Empire Ablaze

As revolution raged in North America, James Aitken – house painter, highwayman, and escaped indentured servant – wandered the colonies formulating a dramatic plan to cripple the British navy by destroying Portsmouth dockyard and Bristol harbour. He was determined to burn down the empire to hasten American independence. Through this overlooked story of British insurrection and America’s founding, historian Tom Cutterham explores how an emerging transatlantic working class experienced the transformation and crisis of Britain’s eighteenth-century empire. Behind this new sense of class consciousness was the Enlightenment philosophy that had informed popular ideas about the universal rights and the corruption of imperial authorities. Reframing the American Revolution as a British civil war, Empire Ablaze offers a fresh account of the United States’ birth and the origins of radical politics in Britain, finding insights for the revolutionary struggles of our own crisis-ridden times.

Tom Cutterham is an associate professor of United States history at the University of Birmingham, and the author of Gentlemen Revolutionaries: Power and Justice in the New American Republic. He has written for Jacobin, the Nation, and the New Republic, as well as a handful of scholarly journals.

Introduction Part 1 Chapter 1, Virginia Chapter 2, Edinburgh Chapter 3, London Chapter 4, Philadelphia Part 2 Chapter 5, Theory Chapter 6, Practice Chapter 7, Captivity Chapter 8, Freedom Conclusion