In the last public letter he wrote before his death in 1826,
Thomas Jefferson offered an expansive vision of the Declaration
of Independence, a document he had drafted half a century
before. As he declined an invitation to attend the commemoration
in Washington, D.C., of the fiftieth anniversary of American
independence, Jefferson called the Declaration “an instrument,
pregnant with our own and the fate of the world.” He
regretted that illness would keep him from a reunion with “the
remnant of that host of worthies, who joined with us on that
day, in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our
country, between submission or the sword.” He would have
“enjoyed with them the consolatory fact, that our fellow citi-
zens, after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue
to approve the choice we made. May it be to the world,
what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later,
but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the
chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had
persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings
and security of self government.”1
Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, two weeks after sending this
letter. He had written it in the tones of a prophetic utterance
surveying past and future from the very brink of death. He
surely intended the letter to be made public, and so it soon
was, in a Washington newspaper on his deathday. Yet this was
not the very last of Jefferson’s letters. A day after sending it on
June 24, 1826, he wrote two more, one to his business agent in
Richmond, Virginia, the other to a merchant in Baltimore, regarding
a shipment of French wine that had just arrived from
Marseilles and on which duty had to be paid.2
Jefferson’s last public thoughts may have treated the afterlife
of the American Revolution, but his last private instructions
concerned the stocking of his wine cellar. Both looked to the
future. Both also acknowledged that the young United States
was tied to a wider world, whether as an exporter of revolutionary
ideas or as an importer of luxury goods. As Jefferson
well knew, any independent country had to be an interdependent
country.
By the time of Jefferson’s death, “half a century of experience
and prosperity” had confirmed American independence as
a political fact. Fifty years earlier, the Declaration had announced
independence at a time when it had yet to be achieved
and when it was still under vigorous assault by Britain. For almost
four decades after 1776, Americans valued the successful
fact of that independence more than they did the specific document
that had declared it. It was only in the last decade of Jefferson’s
life that the Declaration began to be seen as the wellfounded
article of “American scripture” celebrated by Americans
every Fourth of July then and since.3
The Declaration of Independence may have acquired special
significance for Americans, but its power as a symbol was potentially
global in extent, as Jefferson’s prophecy in 1826 affirmed.
Even during the former president’s lifetime, the Declaration
had already become something more practical than a
symbol: it provided the model for similar documents around
the world that asserted the independence of other new states.
By the time Jefferson called the Declaration “an instrument
pregnant with . . . the fate of the world” in 1826, it had already
been joined by some twenty other declarations of independence
from Northern and Southern Europe, the Caribbean,
and Spanish America. Now, more than two centuries since
1776, over half the countries of the world have their own declarations
of independence.
Many of these documents drew directly on the American
Declaration for inspiration. They adopted and sometimes
adapted specific phrases from the Declaration. More often, they
took its structure as a model for their own. Many more such
declarations were written without the flattery of direct imitation.
All shared clear similarities, whether in their motivation,
in their language, or in their form, that make it possible to consider
them collectively and globally.
Before now, declarations of independence have not been
treated as a global phenomenon.4 The reasons for this are central
to the definition of independence itself. At root, independence
means political separation of the kind that the representatives
of the United States asserted against King George III in
1776. More broadly, independence implies national distinctiveness
and difference. Over time, separation and uniqueness
nourish a sense of exceptionalism, especially for a country like
the United States, born out of secession and endowed by its visionaries
with a mission in the world. The authors of the Declaration
had claimed independence only for themselves and not
for others. Their specific and particular idea of independence
would nonetheless assume near-universal significance in the
centuries after 1776 as the American example spread across the
world.
The American Declaration came to be seen as marking the
beginning of a history separate from other national or imperial
histories. Similarly, many other declarations of independence
throughout the world became the property of particular communities
that have celebrated their own declarations as charters
of a special standing in the world. Almost by definition, the
written embodiments of such exceptionalism are unlikely to be
compared with other, similar documents. So it has proved with
declarations of independence.
