ethnic cleansing and warfare broke many of such fragile bonds of kinship (real and fictive) as existed between settlers and Indigenous peoples, even as the metaphor of brotherhood was important to Ranger groups in which Indigenous and settler soldiers fought together. Difference was entrenched through violence. Specific examples of the politics of kinship examined include nineteenth-century settler family stories about warfare, including stories about Joseph Brant, who was often taken as a symbol of settler relationships with the Six Nations; changing practices of captive-taking on the part of the Six Nations; complex relationships between white and Indigenous soldiers; and the breaking of kinship links between the Six Nations themselves, in which the Brants played a significant role.

From the founding on, a dominant stream of American political thought and statesmanship has understood the polity in providentialist terms. Revolutionary leaders espoused belief in a particularly providential God, which is what we would expect if they also held to a classical Christian conception of natural law rather than the pantheistic naturalism alleged by modern scholars. We take our investigative cues from the providentialist proclamation by the Continental Congress that bookended the Revolutionary War, and we then engage in historical case studies of key players and events in American counterintelligence and French diplomacy. These case studies show that prominent actors in the war affirmed core tenets of classical theism: the existence of a creator God who providentially governs the cosmos and the destiny of men. According to these key participants engaged in espionage and diplomacy, the providential creator was also a moralistic God of justice who favored the side of liberty such that the revolutionary actors saw themselves carrying out the divine will on the world historic stage in obedience to the dictates of right reason.

Was the American revolutionary argument justifiable on classical, Christian natural-law and just war principles? This question is not merely of quaint historical interest but also has been the subject of scholarly discussion in recent years on the basis of Thomistic natural-law and just war principles. Moreover, there has been renewed scholarly interest in the debate between the patriots and the loyalists over whether resistance could be justified on biblical grounds. In this chapter, we argue that the American revolution was justifiable on the grounds of Thomistic jurisprudence. We then turn to reconsider the case for revolution in light of Christian Scripture with particular attention to how Romans 13 was interpreted in the Christian tradition and in the American colonies.

Marked military buttons were a distinct innovation introduced in the wake of the global Seven Years’ War that spread across the Atlantic world. On the smallest scale they physically embodied the reforms that characterize the period following that conflict. When considered at all, they are often used definitively by archaeologists to determine the presence of certain soldiers at specific sites. Although designed to function in this way, military buttons could not definitively identify personnel, given the realities of early modern military institutions, economic systems, and increasingly long distance imperial wars. As such, marked military buttons represent ideals of order and control rather than their actuality, exposing what military regulations and mandates alone obscure. This chapter explores the intention and reality of marked military buttons in the armies of France, Great Britain, and the new United States from the 1760s to the 1780s. These tiny artifacts reveal attempts to manifest systems of organization that, in fact, disclose their limitations to enact such systems, and thereby complicate their status as diagnostic artifacts in archaeological contexts.

As resistance to British legislation grows in the American colonies, song intensifies as a political force. Amidst continued white perplexity over the meanings of African music, Occramer Marycoo – also known as Newport Gardner – inaugurates Black American formal composition with his “Promise Anthem” of 1764, a resounding condemnation of slavery. Meanwhile, the Stamp Act, Tea Act, and other British “Intolerable Acts” produce more than riots and organizations like the Sons of Liberty: they produce a store of protest song fronted by the likes of John Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, and the balladeers of the “Boston Massacre.” Loyalist songwriters fight their own losing battles through balladry, and the defeated British troops depart with the strains of “Yankee Doodle” ringing in their ears. The War of Independence may be over; but the songs of class war, women's rights, abolition, and Indigenous lament continue to infiltrate the soundscape of the newborn USA.

In the years and decades following the end of the Revolutionary War, dozens of ordinary Americans engaged in different ways the burgeoning genre of memoir writing. In fragments and half-told stories, as well as whole-of-life biographies, ordinary colonists offered a rich and inclusive history of the era. In their varied forms and diverse styles, they were among the earliest group of Americans to try and explain themselves, and often emphasized themes of betrayal, deprivation, divisions, violence, disease, and chaos. In doing so, these writers undermined or complicated more well-known narratives about the Revolutionary era that dominated the mainstream print culture and subsequent histories of the Revolution. In that respect, those who wrote about their Revolutionary era experiences were also engaging in a Revolutionary act. Collectively and over many decades, memoir writers drew on and enriched a new medium of storytelling that ultimately reveals a more complicated founding story of a nation.

This chapter examines an overlooked connection between patriotism and paranoia, arguing that patriotic love conditions suspicion and enmity born from perennial uncertainty over others’ love of nation. In John Neal’s Seventy-Six (1823), love of country breeds both suspicious minds and suspicious affects. This historical romance of the Revolutionary War demonstrates that paranoia is a set of affects in addition to the mental properties for which it is more commonly understood. For this reason, paranoid patriotism becomes transmissible among persons – and in literature, through style. This observation is significant because literary criticism has traditionally emphasized paranoia’s affinities with narrative, particularly conspiracy theory, and, more recently, with interpretation, namely, the paranoid’s search for coherent explanation and order, or the hermeneutics of suspicion. Neal’s novel insists that we also recognize paranoia as a trait of style.

