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The Declaration of Independence: A Global History
In a stunningly original look at the American Declaration of Independence, David Armitage reveals the document in a new light: through the eyes of the rest of the world. Not only did the Declaration announce the entry of the United States onto the world stage, it became the model for other countries to follow.
Armitage examines the Declaration as a political, legal, and intellectual document, and is the first to treat it entirely within a broad international framework. He shows how the Declaration arose within a global moment in the late eighteenth century similar to our own. He uses over one hundred declarations of independence written since 1776 to show the influence and role the U.S. Declaration has played in creating a world of states out of a world of empires. He discusses why the framers' language of natural rights did not resonate in Britain, how the document was interpreted in the rest of the world, whether the Declaration established a new nation or a collection of states, and where and how the Declaration has had an overt influence on independence movements--from Haiti to Vietnam, and from Venezuela to Rhodesia.
Included is the text of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and sample declarations from around the world. An eye-opening list of declarations of independence since 1776 is compiled here for the first time. This unique global perspective demonstrates the singular role of the United States document as a founding statement of our modern world.
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First published January 1, 2007
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About the author
David Armitage
53 books47 followersDavid Armitage is an English historian known for his writings on international and intellectual history. He is chair of the history department and Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
December 9, 2023
I actually really LOVED this book. It was for school and I procrastinated so I had to power through it in a night but I genuinely might go back and read it again. I didn’t know the Declaration of Independence had an entire books worth of things to say about it but I am now so much more appreciative of that founding document and this book articulated it so well. My prof that assigned it also was the author’s colleague at Harvard and she told us he was British which I think makes this book better because you know he’s not American biased and is truly touching on their genius.
April 1, 2014
The late 18th century was not altogether different from the early 21st century, as it turns out. Both were moments “of acute awareness about globalization.” People living during the revolutionary years in British North America thought of themselves as living in an interconnected world, and they believed their Declaration of Independence had importance on a global scale. As Armitage points out in his book, however, scholars have tended to consider the American declaration and others like it as unique to their states of origin, as “written embodiments of…exceptionalism.” The time is ripe, therefore, to “rethink American history in a global age,” and attempt to recapture the global intentions and global repercussions of the United States’ founding document.
Armitage treats the declaration like the birth of a genre. Thinking of ideas in this manner – as a particular artistic style, or a template – makes their adaptation seem less like the copying of brilliance and more like a shared global project. The Americans created “the flexible instrument” of the genre, and subsequent peoples used it in their unique circumstances. Plus, the unique context of the American Declaration of Independence is vital to understanding it. Thomas Jefferson and his fellow delegates in Philadelphia did not invent the declaration because they were geniuses, or because they loved liberty in a way that other people did not. The flexible instrument was born because the specific political circumstances in which the American Revolution took place convinced those delegates (and other people) that some kind of official statement was necessary. So they improvised one. Furthermore, no matter how brilliant and freedom loving other people around the world may have been, this genre was much more likely to arise first in the Atlantic World than anywhere else. A sort of geopolitical perfect storm was necessary – a situation in which one people felt the need to create a new state, had a group of other independent states nearby to whom they could apply for assistance, and so felt the need to put their assertions in writing for the judgment of this “candid world.”
Armitage closes the book with a dozen or so declarations of independence from around the world, from the USA, to Haiti to Venezuela in the early 19th century, to Vietnam and Rhodesia in the mid-20th century. These are a little boring to just plow through, but the differences do turn out to be pretty interesting. Maybe you should just skim them.
Armitage treats the declaration like the birth of a genre. Thinking of ideas in this manner – as a particular artistic style, or a template – makes their adaptation seem less like the copying of brilliance and more like a shared global project. The Americans created “the flexible instrument” of the genre, and subsequent peoples used it in their unique circumstances. Plus, the unique context of the American Declaration of Independence is vital to understanding it. Thomas Jefferson and his fellow delegates in Philadelphia did not invent the declaration because they were geniuses, or because they loved liberty in a way that other people did not. The flexible instrument was born because the specific political circumstances in which the American Revolution took place convinced those delegates (and other people) that some kind of official statement was necessary. So they improvised one. Furthermore, no matter how brilliant and freedom loving other people around the world may have been, this genre was much more likely to arise first in the Atlantic World than anywhere else. A sort of geopolitical perfect storm was necessary – a situation in which one people felt the need to create a new state, had a group of other independent states nearby to whom they could apply for assistance, and so felt the need to put their assertions in writing for the judgment of this “candid world.”