Multiple declarations of independence have been collected
for comparison on only two occasions. The first was in 1955, in
advance of a meeting of the Organization of American States in
Washington, D.C., when reproductions and translations of the
declarations of independence produced in the Americas and the
Caribbean between 1776 and 1898 were compiled into a single
volume.5 The second sprang indirectly from the commemoration
of the United States bicentennial in 1976, when scholars
published a collection of independence documents from around
the world that included declarations of independence as well as
various other instruments of independence, such as bilateral
agreements and legislative acts.6 Both these moments quickly
passed. The compilations they left behind apparently led to no
further reflection on what might be learned from considering
declarations of independence as a group and in the round.7
Many declarations of independence have given rise to their
own rich hinterlands of analysis and discussion. Most such
treatments have tended to address the documents’ immediate
origins rather than their place in longer, let alone broader, histories.
In this respect, the American Declaration is at once typical
and unusual. It is typical in that many scholars since the
nineteenth century have scrutinized its creation in the summer
of 1776 and its dissemination thereafter. Their work has revealed
a dizzying variety of possible sources for the Declaration’s
language and inspirations for its form, as well as a wealth
of information about how it was drafted, edited, and published.
Much of their work has debated the various European sources
for the Declaration’s statements concerning natural rights or
the right of revolution, whether in English political thought,
Scottish moral theory, or Swiss philosophy, for example.8 That
debate has concentrated mostly on the Declaration’s second
paragraph and its “self-evident” truths; it has not been broadened
to consider other elements in the Declaration, such as the
meaning of the independence it claimed for the United States.
Recovering that meaning will be a major concern of this book.
Americans have been exceptionally well informed about one
of the key documents in their national history. They have also
had the unique opportunity to learn just who in the United
States read the Declaration, how they interpreted it, and with
what political and legal consequences.9 No other declaration of
independence has had its domestic legacy traced so fully or so
revealingly. What Americans and others interested in the fate of
the Declaration have so far lacked is any systematic attempt to
trace its afterlife in the world beyond the United States.10
The Declaration of Independence is hardly alone among the
major landmarks of American history in lacking such a global
treatment of its legacy. America’s growing sense of self-sufficiency
and its apparent hegemony in world affairs for much of
the twentieth century have bred lasting strains of forgetfulness
and even ignorance about the American impact on the world
and, until recently, about the world’s impact on America. Many
other nations have suffered similar forms of historical amnesia
about their place in the world. The very prominence of the
United States in international affairs, however, makes resistance
to thinking of its history in global terms especially glaring. The
world beyond America has always shaped the United States—as
it also formed its pre-revolutionary colonial past—by immigration,
the spread of ideas, or the exchange of goods, and by almost
every other conceivable form of interaction over more
than four hundred years.11 The growing awareness of these interactions
in the past has spurred Americans and non-Americans
alike to “rethink American history in a global age.”12
Putting American history into global perspective in this way
can help to show that what we now call “globalization” is not a
novel condition. As one historian has recently written, the
move toward a global level of analysis “reveals the interconnec-
tedness and interdependence of political and social changes
across the world well before the onset of the contemporary
phase of ‘globalization’ after 1945.”13 It can also help us see that
globalization has not been a single, frictionless movement toward
planetary integration. Rather, it has moved in a series of
discontinuous and distinct phases that have unfolded at different
moments and in diverse places. Understanding globalization
in this way makes it harder to produce triumphalist narratives
of world history. It also makes it possible to compare
discrete phases of globalization to see what they had in common
as well as how they differed.14
This book, written in one moment of acute awareness about
globalization, is about another such moment, more than two
centuries ago. The generation of Europeans and Americans that
came of age in the decades before 1776 was almost the first in
human history to have ready access to a comprehensively global
vision of their place in the world. That vision was the product
of many linked developments: maritime exploration; the elaboration
of interoceanic trade; the spread of European empires in
the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans; the diffusion of maps,
histories, and travel accounts; and the ties created by the circulation
and exchange of goods and ideas. It had also been greatly
expanded by the titanic struggle between Britain and France
for imperial dominance across the globe, known to Americans
as the French and Indian War (1754–1763) and to Europeans as
the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), a conflict fought out over
four continents and across three oceans.15 The generation of
1776 thus grew up in a postwar world decisively shaped by imperial
rivalry and global competition.
That generation’s global vision was enshrined in the comprehensive
histories of European commerce and settlement that
burgeoned in the years around 1776: the Abbé Raynal’s Philosophical
and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans
in the East and West Indies (1770), Adam Smith’s Inquiry
into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), and
the Scottish historian William Robertson’s History of America
(1777), to name only the most notable. Edmund Burke ecstatically
wrote of Robertson’s History: “The Great Map of Mankind
is unrolld at once; and there is no state or Gradation of barbarism,
and no mode of refinement which we have not at the
same instant under our View.”16 Raynal strongly supported the
revolt of the British colonies. Smith published his work in part
as an intervention in the debate on the future of Britain’s “great
empire on the west side of the Atlantic. This empire, however,
has existed in imagination only.” In the closing pages of the
Wealth of Nations, Smith demanded that “this golden dream” of
empire be either realized or abandoned entirely.17 For Robertson,
American independence definitively marked the end of
that dream. He brought his History to an abrupt end with the
loss of the American colonies: as he lamented in 1784, “alas
America is now lost to the Empire and to me, and what would
have been a good introduction to the settlement of British
Colonies, will suit very ill the establishment of Independant
States.”18
The global connections portrayed in the great commercial
and oceanic histories by Raynal, Smith, and Robertson had
come home forcefully to the American colonists in the course
of the imperial crisis of the 1770s. The fortunes of Virginia
planters and Boston merchants were bound up with the fate of
the English East India Company in South Asia by great skeins of
credit and debt that ran through banks in London and Glasgow,
as well as by the circuits of trade that brought China tea in East
India Company ships to Boston harbor in December 1773 under
terms set by the Westminster Parliament. The origins of
the American Revolution cannot be fully understood without
an appreciation of the worldwide webs within which the colonists
were enmeshed in the years leading up to 1776.19
Traces of both anxiety and excitement about those connections—
were they chains or links, shackles or bonds?—can be
found even in the Declaration when it announced the states’ intention
to enter the international system on equal terms with
the other “Powers of Earth.” These thickening global connections,
and the decisive shifts in the European state system and
in the balance of power within the Atlantic world that they
brought in their wake, challenged contemporaries to understand
their world in innovative ways. In this context, it seems
to be more than just a coincidence that the English legal philosopher
Jeremy Bentham found it necessary in 1780—during the
crisis of the American War—to coin “the word international
. . . a new one, though, it is hoped, sufficiently analogous and
intelligible,” to describe “the mutual transactions between sovereigns
as such” that he encompassed under the neologism “international
law.”20
Every generation gets the Declaration of Independence it deserves.
Our own global moment merits a global history of the
Declaration. Such a history can be pursued from the outside in,
to bring universal perspectives to bear on particular moments,
places, persons, or objects. It can also be written from the inside
out, from the local and specific to the worldwide and the
general. These approaches are not competing but complementary;
indeed, each would be impossible without the other. One
can find what a near-contemporary of the Declaration, the English
poet William Blake, called “a world in a grain of sand.” In
the case of the Declaration, this means the traces of a wider
world embedded in one relatively brief and pungent document.
That document took on a life of its own as it circulated at home
and abroad: out of its travels emerged another kind of global
history, the history of its dissemination and reception. That
history in turn spawned imitations and analogues of the Declaration.
A global history can also be written from the patterns
revealed by the emergence and accumulation of other declarations
of independence. In this book, I pursue all three approaches
to the global history of the Declaration of Independence
as I examine successively the evidence of the world in
the Declaration, the Declaration’s fortunes in the late eighteenth-
and early nineteenth-century world, and the myriad
declarations of independence produced since 1776. The Declaration
of Independence cannot help looking different when it is
put into such multiple global perspectives.
No single document is so bound up with what it means to be
an American and few words can sum up the American creed as
succinctly as “the rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
Yet even in its earliest material forms, the Declaration
offered evidence of connections with a wider world. It first
appeared in print on July 5, 1776, as a single-sheet broadside
for distribution and display. The printer of this version of
the Declaration was a native Irishman, twenty-nine-year-old
John Dunlap, who had migrated to Philadelphia from Strabane,
County Tyrone, in 1757.21 He printed most of the copies on
Dutch paper that had been brought from England, the source
of much of the colonies’ paper in this period; his printing press
and the type he used in it would probably also have been imported
from Britain.22
The Declaration would not be signed until late July and early
August 1776. Fifty-five delegates to Congress—nine of whom
had been born in Britain or Ireland, and over a dozen educated
outside the colonies, in England, Scotland, and France—put
their signatures to the engrossed manuscript copy of the Declaration.
They did so using an inkstand fashioned by another
Irishman, Philip Syng, Jr., out of silver that would have been
mined in Mexico or Peru.23
The earliest public versions of the Declaration thus arose
from the intersections of politics and printing, the migration of
individuals and the movement of goods, around an Atlantic
world that over the course of the eighteenth century increasingly
linked Europe, Africa, and the Americas into a single economic
and cultural system. If such traces of the world beyond
the North American colonies can be discovered in a document
vested with so much significance as an icon of Americanness,
then surely similar vestiges can be found throughout the various
materials out of which American history is built.
I treat the Declaration of Independence variously as an
event, a document, and the beginning of a genre. In the words
of Carl Becker, one of its earliest students, the Declaration
as an “event” was “the culmination of a series of revolutionary
activities” expressed in the “document in which that event
was proclaimed and justified to the world.”24 The Declaration’s
global history did not end—indeed, it had barely begun—in
July 1776. The document inaugurated a genre of political writing
that has persisted to the present day. By “genre” I mean a
distinct but repeatable structure of argument and literary form.
Similar documents, whether or not they are consciously or directly
indebted to a specific original, become instances of such
a genre. Literary genres can be as strict as a sonnet or as loose
as a novel; utopias and constitutions, declarations of rights and
declarations of independence, are among similar genres of political
writing. They supply the forms that capture, and allow us
to comprehend and criticize, similar ideas and events. They
provide the recurring shapes assumed by documents arising
from comparable circumstances.25 Genres are born. They break
apart and recombine with elements of other genres. Sometimes
they die. Like the ideas they contain, they are both movable and
mutable, and they do not recognize national borders.
The Declaration marked the birth of a new genre of political
writing. Part of its genius—and a major reason for its later
success as a model for other declarations—was its generic promiscuity.
It combined elements of what would become three
distinguishable genres: a declaration of independence, a declaration
of rights, and a manifesto. The opening and closing paragraphs
of the Declaration—beginning, respectively, “When in
the Course of human Events . . .” and “We, therefore, the Representatives
of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA . . .”—
made up the declaration of independence itself. The second
paragraph, starting with the still more famous words “We hold
these Truths to be self-evident,” was closer to what would be
recognized as a declaration of rights, especially in the wake of
the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of
1789.26 Finally, the list of grievances that made up the bulk of
the Declaration had the features of a manifesto that publicly explained
to the world the grounds for a revolutionary action.27
After its publication, the Declaration rapidly entered national
and international circuits of exchange. Copies passed
from hand to hand, desk to desk, country to country, often
with (to us) remarkable speed, but sometimes with perhaps less
surprising inefficiency and mishap. To some, the Declaration
could easily be ignored, while others sought it out, pored over
it, or painstakingly translated it out of its original language. To
yet others, it was a subversive document in an age when treason
and revolution could be ignited by papers as readily as by
rebels. “The independence of the Anglo-Americans is the event
most likely to accelerate the revolution that must bring happiness
on earth,” remarked the French royal censor the Abbé
Genty in 1787: “In the bosom of this new republic are the true
treasures that will enrich the world.”28 As if to fulfill this prophecy,
for more than two centuries the Declaration provided others
with just the template they would need to communicate
their own political intentions to “a candid World.”
Once the Declaration had embarked upon this international
career, it broke loose from the circumstances of its birth. It
took on a life of its own and became the model for what would
in time become a global genre. No document before 1776 had
ever been called a declaration of independence; in fact, the
Declaration itself did not carry that title, nor did the word “independence”
appear anywhere in its text. For months before
July 1776, however, contemporaries had been speaking of the
need for “an independency,” a “declaration of independency,” or
a “declaration of independence.” On July 8, 1776, Jefferson
sent “a copy of the declaration of independence” to his fellow
Virginian Richard Henry Lee.29 There could be no doubt, then,
that the document issued by the Continental Congress and
dated July 4, 1776, was a “declaration” (as it called itself, in
both its printed and manuscript versions), and that what it declared,
first and foremost, was “independence.” Once it had
done so, and after it had traveled far and wide as a document, it
could be imitated, plundered, and paralleled by the many other
documents that constitute the genre of declarations of independence.
Urgent international pressures had compelled Congress to
issue a declaration in the early summer of 1776. Accordingly,
the Declaration reflected a range of concerns about security,
defense, commerce, and immigration. As a document that announced
the transformation of thirteen united colonies into the
“United States of America,” the Declaration marked the entry
of those states into what would now be called international society.
Its authors addressed it to “the Opinions of Mankind” in
diplomatic and legal language designed to render it acceptable
to its audience beyond America. The Declaration thereby reflected
changing conceptions of the international community of
the Atlantic world. It helped to change that community by expanding
its boundaries westward into North America and by
opening American commerce to a wider world outside the limits
previously set to it by the laws of the British Empire.
The American Declaration, like its successor declarations,
was a document of state-making, not of nation-formation. It
declared that what had formerly been dependent colonies within
the British Empire were now independent states outside that
empire’s authority. It did so without mentioning “Americans”
or using the word “nation.” Instead, it concentrated on the
emergence of “one People” assuming a separate and equal station
“among the Powers of the Earth” and declared that “these
United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, FREE AND
INDEPENDENT STATES.” The Declaration’s statements regarding
rights to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”
were strictly subordinate to these claims regarding the rights of
states, and were taken to be so by contemporaries, when they
deigned to notice the assertions of individual rights at all. Thus
a contemporary report in August 1776 noted that when the
Declaration was first read out to the Continental troops at
Ticonderoga, in western Pennsylvania, “the language of every
man’s countenance was, Now we are a people! We have a name
among the states of this world!” The first loyalty oath issued by
the new United States similarly asked officials to “acknowledge
the UNITED STATES of AMERICA to be Free, Independent
and Sovereign States, and declare that the people thereof owe
no allegiance or obedience to George the Third, King of Great-
Britain.”30
American and foreign audiences found many different meanings
in the Declaration during the decades immediately following
1776. Shifting international contexts in those years—of
war, revolution, and state-formation—helped to change even
the American understanding of the Declaration’s central message
from an assertion of statehood to a declaration of individual
rights. Meanwhile, the circulation of the Declaration outside
the United States encouraged a wider debate about the
rights of states—especially new states, like the United States—
to enter the international arena. The claims regarding individual
rights in the Declaration’s second paragraph played little
part in these broader discussions. They would not be seen as
crucial to the Declaration’s meaning for an international audience
until the advent of a global rights movement in the second
half of the twentieth century.
The Declaration’s enumeration of the rights of the former
colonies “to do all [the] Acts and Things which INDEPENDENT
STATES may of right do” drew attention to features of
the state within the international realm. The conception of the
state found in the Declaration was Janus-faced, as it is in most
standard definitions of the state, classically encapsulated in the
1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of
States as the possession of a permanent population, a defined
territory, and a government, and the capacity to enter into relations
with other states.31
The Declaration affirmed the existence of a population (“one
People”) and implied a form of government, but it did not
define a territory. Instead, it stressed firmly the capacities of
the United States as international actors alongside other such
actors. My analysis in this book will follow this emphasis in
the Declaration by highlighting the outward-looking rather
than the inward-looking face of the state. Thus I downplay nations—
as well as nationalism and national identity—in pursuit
of a history concerning the relations of states with other states:
how they have been created, by what criteria they have been
recognized, and what the consequences of their proliferation
have been.
