This forum marks the US semiquincentennial with a panel on the impact of the American Revolution and US Declaration of Independence on international affairs in the past 250 years.
KRISTIN CAULFIELD: I now turn the event over to Professor Erez Manela, Acting Director of the Weatherhead Center.
EREZ MANELA: Thank you, Kristin. And welcome, everyone, to the Weatherhead Forum. This is our platform at the Weatherhead Center to address pressing topics of the day. My name is Erez Manela. I'm the Acting Director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.
Today, our topic of discussion will be extremely timely, the American Revolution in Global Perspective. This forum marks the US semiquincentennial with a panel on the impact of the American Revolution and the US Declaration of Independence on international affairs in the past 250 years.
A quick note on our format here. Each of our three speakers will present, and then I will pose questions to the group. And after that, we will take your questions from the Q&A feature on Zoom. So if you have questions, please draft them there. I will try and get to as many as I can given our time, and I will also try to combine questions that are similar.
So without further ado, we are truly honored to be joined today by three esteemed guests. I'll introduce them in order that they will speak. And after that, we'll launch straight into the conversation. So our first presenter today is Danielle Allen. She is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University. She's also Director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at the Harvard Kennedy School and Director of the Democratic Knowledge Project-Learn, a research lab focused on civic education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
She is a Professor of Political Philosophy, Ethics, and Public Policy, as well as a seasoned non-profit leader, democracy advocate, tech ethicist, distinguished author, and mom. She's a contributing columnist at The Atlantic magazine, and was the 2020 winner of the Library of Congress Kluge Prize, which she received-- and I quote here-- "for her internationally recognized scholarship in political theory and her commitment to improving democratic practice and civics education."
Our second speaker today is David Armitage, the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History, Chair of the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, and former Chair of the Department of History at Harvard University where he teaches Intellectual History and International History. He is the author or editor of 19 books, and co-edits two book series with Cambridge University Press, Ideas in Context and Cambridge Oceanic Histories.
Our final speaker will be Elisabeth Leake. She's an award-winning historian and the Lee E. Dirks Professor in Diplomatic History at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Professor Leake's research to date has been broadly focused on the global histories of decolonization and the Cold War.
She is currently working on a global history of decolonization and developing a research network examining the comparative and interconnected histories of oppositional politics and modes of dissent in the years immediately following political independence in decolonizing states. She is the Chief Editor of the Journal of Global History. Danielle, we're looking forward to your presentation.
DANIELLE ALLEN: Thank you so much, Erez, and thank you to the Weatherhead Center for sponsoring this conversation. It's really wonderful to have the chance to take history and put it in the context of a larger global frame.
My remarks today are going to be about the tensions between colonialism and freedom that took root obviously earlier than the American Revolution, but were morphed and torqued because of it, and then expanded. I think the remarks of my colleagues, Professors Armitage and Leake, will be more directed at those later evolutions, I think, and the issues of colonialism and decolonization.
But what I want to do is focus on a moment in 1780 that people don't typically know about or recognize as a part of the history of the American Revolution, but it was really world-changing. On June 3, 1780, a British Aristocrat, Charles Lennox, the third Duke of Richmond, stood up in the House of Lords and introduced a bill for universal manhood suffrage. This was the first time that anybody sought to introduce universal manhood suffrage at a national scale in the history of the world.
At the very same time, there were about 15,000 angry anti-Catholic protesters who stormed Parliament, including roughing up members of Parliament. So as you might imagine, the Duke's bill for universal manhood suffrage did not receive a favorable hearing under those conditions, and it died at that point in time.
Britain wouldn't take its first move towards major electoral suffrage reform until 1830. But when it did in 1830, it was a direct result of the Duke's efforts. After he brought his bill thereafter, for nearly every year in Parliament, people continued to bring versions of his bill, and reform movement built around the effort.
This motion on his part, this effort, was a direct outgrowth of the tensions experienced in British politics brought about by the American Revolution. So I want to tell you a bit of that story and then reflect on exactly how it is universal suffrage became a part of the important architecture of colonial expansion. That sounds contradictory, and yet, those two things, in fact, went hand in hand.
So about 10 years ago, my research team here at Harvard found in a small archive in southern England ceremonial-scale parchment, manuscript parchment of the Declaration of Independence. At that point in time, the world thought that there was one such thing, and that it lived at the National Archives in Washington, DC, housed in preservative gases. We were stunned to find this in this tiny little archive in Sussex, the kind of place where you go for your marriage license and death certificates and the like. It also has local archival records.