Armitage closes the book with a dozen or so declarations of independence from around the world, from the USA, to Haiti to Venezuela in the early 19th century, to Vietnam and Rhodesia in the mid-20th century. These are a little boring to just plow through, but the differences do turn out to be pretty interesting. Maybe you should just skim them.
March 19, 2013
This is an excellent contribution to the literature on the Declaration of Independence. David Armitage is an accomplished historian of the early modern Atlantic world, and his understanding of an emerging body of international law and norms helps him to place the Declaration in that context. Reading the first paragraph of the Declaration, Armitage sees "a set of assumptions about eighteenth-century international politics." He goes on to cite the work of natural law/international law theorists like Emerich de Vattel, who codified this set of assumptions which were to structure the development of an international community of states. This places phrases like "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" in context with the Declaration's concluding paragraph which claims the colonies to be "FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES".
In addition to this, Armitage makes available, as an appendix, a response by Jeremy Bentham to the Declaration. It should be of no surprise that Bentham - who dismissed the natural rights claimed in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man as "nonsense on stilts" - has no use for the Declaration's proposition that "all men are created equal". It is surprising to see Bentham categorize Jefferson's claim as religious fanaticism.
In addition to this, Armitage makes available, as an appendix, a response by Jeremy Bentham to the Declaration. It should be of no surprise that Bentham - who dismissed the natural rights claimed in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man as "nonsense on stilts" - has no use for the Declaration's proposition that "all men are created equal". It is surprising to see Bentham categorize Jefferson's claim as religious fanaticism.
February 3, 2024
Armitage attempts to explain the "great political transformation of the last two centuries: the gradual emergence of a world - our world - of states from an earlier world dominated by empires" (20-21). He does so by looking at the American Declaration of Independence, and its impact on world history. The Declaration can be analyzed from a global perspective in three ways: 1) the inside-out approach, looking at "the world in the declaration"; 2) the outside-in approach, looking at the way that the declaration was received by the wider world of contemporaries or "the declaration in the world"; 3) a history of the "world of declarations," the history "revealed by the emergence and accumulations of other declarations of independence" (11-12, also chapter headings). Through his analysis of the Declaration and its impact, Armitage argues that "the origins of our modern world of states can be traced back to the Americas and, in particular, the American Revolution" (138).
The Declaration marked an important change in international law, from a focus on natural law to one based in positive law (85, 89-90). The key thinker in this transformation, according to Armitage, was Emer de Vattel, who in 1758 published his Le Droit des Gens (The Law of Nations). "Vattel made independence fundamental to his definition of statehood," Armitage writes, and "the authors of the American Declaration would soon adopt this... as the conception of their own states' condition" (39, 40). The Declaration was therefore the first document in world history to announce statehood in the language of independence (22-23; 137). The success of the American Independence movement made this idea especially influential (87). The Revolution was "the first outbreak of a contagion of sovereignty" that afterward swept the world (103). In this way, the Declaration embodied and enacted a transformation in the language of sovereignty, one which drew upon Vattel and argued that independence and formal equality among states were central. These ideas acquired political legitimacy in the crucible of the Revolution, and that legitimacy allowed them to spread, to create a world of declarations and of states.
My problem with this argument is in the question itself. Armitage intends to explain the transformation from the world of empires to the world of states. But surely empires are a form of state? In their influential Empires in World History, Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper distinguish between empires, which "presume that different people within the polity will be governed differently" (and which they acknowledge as a kind of state) and nation-states, which are "based on the idea of a single people in a single territory." The key difference is that "the nation-state proclaims the commonality of its people - even if the reality is more complicated - while the empire-state declares the non-equivalence of multiple populations" (Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History, 8).