Armies prepare to fight the last war, or so the adage goes. Napoleon, for instance, won great battles attacking with tight formations of troops, and mid-nineteenth-century military leaders emulated his tactics, even as advances in bullet and rifle technology rendered them increasingly ineffective. This became brutally apparent in the American Civil War as defenders capable of shooting more quickly and accurately at longer distances decimated charging formations. The problem of predicting the nature of future wars by looking to past conflicts can be more generally summed by another adage, this one traceable to Søren Kierkegaard in 1843: life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.1

Chapter 11 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet explores cities’ role as creators and creations of the political revolutions of the late-eighteenth-century Atlantic world. It argues that traditions of urban “freedoms” going back to the revival of European cities, imperial conflict throughout the world between regimes based in London and Paris, restive settler colonial cities in the Americas, and the Atlantic economy’s reliance on enslavement made the Atlantic into the world’s first “cauldron” of modern revolution. It traces the close connections between the American Revolution that started in Boston and the French one in Paris, while investigating the ways revolutionaries used the spaces of a cities designed for colonial or authoritarian control to overthrow otherwise all-powerful-seeming regimes, replacing them with structures designed for democracy or People Power.

The Haitian Revolution (1789–1804) in Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) and the African Protestant movement in the early United States coincided to produce a collective of protest literature by Black authors against the unequal treatment and inhumane bondage of Black people. Black Atlantic revolutionary literature offers a countervailing narrative to a historiography of the Haitian Revolution based on analysis from contemporary literary works by white writers. This repertoire of Black literature presents the history of expanding political and social freedoms across the Atlantic world. Black writers constructed disparate revolutionary views of freedom. In Saint-Domingue, Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines pursued different policies, and Julien Raimond advocated predominantly for enfranchisement of gens du couleur, free persons with African and European parentage. African American clergy Lemuel Haynes, Absalom Jones, and Richard Allen looked to Christian Republicanism to end slavery, while Freemason leader Prince Hall embraced revolutionary violence as legitimate to secure Black liberation. The geopolitical triumphs of the Haitian Revolution inspired transitions in Black Atlantic literature toward resistance writing throughout the nineteenth century. The revolutionary-era collective established a literary foundation upon which later Haitian and Black American authors published works heralding the birth of an independent Black republic in the Caribbean.

This chapter explores how transatlantic Black authors responded to transitional British national identity in the decades surrounding the American Revolution. It examines some of the conflicting discursive and cultural elements of African, American, and British identities as each of these emerged in new forms during the mid- to late eighteenth century. Examining evangelical and political work by Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Phillis Wheatley and Ottobah Cugoano, it emphasizes sensitivity to the prevalence of “Britishness” in the construction of early “African American” narratives of identity and belonging. While the “middle passage” loomed large as the most traumatic transatlantic migration in the eighteenth-century African American literary tradition, moving from west to east also generated considerable economic, social, and political anxieties and prompted a range of intellectual responses. As they would in the nineteenth century, many Black writers in America saw Britain as a beacon of liberty, Christian morality, and fairness. When they arrived, they often found that the reality did not match their expectations. This chapter therefore examines Black intellectual responses to, and constructions of, British national identity narratives during decades of significant transition.

Slavery, Christianity, the Enlightenment, and the American Revolution were primary forces that shaped African American literary production during the eighteenth century. Slavery was the force that brought most Africans and Europeans into intense personal contact and influenced Africans’ thinking about Western ideas and ideals. Christianity was the message that prompted several Africans to write, modified their beliefs, and highlighted the contrast between what Christians said and the way they often lived and treated enslaved and other Africans. This disjunction was a constant theme in the writings of Africans who acquired this skill in the eighteenth century. The Enlightenment fostered racialist and racist thought concerning Africans and encouraged some Europeans to test these ideas by educating Africans and some Africans to dispute these ideas through literary expression. The so-called Age of Revolution fueled secular and not just religious attacks on slavery and Western hypocrisy. It is not always possible to separate African literary expression in Europe and America or even Africa during the eighteenth century because the world at the time was more truly Atlantic than some may currently suppose.

This chapter explores the high hopes for Irish commerce that were aroused by the American Revolution, and their complex interactions with British attempts to reform and consolidate the remnants of its mercantile empire following its American debacle. Irish campaigns for ‘free trade’ and ‘legislative independence’ were animated by the hope that the liberation of the Kingdom’s foreign trade would enable it to chart its own course in a more peaceful Europe. This vision clashed fundamentally with a rival, British reform agenda, embodied in William Pitt the Younger’s unsuccessful Irish Commercial Propositions of 1785, which balanced an extension of imperial trading privileges to Ireland with its closer integration into the British market. The rejection of Pitt’s proposals by the Irish parliament, after their heavy modification by British slaving and manufacturing interests, produced an unstable equilibrium, dominated by patronage and executive power, that was ripe for criticism by the more radical forces that would take up the fallen mantle of Irish ‘patriotism’ in the 1790s.