Now, this ceremonial parchment that we found-- we now call it the Sussex Declaration-- wasn't signed by the individual 56 signers. All the names were written out in the hand of a single clerk. But otherwise, it is as impressive-looking as the one that we know from the Archives in Washington, DC.
So how on Earth did it get to Sussex? It turns out that it was in the possessions of the papers of that third Duke of Richmond, the same individual I mentioned who brought that motion in the House of Lords for universal manhood suffrage.
What was the link in the chain between the Duke of Richmond and the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution? It turns out to have been Thomas Paine. Thomas Paine worked as an excise collector in Lewes, England, from 1768 to 1774, and he was there during that time in order to be a secret pamphleteer for the Duke of Richmond.
He, Richmond, and other figures like Edmund Burke formed a radical network in the 1760s and 1770s that were already pursuing a project of checking the overreach of George III. They had, in other words, their own project to check the executive.
In Britain, there were problems with taxes and riots around taxes before there were problems with taxes and riots around taxes in the colonies. There were massacres of protesting civilians before there were massacres of protesting civilians in the colonies.
There was a single interwoven fabric of conversation, as people rejected the idea that the economic pressures of expanding empire had to come out of the pockets and the labor of ordinary people. They then, of course, rejected the idea that when people complained about that dynamic between expanding empire and appropriation of hard-earned earnings, that when people complained about that, they should then be punished with trials of sedition, and in other ways have liberties of speech and expression quashed.
So the same complaints were arising on both sides of the Atlantic. And of course, the Duke, Benjamin Franklin, another ally in London at the time, sent Paine to America. Paine published Common Sense. As they say, the rest is history, the spark of the Revolution. Of course, there was a lot more to the American story than that.
But the Duke had an important role in all of this, because he was in Britain, trying to figure out how to help the British government navigate the politics of the Revolution. He was a friend of the Americans. He was the first person to recommend recognizing American independence. And for him, the puzzle of the Revolution had a very specific form, different than the kind of form it had for others.
For him, the puzzle of the Revolution was as follows, that he was a person who believed strongly in Parliament as a counterweight to the king. It had the job of channeling perspective and opinion that would balance whatever the arbitrary will might be that might flow from a monarch.
Because of his commitment to natural rights and education with Montesquieu and the like, he was also very sympathetic to the arguments in the colonies that they too should have a voice, a parliament of a kind. He had responsibilities as a member of the cabinet for the relationships between Britain and France and Canada at particular points, and he began to develop the notion that the colonies, a place like Canada, should have its own legislative assembly. He was an early advocate of that view.
That view, of course, was taken up by the Americans. There was a stage leading up to the revolution where they would have been quite happy to have had their own legislative assembly, their own parliament, connected to the British monarchy. You can hear in that idea of the Americans, the Canadians having a parliament also connected to the Crown, the early seeds of the Commonwealth, the British Commonwealth, as it came to be known and experienced by all.
But there was a problem with this idea of all the colonies having a legislature connected to the Crown. That would, of course, diminish Parliament in Britain. And the very problem that the people in Britain were having was the fact that the king was starting to overpower Parliament, again, through taxation, through suppression of speech, through suppression of publication.
The king had a massive network of patronage and cronyism. And so Parliament had little independence from whatever decisions the king and his ministers might make. This was the problem in Britain that Richmond wanted to tackle.
So then the question was, well, if you have all these different legislatures in different colonies all connected to the Crown, doesn't that centralize power of the Crown, make the Crown too powerful in relationship to Parliament in Britain? So the puzzle to be solved was how to rebalance that kind of allocation of power.
And the answer to that puzzle was it could only be done if you could make Parliament independent of the Crown. And what would be the most efficient way of making Parliament independent of the Crown? To have Parliament elected by the whole people instead of having it elected only by the very restricted suffrage that existed in Britain, the problem of rotten boroughs and the like.
And so that's precisely why Richmond proposed universal manhood suffrage, was in order that Parliament could have balance of power in relationship to the Crown. Then there would be possible to build a Commonwealth structure where you could actually have legislators in a different colonies without overpowering the voice of the people in Britain itself.
So the paradox then of universal manhood suffrage is that it emerged as a solution to the project of how to build a colonial empire. It also, as you know, as it advanced progressively around the world, has unleashed all the energy and dynamism of popular sovereignty and all the turbulence of politics that comes with popular sovereignty. So I'm going to leave it to my colleagues to talk more about the legacies of that interesting conjunction of freedom, universal suffrage, and the project of colonialism. But that linkage is one of the important legacies of the American Revolution.
