Professor David Armitage on the 1688 & 1776 connections - "move beyond nationalist paradigms"

I saw this Zoom broadcast, hosted by the National Army Museum in London, back in April of this year. Professor David Armitage (Harvard webpage here) makes a number of critical points here. I've lifted these from the YouTube transcript, but do listen to the whole for proper context.

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From 3:00 –

"... it's very useful indeed and very important historically to reconsider the war of independence as a Civil War and I think that's for three reasons - I'm sure my fellow panelists will have others to add to these.

The first is that it returns the War of Independence to its full British transatlantic and imperial context by thinking of the commonalities on both sides of the Atlantic and indeed around the Atlantic that framed and shaped the course of the War of Independence;

secondly it liberates the War of Independence from a nationalist teleology that was imposed back upon those events particularly from the 19th century making it an event in the history of the United States even before the United States existed, but more importantly in this context, it restores the very deep divisions that characterise the war itself within North America but also again within the British Empire and in Britain itself, and also reminds us of the often terrible violence that took place during the war of independence something that later nationalist accounts tended to gloss over;

and thirdly and finally I think it's historically important to rethink it rethink the War of Independence as a civil war because that those are exactly the terms that contemporaries used to describe it, for example the very first Declaration from the Second Continental Congress in July 1775 the Declaration on taking up arms said that the American cause was not to declare independence but rather to save the Empire from the calamities of Civil War and very similarly the official British government response to the Declaration of Independence accused the Americans themselves of fomenting Civil War ..."

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From 14:16 –

"... the overall way to think about this is again not in the terms of the nationalist narrative which effectively tells the story of the American Revolution as a crisis of disintegration - as it were proto Americans discovering their own identity attached themselves to a certain set of values which then they put into practice against the predatory invasions of Ministry, Parliament and the Crown - we should think of it in in fact in the exactly the opposite way, as a crisis of integration. By the 1760s and 1770s most of the white colonists in the 13 colonies and indeed the other British colonies on the western side of the Atlantic thought of themselves as more British in their mores in their attachment to common law in the way in which they organised property relations but also in the ways in which they were for example bound together by the fruits of a modernising consumer revolution ..."

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From 48:00 –

“... this is also relevant to the ideological context for the colonies going all the way back to the attachment of Britons, the common attachment of Britons as Britons, to what they saw as their peculiar inheritance of civil liberty guaranteed by the Revolutionary settlement of 1688 to 1689 - so as well as expanding our geographical range to see the American crisis in a global context we also need to pull out the temporal context and take it all the way back to 1688-89 to see how debates about civil liberty, the definitions of those, how they're related to conceptions of consent, of representation of parliament ..."

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