States were not always the primary units of global politics
that they had become by the latter half of the twentieth century.
They faced competition from both larger and less well integrated
political organizations in the form of empires.32 In the
last quarter-century, states have been rapidly outnumbered by
proliferating nongovernmental organizations and multinational
corporations.33 They have also often had to confront challenges
from substate groups or peoples claiming to be nations, in the
sense of cultural communities based on the mutual recognition
of commonality among their members. Yet we should not fall
into the nationalist assumption of identifying states with nations
as “nation-states.” As Ernest Gellner has noted, “nations, like
states, are a contingency, and not a universal necessity. . . .
Moreover, nations and states are not the same contingency. . . .
The state has certainly emerged without the nation. Some nations
have certainly emerged without the blessings of their own
state.”34
The story of how the world came to be so thickly populated
with states has hardly begun to be told.35 Assembling and analyzing
declarations of independence is an economical way to
sketch the outlines of that much grander narrative. In order to
assert their own statehood, most of the world’s present-day
states had at some point in the last two centuries declared their
independence of the larger units that had once contained them.
They sought confirmation of their standing alongside other
such states by justifying their secession and, in some cases, their
recombination with other territories and peoples. In short,
they declared their possession of sovereignty, both internally,
over all their own people, and externally, against all other states
and peoples. More than one hundred declarations of independence
have been issued since 1776, indicating a great political
transformation of the last two centuries: the gradual emer-
gence of a world—our world—of states from an earlier world
dominated by empires. Considered in a series and as a genre,
those declarations point up the stages of that epochal transition
better than any other set of historical documents can.
The primary purpose of the American Declaration, like that
of most declarations of independence that have been issued
since 1776, was to express the international legal sovereignty
of the United States. Thus Jefferson recalled in May 1825 that
an appeal to the tribunal of the world was deemed proper
for our justification. This was the object of the Declaration
of Independence. Not to find out new principles, or new
arguments never before thought of, not merely to say
things which had never been said before; but to place before
mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms
so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify
ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to
take. Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment,
nor yet copied from any particular and previous
writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American
mind.36
Jefferson was perhaps too modest in his assessment. The
Declaration was innovative in two ways that would have farreaching
consequences. First, it introduced “the United States
of America” to the world; second, it inaugurated the very genre
of a declaration of independence. No previous public document
had used the name “the United States of America”: in the
months immediately before July 4, 1776, and even within the
text of the Declaration itself, the political bodies represented at
the Continental Congress had been generally called the “United
Colonies.”37 Yet the earliest printed text of the document was
explicitly called “A Declaration By the Representatives of the
United States of America, in General Congress Assembled.”
John Dunlap’s broadside highlighted only three terms in
its main text by means of capital letters: “the UNITED
STATES OF AMERICA” in “GENERAL CONGRESS” assembled
as they declared themselves to be “FREE AND INDEPENDENT
STATES.” The formal manuscript copy of the Declaration
produced later in July 1776 to be signed by all the
delegates highlighted these same words. They appear in a distinctive
italic script that draws attention to their significance.
So faded is this manuscript of the Declaration now on display at
the National Archives in Washington, D.C., that these are almost
the only clearly legible parts of the text. That is only appropriate,
for these words made up the central message of the
Declaration as an assertion of sovereignty as independence.
This is what the Declaration of Independence declared: that
the former United Colonies were now “the United States of
America” because they were “free and independent states.” No
document in world history before 1776 had made such an announcement
of statehood in the language of independence. A
great many later documents would do just that. Indeed, the
global history of the two centuries after 1776 would show that
creating the flexible instrument with which others could declare
their independence proved to be as momentous an innovation
in its own way as ushering “the United States of America”
onto the world stage in July 1776 had been.