EREZ MANELA: Thank you, Danielle, for illuminating that fascinating episode. David. David, if you could unmute yourself.
DAVID ARMITAGE: Thank you, Erez. And I'm hoping my screen will now share. Is everyone seeing that?
AUDIENCE: Yes-- oh, there you go. Presentation. Yep.
DAVID ARMITAGE: Fantastic. Thank you. I'm actually going to go back behind the 1780 moment that Danielle has just illuminated for us-- in fact, to July 1776 by asking the very simple but ultimately puzzling question. What did the Declaration of July 4, 1776, actually declare?
I mean, what it declared was the explanation and justification for the really important vote, the really important resolution, which was the vote of 2 of July, 1776, in the Continental Congress on Richard Henry Lee's resolution "that these united colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved."
Formally, that was the vote that carried the delegates to the Continental Congress across the Rubicon. And as some of you may know, on that very day, 2nd of July, John Adams wrote to Abigail Adams, predicting that for evermore, perpetually, the 2nd of July would be celebrated with guns and illuminations and festivals as the Independence Day of the United States. Nice try, John Adams, but I want to stress that fundamentally he was correct at least in that understanding of when the Rubicon had been crossed.
In a late 18th century media environment where public opinion mattered increasingly-- and Danielle's talk gave evidence for that-- and also in a diplomatic context where the embattled American patriot cause desperately needed assistance from abroad, it was essential to announce Congress's resolution to the opinions of mankind and to present its arguments and justifications for the radical act taken on the 2nd of July to a candid world. Hence, a declaration of what had been agreed on the 2nd of July.
So let's see what the Declaration itself declares. This is a word cloud of the Declaration. One thing you may immediately notice from this word cloud is the absence of the word "independence." Not only does the word "independence" not occur in the title-- it's not entitled The Declaration of Independence-- but in fact, the word "independence" occurs nowhere in the document itself.
The word "independent," the adjective, does indeed occur. But one thing I think that's very striking about this word cloud is the prominence of "we," "people," and "our." These are the most frequently used substantives in the document itself, followed by "laws," "states," "right," "government," "powers," and "time." But "independence" appears nowhere.
Also a striking absence is the absence of the word, either as a noun or an adjective, "American." There is no American Revolution. There is no revolution by Americans. There is no identification of anything as American or of any one as Americans in the document. Of course, the word "British" appears there in the phrase "our British brethren." So there are British people in the Declaration, but there are as yet no Americans. It was declared not in the name of any American people as yet at that point.
I think we might here repurpose the phrase attributed to the 19th century Piedmontese politician, Massimo d'Azeglio after the consolidation of Italy in the 19th century when d'Azeglio allegedly said, "Now we have made Italy-- now having made Italy, we must now make Italians." Having made the United States of America, it was now necessary to make Americans, a process many historians would say was not in any sense remotely complete until the aftermath of the Civil War.
So what did the Declaration declare, in fact, if not independence? First of all, it declared that British subjects were now, at least potentially, citizens of some new polity or some congerie of new polities. 13 of them, in fact. United States is always plural in the Declaration, as it will almost universally remain until, again, after the Civil War.
Secondly, the Declaration declared that rebels within the British Empire were now effectively legitimate fighters outside it. That is, insurgents as seen from the authorities in Britain, were now legitimate belligerents in a larger international realm, thereby transforming a British civil war, the last British civil war within the British Empire, into an interstate or international war, though that word "international" would not be coined until four years later, perhaps not coincidentally in 1780 by Jeremy Bentham.
But a civil war within the British Empire is transformed into an interstate war in the international realm under the law of nations. And of course, the ultimate transformation declared by the Declaration was that the former united colonies were now "free and independent states."
Now, this declaration in 1776 was what international lawyers would call a unilateral declaration. That is, it was declared by one people, but without any negotiation or agreement with the then incumbent sovereign. As such, that declaration could not in itself guarantee secession or guarantee external recognition.
As the leading international lawyer of state formation and state recognition, James Crawford, put it a few years ago, quote, "A declaration issued by persons within a state is a collection of words writ in water. It is the sound of one hand clapping."
The Declaration of 1776 could not alone transform the united colonies of British America into free and independent states. As a contemporary pamphlet from 1776, not coincidentally, perhaps, again, co-authored by Jeremy Bentham, put it, "It is one thing for Congress to say the connection which bound them to Britain is dissolved, another to dissolve it. That to accomplish their independence is not quite so easy as to declare it."