Armitage is careful throughout to say that he is not interested in nations (which, he points out, are far more numerous than states) and instead is solely focused on states (17, 20, 106). But what then is the difference? Armitage argues that:
Imperialism for Armitage is therefore about interference and hierarchy, whereas statehood is about internal autonomy and external equality. But this framing presumes a difference (perhaps a national difference?) between imperial components vis-a-vis states, which presumably understand themselves to be internally homogenous, at least to the extent that people within them generally acknowledge themselves to be within a state's "internal affairs" (rather than seeing the state as an external other). How do people determine whether the state is theirs or not? In the American case the inhabitants of the 13 colonies had long conceived of themselves as British subjects, but in the 1760s came to see themselves as other in response to the actions of the Tory ministry in London. Rather than empire itself being in tension with statehood, colonists saw themselves pre-1760 as part of the British community whose interests the (imperial) state served. What made independence imaginable was the breakdown of that belief.
The breakdown of a handful of world-girdling imperial states into our present panoply of nation-states is a compelling question. But Armitage stumbles at the outset by distinguishing between empire, state, and nation in such a way that any transformation is difficult to grasp. If empires are states - as surely contemporaries, including Vattel, would have argued - then Armitage's research question about the transition from a world of empires to a world of states makes no sense. The notion of "state" in Armitage cries out for some modifier to distinguish it from imperial-states, and it seems likely that the best modifier would be nation, but he spurns that category and muddies the waters.
Armitage's more micro-claims about the Declaration as a document embodying Vattelian ideas of statehood-as-independence, about its reception abroad, and its impact on later Declarations, and its essential character as an international document as opposed to a document centrally concerned with human rights, are interesting and well researched. But the study as a whole does not answer its key question.
The Declaration marked an important change in international law, from a focus on natural law to one based in positive law (85, 89-90). The key thinker in this transformation, according to Armitage, was Emer de Vattel, who in 1758 published his Le Droit des Gens (The Law of Nations). "Vattel made independence fundamental to his definition of statehood," Armitage writes, and "the authors of the American Declaration would soon adopt this... as the conception of their own states' condition" (39, 40). The Declaration was therefore the first document in world history to announce statehood in the language of independence (22-23; 137). The success of the American Independence movement made this idea especially influential (87). The Revolution was "the first outbreak of a contagion of sovereignty" that afterward swept the world (103). In this way, the Declaration embodied and enacted a transformation in the language of sovereignty, one which drew upon Vattel and argued that independence and formal equality among states were central. These ideas acquired political legitimacy in the crucible of the Revolution, and that legitimacy allowed them to spread, to create a world of declarations and of states.
My problem with this argument is in the question itself. Armitage intends to explain the transformation from the world of empires to the world of states. But surely empires are a form of state? In their influential Empires in World History, Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper distinguish between empires, which "presume that different people within the polity will be governed differently" (and which they acknowledge as a kind of state) and nation-states, which are "based on the idea of a single people in a single territory." The key difference is that "the nation-state proclaims the commonality of its people - even if the reality is more complicated - while the empire-state declares the non-equivalence of multiple populations" (Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History, 8).
Armitage is careful throughout to say that he is not interested in nations (which, he points out, are far more numerous than states) and instead is solely focused on states (17, 20, 106). But what then is the difference? Armitage argues that:
states made empires, and empires dissolved into states. Empires are structures of political and economic interference that organize their component parts hierarchically. They thus represent the major conditions that statehood is designed to escape. Statehood implies the absence of external interference in internal affairs, as well as formal equality in relations with other states. (106-7)
Imperialism for Armitage is therefore about interference and hierarchy, whereas statehood is about internal autonomy and external equality. But this framing presumes a difference (perhaps a national difference?) between imperial components vis-a-vis states, which presumably understand themselves to be internally homogenous, at least to the extent that people within them generally acknowledge themselves to be within a state's "internal affairs" (rather than seeing the state as an external other). How do people determine whether the state is theirs or not? In the American case the inhabitants of the 13 colonies had long conceived of themselves as British subjects, but in the 1760s came to see themselves as other in response to the actions of the Tory ministry in London. Rather than empire itself being in tension with statehood, colonists saw themselves pre-1760 as part of the British community whose interests the (imperial) state served. What made independence imaginable was the breakdown of that belief.
The breakdown of a handful of world-girdling imperial states into our present panoply of nation-states is a compelling question. But Armitage stumbles at the outset by distinguishing between empire, state, and nation in such a way that any transformation is difficult to grasp. If empires are states - as surely contemporaries, including Vattel, would have argued - then Armitage's research question about the transition from a world of empires to a world of states makes no sense. The notion of "state" in Armitage cries out for some modifier to distinguish it from imperial-states, and it seems likely that the best modifier would be nation, but he spurns that category and muddies the waters.
