Sarah M. S. Pearsall — Freedom Round the Globe
Historian Sarah Pearsall presents a world history of the American Revolution — tracing how the conflict's ideas about liberty, sovereignty, and rights ricocheted across five continents.
Why we picked this
Pearsall teaches at Cambridge and writes American history from the outside — her global frame recovers how the Revolution looked to people in the Caribbean, South Asia, and West Africa who were not invited to share its freedoms.
Sarah M. S. Pearsall, a historian at Cambridge University who has spent her career examining how American history looks when viewed from outside its own borders, presents Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution. The book traces how the ideas articulated in Philadelphia in 1776 — about natural rights, popular sovereignty, and the legitimacy of rebellion — were received, adapted, feared, and contested across the globe, from the Caribbean plantation colonies to the courts of Europe to South Asian territories under British rule.
The global frame is not cosmetic: Pearsall shows how the Revolution’s promises of freedom looked to people who were explicitly excluded from them, and how enslaved people, colonized subjects, and women made arguments derived from the Revolution’s own logic to demand the rights it denied them. The result is a history that takes the founding ideals seriously enough to trace their consequences for everyone, not just the people who made them.
This event arrives in DC’s anniversary season with a perspective that the official commemorations are unlikely to supply. For anyone who wants to understand the Revolution as a world-historical event rather than a national origin story, Pearsall’s scholarly account — made accessible at a public book event — is the right starting point.