Under the prevailing legal norms of the time in 1776, this was rather like Michael Scott in the office declaring bankruptcy. You can't just stand up in the office and say, "I declare bankruptcy." You may remember the episode where one of his office mates says, you can't just stand up and say bankruptcy and become a bankrupt. And Michael Scott huffily replies, "I didn't say it. I declared it," as if there were some difference there.
You couldn't just say you were independent states in 1776 or even declare it. You had to secure that freedom and independence for those states. And most importantly, again, under prevailing norms of the time, you had to get your independence recognized by the former incumbent sovereign.
This is what I would call an originalist reading of the Declaration of Independence. There are many originalists in regard to the US Constitution, but I have found very few-- indeed, none-- around the US Declaration of Independence. But at the time, prevailing understandings of state recognition held a declaration of independence to be constitutive in itself, that it could not simply be proclaimed by one people, but had to be confirmed by the incumbent power. It follows that according to the legal norms of the 1770s and 1780s.
The United States of America only became independent when, quote, "His Britannic Majesty acknowledged the said United States to be free, sovereign, and independent states in Article I of the Peace of Paris of 1783." That, I submit, was the true-- that is, legal-- declaration of the independence of the United States.
Accordingly, a strictly historical and legal account would properly defer the American semiquincentennial until September 3, 2033, and the 250th anniversary of the Peace of Paris. I hope we'll all reconvene, therefore, in seven years to celebrate the proper semiquincentennial of the United States.
Looking forward to the larger sweep of world history after 1776, we can see that declarations of independence were generally announcements of exit from empires and similar conglomerate political bodies to become separate with one people-- to quote the opening of the US Declaration, "One people dissolving the political bands which have connected them with one another, and assuming among the powers of the Earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's god entitle them."
This, again, I submit historically, was the goal of Thomas Jefferson, the other members of the Committee of Five, and the Continental Congress in 1776. That is, to create free and independent states outside the British Empire, having, of course, thrown off Parliamentary sovereignty, and then ultimately cutting the last remaining federal bond, the bond through the Crown, in order to gain support from the other powers of the Earth, especially France, for military and commercial support in the Patriot cause, or for the Patriot cause, leading in due course to the Treaties of Amity and Commerce and of alliance with France in February 1778.
This truncating brutally the entire course of the American Revolution led to what Ezra Stiles, then President of Yale in 1784, looking back on 1783, said was the very substance of the American Revolution itself. "This great American Revolution, this recent political phenomenon of a new sovereignty arising among the sovereign powers of the earth, will be attended to and contemplated by all nations.
Navigation will carry the American flag around the globe itself and display the thirteen stripes and new constellation at Bengal and Canton, on the Indus and the Ganges, on the Whang-ho and the Yang-tse-kiang." And of course, just a few weeks before Stiles made that pronouncement in a sermon, the first ship had left the United States, the independent United States, for Guangzhou.
In the last few minutes, I want to just look at the later history of declarations of independence. And we might call this a tale of two declarations. The Declaration outside the United States is read very differently from the Declaration within the United States.
Outside the US, the document began to spread rapidly and started to generate what I called elsewhere the jura of a declaration of independence, first in Europe, then in the Caribbean, then in Spanish America, and Africa, beginning crucially with the Haitian Declaration of Independence. There were are a couple of other declarations before January 1804. But I think if we want to think about the global jura of the Declaration of Independence, it really begins with this epochal, truly epochal document from Haiti in 1804.
In July 1776, the world historical potential of the Declaration of Independence was not yet self-evident, but the centuries that followed have demonstrated the wide appeal of its principles. But the principles as seen by the rest of the world were not those of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, but those of the first and last paragraphs. That is, for the world, the Declaration's message was about the rights of states and their freedom and independence, rather than the rights of individuals.
There are two major exceptions to that general rule, the Declaration of Independence of Liberia, as you'll see on the right, the bottom paragraph, which announces, "We recognize in all men certain natural and inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty, and the right to acquire, possess, enjoy, and defend property." Very important indeed, of course, for those who themselves had formerly been property to declare their "right to acquire, possess, enjoy, and defend property."
The other exception, perhaps even more famously, is the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence of September 1945, which begins with the words "All men are created equal." Famous second paragraph of the US Declaration, but with an important twist with great potential for future decolonization movements. As Ho Chi Minh parsed those words, he said, "This immortal statement was made in the US Declaration in 1776." But "In a broader sense, it means all the peoples on earth are equal from birth. All the peoples have a right to live, to be happy, and to be free."