Armitage's more micro-claims about the Declaration as a document embodying Vattelian ideas of statehood-as-independence, about its reception abroad, and its impact on later Declarations, and its essential character as an international document as opposed to a document centrally concerned with human rights, are interesting and well researched. But the study as a whole does not answer its key question.
November 8, 2012
Had to read it for class, won't hide that fact. Also had to write a paper using this as a source. Other than that I wouldn't have read it. His argument came across as confusing at first.
March 1, 2021
Required reading for a graduate seminar, Historians debate the American Revolution.
April 12, 2025
I had a chance to hear the author lecture on this book about the Declaration of Independence prior to reading it. In 1776, this was a new concept to lay out grievances against the parent country, assert individual rights, and declare oneself an independent state.
This document has gone on to be either the source document or at least a major reference work for dozens of other independence movements around the world in the centuries since its adoption. He posits that it was written for that purpose - to be understood by other nations and serve as a means by them to recognize the USA as an independent nation.
This document has gone on to be either the source document or at least a major reference work for dozens of other independence movements around the world in the centuries since its adoption. He posits that it was written for that purpose - to be understood by other nations and serve as a means by them to recognize the USA as an independent nation.
October 2, 2022
Loved the tracing and tying of all of the various Declarations of Independence to the United States' declaration. The book also discusses the 4 eras of Declarations and their ties back to the United States' declaration, as well as discussing the various parts and meaning throughout the whole. A very interesting read if you want to explore the effects of the United States' declaration on the world.
August 10, 2025
Foundational background of the American declaration and the document in the context of global history. Dr. Armitage writes with authority and insight. Any political science or Government teacher should be reading this book for the context. The literature that the rebellious colonists were reading and discussing were crucial to the words they chose in this pivotal document.
August 28, 2008
While this book was interesting as it discussed how novel the Declaration of Independence was, the impact it had on the world, and the ins-and-outs of how independence is declared and acknowledged, it was lacking. It was lacking the foundational principles that people have unalienable rights that exist regardless of government. That government is instituted by a group of people to protect those rights. That people can and should modify or abolish government when it oversteps the bounds of protecting their unalienable rights. And that the Founding Fathers felt very strongly about those principles. It felt like he was trying to get me used to the idea of Globalism by really stressing that the world is fragmented into many independent states that could easily be united in a United States of the World. But I could have been reading too much into his words, he might not have been saying anysuchthing. I still recommend this book to everyone to read. It is worthwhile and provides lots of material for reflection and discussion.
January 16, 2014
Considers the Declaration of Independence as a Global Document. Rather than a call to arms for a domestic audience, it was a declaration of not just independence but interdependence, a statement of the colonies' place among the Atlantic Powers, and to some degree a plea for recognition and aid from France, Spain, and the Dutch. Most interesting is a collection of primary documents toward the end of this brief book, including Jeremy Bentham's condescending dismissal of the Declaration wherein he defies anyone to explain the difference between the laws of nature and the laws of nature's god. Armitage sees the US D of I as beginning a 'genre' of Declaration writing. Ultimately, the US document is pretty toothless compared to Haiti's (hatred of France is our principle, let any son of France who wants to die come to our shores, etc), and a lot gutsier than Czechoslovakia's desperation (we promise to be the best republic you ever seen mister). Short, interesting, oddly shaped, this little book has it all.
December 5, 2008
Dry but interesting. Not for the faint of heart. This non-fiction book had some interesting history facts, but read more like a long, rambling lecture by a really old college prof that "loved" the topic just a little too much. I love history, but I had to keep putting it down, it kept putting me to sleep.
August 7, 2009
I only got halfway through this book. The author has a unique gift of transforming an interesting and provoking premise into dull prose. I wanted to like it, I tried to finish it, but found my attention wandering every few sentences. Life's too short. Glad I checked this out of the library for free.
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October 28, 2015I had to read this book for an American Revolution class that I was taking .... And to be honest, I didn't enjoy it at all. Being a professor at Harvard already gives the author some credibility ... There was no need for him to be SO wordy in a vain attempt to sound like an authority. I am sure that there are more dynamic books out there that discuss the Declaration of Independence.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews