Freedom Round the Globe

“Engaging. . . . With Pearsall’s expert guidance, we meet revolutionaries and liberty lovers — men and women, enslaved and Indigenous, old and young — in far-flung places. . . . Her arguments and her observations repay attention in any year, but especially in this one. . . . Pearsall’s book does so much to illuminate [American history].”
—Jon Meacham, The New York Times Book Review

“Award-winning scholar Sarah Pearsall accomplishes the incredible: a vibrant, inventive, intricate history of the American Revolution that shows how key ideas and principles were shared around the world even as thirteen diverse colonies on the eastern Atlantic seaboard banded together to forge a future born of context, contradiction, and contingency. This extraordinary history offers thrilling narrative, sharp analysis, and encouragement to liberty’s defenders while presenting a carrousel of fascinating figures – some familiar, most refreshingly new.”
—Tiya Miles, author of All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, winner of the National Book Award

“No place on earth was unaffected by an age of revolutions, as the intrepid Sarah Pearsall reveals. With sparkling narrative and research ingenuity, this book takes us to all manner of people in taverns, villages, castles, cornfields, and far away havens of imperialism to show that the cause of the American Revolution was taken up, ideologically, politically, and militarily all over the globe. An amazing and beautifully crafted book.”
—David W. Blight, Yale University, author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“Freedom Round the Globe is a joy and achievement. Exhibiting great familiarity with the new literatures of early America as well as a sweeping expanse of new sites of analysis, the book’s characters and narrative jump off the page.”
—Ned Blackhawk, author of The Rediscovery of America, winner of the National Book Award

“In this risky, energizing reimagining of the American Revolution, Pearsall shows how ordinary people spanning the globe understood empire’s brutal costs and dared to rebel. Her brilliant history reveals that the very conditions of empire—slavery, exile, military violence, and dispossession—created the worldwide community of people who could challenge it.”
—Anne Hyde, author of Empires, Nations and Families, Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the Bancroft Prize

“Sarah Pearsall’s study of revolutionary words heard around the world is a syncopated dance of ideas delivered with a poetic touch. Global in scope and local in depth, it is chock full of unexpected insights. This book not only opens up our understanding of the American Revolution, it challenges how we think about the past itself.”
—Jefferson Cowie, author of Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“Weaving together events from far and near, Pearsall has crafted a stunning narrative of the American Revolution and made visible the interconnected world of that era.”
—Andrés Reséndez, author of The Other Slavery, National Book Award finalist and winner of the Bancroft Prize

“This book is FANTASTIC. So giddy and interesting is the journey. The best and most enthralling thing may be the way in which Pearsall makes strange this familiar subject, pulling deep insights like beautiful silken handkerchiefs from a pocket no one had even noticed. What a triumph. I loved it.”
—Sir Christopher Clark, Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge and author of The Sleepwalkers

“This sprawling, immersive account . . . explores “the effect of the world on the American Revolution” rather than the “too often” emphasized opposite. . . . In a roving narrative that ranges from European power politics to resistance movements of Indigenous and enslaved peoples, Pearsall spotlights many fascinating figures and milieus. . . . The result is a remarkably clarifying picture of the revolutionary spirit that swept the world in the 1770s.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Pearsall herself does good work in chronicling that “a revolutionary spirit was alive across the British Empire,” one that accused the empire’s leaders of being enslavers—and that would play out in later abolitionist movements. . . . A revealing study of the global dimensions of America’s war for independence.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Pearsall creates unique slices of life in each place, focusing on the history of each location, its culture, and the individuals involved in the uprising. The connections she reveals to the American Revolution are surprising and intriguing and will greatly alter readers’ understanding of the ideas that fueled American independence and the emerging nation’s influence on other lands.”
—Booklist

“Pearsall does not merely critique the founding or celebrate it. She enlarges it. . . . The book arrives at an ideal moment for this kind of historical widening. . . . What makes Freedom Round the Globe especially valuable right now is that it resists two temptations simultaneously: patriotic simplification and fashionable cynicism. The founders emerge neither as marble saints nor as cartoon villains. They become recognizable political actors inside a sprawling international crisis they only partly understood and certainly did not control. The Revolution itself remains enormously important. Pearsall simply restores the rest of the world to the picture. And perhaps that is what the best historical revisionism ultimately does.”
—Arkansas Democrat-Gazette