250 years on from 1776, after hundreds of declarations, both successful and failed and sometimes suspended, have appeared, the defining features of declarations of independence, again, as a collective jura, are much clearer. Declarations are public, and indeed, they're customarily published. They usually speak in the voice of one people seeking to dissolve the political bands connecting them with another, and they almost always assert that the political body or bodies assumed by such a people are, and of right, ought to be free and independent states, or equivalent later language, that are able to do all the acts and things which independent states may of right do.
These were the features found, for example, in the 1918 Czechoslovak Declaration of Independence and the Korean Declaration of Independence of 1919. I choose these both from many, many examples, but also because the Czech Declaration was signed at Independence Hall at Philadelphia, and the Korean Declaration of Independence was generated by the First Korean Congress, which also met in Philadelphia, showing the importance of the American example for the globe during what we might call the Wilsonian moment after the first World War.
Fast forward to our own century as I conclude, we can see the Kosovo Declaration of Independence of 2008. Still suspended, because only recognized by 140 members of the United Nations. The successful South Sudan Declaration of 2011, which I think is the first declaration of independence one can watch on YouTube, and the failed Catalonian Declaration of Independence of 2015.
All those images, these last three images, bear witness to the global significance of the US Declaration of 1776, not because any of those recent declarations quoted the US Declaration, appealed to its values, or even adopted its form or structure, but because they all show the necessity, even in our own century of, first of all, declaring independence, making it known domestically and internationally, but performing that declaration in public, ceremonially, at a hinge moment within a cause, marking a from-to moment, and finally, justifying independence in the language and the terms that the wider world would both understand, and crucially, the declarers of independence always hope, that the wider world would accept.
So seen globally since 1776, declarations of independence have overwhelmingly diagnosed the existence of restrictive imperial or colonial systems and represented resistance against them. They more often indicated fissure and secession than anything else, more than, say, human rights claims, assertions of democracy or equality, or aspirations for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, at least on the individual level. Now, more than half of the 193 states represented at the United Nations have documents that they acknowledge to be declarations of independence.
In 1943, the Trinidadian historian and politician Eric Williams wrote, quote, "The emergence of the United States onto the stage of the nations of the world was itself only accomplished by an overthrow of the colonial system. The spirit of 1776 is still alive today."
Following Williams and our next speaker, Elisabeth Leake, we might say that decolonization can be traced back to 1776, with declarations of independence becoming over the centuries among its most conspicuous markers. In a world where there are still remnants of empire and drives for self-determination, the spirit of 1776 remains alive and well, while declarations of independence remain indispensable instruments to animate that spirit politically and internationally. Thank you very much.
EREZ MANELA: Thank you very much, David. I think you've set it up perfectly for our next speaker. Elisabeth, please.
ELISABETH LEAKE: Amazing. Yes. Thank you so much. Can you hear me? Is my sound working? Super. David is nodding at me. Great. Well, thank you again to the Weatherhead Center for inviting me to be part of this conversation. And I think what I have to say dovetails really nicely with what David and Danielle were talking about, though I think some of my arguments or perspectives might be a little bit different.
So I want to, I think, probably start with some of the same sort of entry points that David and Danielle have made. And so firstly, thinking about the US Declaration of Independence and US independence more broadly as a model. And then thinking about its longue durée, its impacts, I actually want to focus more on the United States' influence on independence processes thereafter.
So I wanted to start out by just really thinking very briefly about the Declaration of Independence and the tensions within it between its specificity and its universalisms. And I think this tension is really significant. It's very much-- as Danielle pointed out, it's very much a part of this broader moment.
So a lot of what's stated in the Declaration is rooted in Enlightenment-era debates about the rights of citizens, the role of the state, debates about republicanism, constitutional monarchy, and so on. In turn, so these questions of suffrage and forms of government in which people can participate, but also those questions of who-- who can participate, who should participate-- are really alive and really, certainly transatlantic in this moment.
And so the Declaration of Independence is speaking then to this global moment. And it has these specific criticisms of British rule on one hand. But on the other, it's also making very-- it's making these more universal assertions about the assertions of universal rights. And there's a real tension then in this, right?
And we see-- and I think the point that I want to come back to, that David pointed out, which I think is really, really important, is the fact that there is no American in the Declaration of Independence. And I think this is important, because I want to talk briefly about the notions of nationhood and statehood that are there or are absent in the Declaration of Independence, and what this tells us, and why it's significant.
