Overview

In The Idea of Europe and the Origins of the American Revolution, Dan Robinson presents a new history of politics in colonial America and the imperial crisis, tracing how ideas of Europe and Europeanness shaped British-American political culture. Reconstructing colonial debates about the European states system, European civilisation, and Britain's position within both, Robinson shows how these concerns informed colonial attitudes towards American identity and America's place inside - and, ultimately, outside - the emerging British Empire. Taking in more than two centuries of Atlantic history, he explores the way in which colonists inherited and adapted Anglo-British traditions of thinking about international politics, how they navigated imperial politics during the European wars of 1740-1763, and how the burgeoning patriot movement negotiated the dual crisis of Europe and Empire in the between 1763 and 1775. In the process, Robinson sheds new light on the development of public politics in colonial America, the Anglicisation/Americanisation debate, the political economy of empire, early American art and poetry, eighteenth-century geopolitical thinking, and the relationship between international affairs, nationalism, and revolution. What emerges from this story is an American Revolution that seems both decidedly arcane and strikingly relevant to the political challenges of the twenty-first century.

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9780198862925

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The book's main takeaway is that domestic and international politics were as linked in the lead up to 1776 as they are today. That is a point that many other historians have made. It is without question correct. * Eliga Gould, The Journal of the Social History Society * Yet if Robinson had attempted to deal with any more currents of thought with the rigor with which he has approached The Idea of Europe and the Origins of the American Revolution, he would have needed to fill many more volumes. For the sheer ambition of this work's archival research it should feature regularly on undergraduate and postgraduate eighteenth-century North American history book lists. Established academics, independent scholars, and all those interested in the prerevolutionary debates should also read this book. It offers a genuinely fresh perspective, and a convincing one at that. * Tristan Stubbs, H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online * Robinson brings new perspective to the importance of Europe as an influence on the early American revolutionary movement. * M. A. Byron, CHOICE *

Yet if Robinson had attempted to deal with any more currents of thought with the rigor with which he has approached The Idea of Europe and the Origins of the American Revolution, he would have needed to fill many more volumes. For the sheer ambition of this work's archival research it should feature regularly on undergraduate and postgraduate eighteenth-century North American history book lists. Established academics, independent scholars, and all those interested in the prerevolutionary debates should also read this book. It offers a genuinely fresh perspective, and a convincing one at that. * Tristan Stubbs, H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online * Robinson brings new perspective to the importance of Europe as an influence on the early American revolutionary movement. * M. A. Byron, CHOICE *

Robinson brings new perspective to the importance of Europe as an influence on the early American revolutionary movement. * M. A. Byron, CHOICE *

Author Information

Born in Northumberland, D. H. Robinson earned his bachelor's and doctoral degrees at Peterhouse, Cambridge, before becoming a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He served as Senior Policy Advisor at the Cabinet Office in Theresa May's government. In both academia and public policy, his work has explored unionism, separatism, and the idea of Europe in the English-speaking world.

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