So I think one of the things that's important, if we think about the fact that there is no American in the Declaration of Independence, it's important to note that this document really was not focused on and was not particularly interested in creating a sense of nationhood or shared identity. And I agree with David, that I think-- yeah, a lot of scholars have really written about how a notion of Americanness really only coalesces after the US Civil War.
And I don't want to-- I'm not going to get too much into that. But I want to make-- kind of reemphasize this notion of who is American or what an America could or should be is really absent from the Declaration of Independence.
Instead, it's very much more about state structures. What are the structures of British colonial rule that are impeding on locals' rights and abilities? But also then to implicitly, what are the alternatives that should be posed?
And this kind of sense about this question of nationhood is something that obviously, in some ways, the framers of this document are very much skirting around. And we can certainly see this in the behind-the-scenes debates about slavery. And it's critical, obviously, in the Declaration of Independence, that while it's not explicitly stated, this notion that all men are equal, all men have rights certainly does not apply to either enslaved Africans or to the vast majority of Indigenous Americans. So there's this in-built inequality, even if it's not explicitly stated as such, because it's framed in these universalist terms.
So I think this notion then-- and I think if we look at American history, one of the things that's really critical, if we take the Declaration of Independence and the US war of independence as starting points, is we see that this notion of a United States-- so statehood is something that really comes before a sense of debate or dialogue about, what does it mean to be a citizen within this new United States? What does it mean to be an American versus a British colonial subject?
And this is something that really differentiates then the US model from what comes later on in terms of, I suppose, declarations of independence in subsequent eras. So there's a stark difference between independence movements of the late 18th century and the early 19th century and the ways of decolonization that we're much more familiar with in the 20th century.
So the 20th century, what you will almost always see is kind of looking at these documents and movements that David has referenced, but also more broadly is that you will see that there are debates, very active debates about identity and nationhood that take place before independence, and then serve as a justification and rationale for political independence. So this relationship between nationhood and statehood is a really significant one.
And thinking about the modern day or our current moment, I think it's important for us to take a step back and think about this relationship between statehood and nationhood within a domestic context, as well as an international context. I would potentially argue that a lot of the domestic tensions that the United States is dealing with in this moment is because of this longer history in which kind of there was agreement about state structures first, but then agreement about what it meant to be American came afterwards.
And there still isn't necessarily agreement, right? There are so many different interpretations. So the question becomes then, how can you make the two correlate, or where do those fractures continue to persist?
So thinking then about that longer term history of decolonization and independence making and independence claiming, I would certainly argue-- and I have some students in the audience, and you do not have to agree with me, I promise. But I would argue at least that I think if we're thinking about independence processes in a longer historical framework, it's actually Haiti rather than the United States which offers a much better framework, I think, for understanding both practices and ideas of independence over the next 250 years.
And if we look at it with the documents that David showed, we see that in terms of Haiti's Declaration of Independence, in which it does very intentionally try to marry ideas of what a Haitian state should look like, but also the notion of what a Haitian identity and what a Haitian citizen should look like. So in terms of that, we can think about the fact that Haiti is named Haiti instead of being a French colony-- the French colony of San-- oh my gosh, I'm about to-- I was going to say Saint-Domingue.
But anyways, thinking about Haiti as it's a reclamation of the Indigenous name for the island. So thinking about that very explicit and intentional identitarian factor, as well as the ways in which issues of race and slavery are key, are really foremost and foregrounded in the documents for Haitian independence, as well as in negotiations with the rest of the world.
So I think in that sense-- and this is something that, again, to stay in the Caribbean like David did rather than Eric Williams, if we look at CLR James's absolutely brilliant book from the 1930s, The Black Jacobins, he really frames the Haitian-- the Haiti, rather than the United States, as the model of independence for colonially oppressed peoples across Africa, across the Black Atlantic, and further on.
So this is a-- so thinking about the US and as a model, I think one of the points that is really important is the fact that, yes, the Declaration of Independence as its own sort of form, as its own sort of mode of claiming independence becomes so utterly pervasive. But there are two points I want to make then in terms of thinking about the United States-- the United States' subsequent influence then on statehood and the growth of the nation-state system across the world in subsequent decades and centuries.
Firstly, I think it's important for us to remember, particularly in the United States' case, but certainly not just exclusive to the US is that a declaration of independence is not the same as a rejection of empire, either formal or informal. Certainly, in the case of the United States, we see this in terms of so-called manifest destiny, US westward expansion, and displacement of Indigenous peoples. But also certainly, we see this in the case of the United States in terms of informal empire, and economic and then political intervention, let's say first in Latin America, but also increasingly in East and Southeast Asia and elsewhere.
And I would point out then that this is also something that it holds true for many newly independent states in terms of the ways in which they declare themselves as independent states, but they still continue drawing on the imperial toolbox. And we see this in terms of external expansion, whether, for example, let's say India invading Goa and actually forcing it to become part of independent India.
But also then, we see this too in terms of the ways in which so many newly independent states across the world treat minorities within them. So thinking about, what are the identities they can or cannot have? And often, really trying to force a national sense of identity that does not necessarily account for local texture and social and cultural or religious practices. So that's one lingering influence, I suppose, of the US Declaration of Independence, is that declaration of independence is not a declaration of the end of empire, nor is it the end of practices of empire.
The second point, and the one that I want to finish on then, is, I suppose, the paradox of US influence, this paradox of the United States, both framing itself and often being perceived and described as leading the so-called free world in terms of international affairs within the 20th century at the same time that the United States, time and again, especially across the so-called Global South, very actively supported very autocratic regimes. So there's a tension here between, I suppose, the universalist values described as a modus for US independence, but the ways that it actually treats or values these-- values these universalist rights in other external contexts.
So on on the hand, in a sense, the United States is seen as being emblematic of democracy. It's pointed to as such. We certainly see this if we think about Ayres's work in terms of the Wilsonian moment, in terms of justifications for independence and nationhood across a lot of East and Central Europe, even in the Middle East as well. So it's something-- that idea really circulates. It's seen as this political model to be replicated, particularly in terms of its federal structures.
But this does not mean that the US necessarily acts to support the spread of democracy. And so there's a tension then within US foreign policy between recognizing independent statehood, but in fact, being very deeply ambivalent about what this means for nationhood and the on-the-ground realities of the relationship between citizens and states.
And this is something that's really come out in a lot of the scholarship on the Cold War. And I think it's a point, though, that we can perhaps link back then to the United States' own founding.
So if we think about something like the Declaration of Independence, thinking, again, about the Ezra Stiles quote, about the Declaration of Independence is an assertion of sovereignty. So when these other colonies, these former colonies, whether, let's say, Ghana or Kenya or India or Pakistan or Indonesia, they become sovereign with the transfer of power and a kind of moment of independence and decolonization in the 20th century. And so the United States recognizes that sovereignty.
But then if that sovereignty-- but then the question of domestic politics then becomes a whole other story. We can think about this with something like Pakistan where the US very much turns a blind eye to authoritarian, military rule, because that supports US interests.
And so I think one of the things that we have to remember then for the United States in terms of its foreign policy, as well as-- and then linking to these questions about the domestic, is that statehood has always been more central to US thinking, both about itself and about the rest of the world, than questions of nationhood and what it means to belong to a nation. And I think that's something that really then underpins a lot of the political thinking we've seen, both in the past and potentially in the present. So I'll end there. I don't want to take up too much time. But thank you so much for letting me be part of this conversation.
EREZ MANELA: Thank you, all three of you. Why can I not see myself? Let's see. Here I am. OK. Thank you, all-- thank you, all three of you, for this really wonderful set of reflections. There is so much I could ask you, but I want to focus on the mandate of the Weatherhead Forum, which is that it's timely and teaches us something or helps us understand the world around us currently.
And I'm wondering if I could pull-- you and you've done that already in your remarks. But I wonder if I could pull you even more to try to unspool the implications of what you've said about the Declaration of Independence, or more generally, the implications of the Declaration of Independence in the past to that history that you all went through, the past 250 years, on understanding our current moment.
Just to give one example, it occurs to me that if Elisabeth is right that independence is not the same as a rejection of empire, then we can imagine the usual perspective that international historians often give, and others on the history of the last 200 years, as this transition from a world of empires to a world of nation-states actually maybe never really happened. Maybe it's a world of empires to a world of empires, in which case-- and I know this is taking it-- this is taking, perhaps, the implication a bit far. In which case, what we're maybe witnessing now, according to some commentators, is not the return of empire, but simply its perseverance.
So that's just one thought that occurred to me. It doesn't have to dictate how you think about it. But I'm very interested to hear you reflect a bit further on the relevance of our conversation and the Declaration in that history to our current moment. I don't know who wants to pick that up first. I know it's a big and complicated question.
DAVID ARMITAGE: Well, I'll pick up the ball since I completely agree with Elisabeth's central point that a declaration of independence does not pre-commit whichever body or polity or people, however arranged into whatever format, to any future policies of any necessary kind. That is, doesn't necessarily commit in all eternity to republicanism, certainly not to anti-imperialism, especially when picking up on Erez's point, what we know as the features of modern states, particularly in their desire for homogenization, their exclusion of minorities, including but not confined to Indigenous peoples, their boundedness by territoriality, they maintain many of the features of empire which have never quite gone away.
But I also agree with Elisabeth that it's important to distinguish between, let's say, state-nations and nation-states, and how states, plural in the case of the United States, generate nations through the elaboration of civic religions, often around pivotal moments or documents like the Declaration of Independence, for instance. But also the cases where a pre-existing, self-identifying people or nation decide ultimately that they want to determine their future as independent, usually in a bounded territorial state. That is, the framework within which nations wish to achieve their self-determination. But again, without foreclosing the possibilities of further expansion.
And the other important-- I think one of the few iron laws of politics since 1776 is that any state which has declared its independence will thereafter resist any claims to independence from within the boundaries of the state which had declared independence. There are very few counterexamples to that. West Virginia, for example. There are a couple of others on the world stage. But by and large, independent states will resist by force of arms any further fissiparousness within the boundaries they have established through a claim to independence.
EREZ MANELA: Danielle.
DANIELLE ALLEN: Oh. Well, I was going to go ahead and respond as well, and just to take it in a slightly different direction. So those are all very, very helpful thoughts, but it's probably just worth saying out loud that the Declaration of Independence, as a kind of creedal founding document, puts a set of universalizing, universalist commitments in the heart of American self-understanding that has always produced a conflict, in some sense, between the question of, is the goal to interact with a set of other free and independent states and to respect that freedom and that independence, or do we have a hard power, realpolitik view of the national interest?
And so this country has never had a sort of stable ground for how to reconcile those two halves of its mind in terms of thinking about international relations. I mean, obviously, that was at issue in the French Revolution and the debates between Jefferson and the others about whether or not America should engage there, Washington and Adams being on the other side of that.
And I think the challenge, and in some sense, sort of challenge for our current moment, Erez, as you asked us to bring it to the current moment, is always this question of, when and in what forms do the realpolitik modes of engagement sort of boomerang and undermine the ability of the country to maintain its universalist commitments? Those commitments, of course, are necessary for how politics operate internally. So again, I don't think that there's a sort of hard and fast answer to that question. But in essence, we are in the middle of that debate once more.
ELISABETH LEAKE: Can I just-- I want to add really briefly to Danielle's point. I was going to say, I think we see exactly, Danielle, what you were saying with thinking about the slogan "America first," right? And in terms of the ways in which we're seeing it used by people of various political persuasions, but often in ways that are very much in tension with each other.
So it's like, America first. Does that also mean American first within the international system, or does it mean America first in terms of a refocusing on the domestic? And I think that has obviously been a really active debate in terms of thinking about what's going on in the Middle East right now and US action there.
But in terms of thinking about how that idea of America first, I think, in some respects is so tied to these foundational documents, even if the term isn't there. But it still really, I think, points to this tension then between yeah, it kind forms of expansionism and imperialism abroad, but also thinking about what and whom is prioritized within as well.
DAVID ARMITAGE: I also think it's very urgent to point out that the consensus that the Declaration of Independence, second paragraph, is the national creed, which was forged across the course of the 19th century and has held pretty firmly since the Civil War up to the near present, is under challenge at the moment. Think of JD Vance's speech at the Claremont Institute last year and the supportive comments by some of his allies, saying, we shouldn't confuse what it means to be American with, quote, "five words from the Declaration of Independence." We cannot be complacent about the centrality of those promises of the second paragraph when they are currently under skeptical attack by designing agents within the country at the moment determined to undermine that fundamental and important consensus.
EREZ MANELA: Well, thank you. Let me-- I'll ask one more question and then open it up to the audience. I have a couple of-- I see a couple of audience questions already in the Q&A. And so I invite those of you in the audience who want to add to that to please do so in the next few minutes, and we'll take as many of those as we can.
The second question I had is the relationship between-- if you could reflect on the relationship between the American Declaration of Independence, and more generally, perhaps, the history of declarations of independence and military violence. That is to say, war. Because of course, it occurs to me that the American Declaration of Independence is promulgated in the midst of ongoing conflict. The war has already begun.
Whereas if you think about other parts of the British Empire that eventually gained their independence, most people would agree, I think, that Canada or Australia or New Zealand are independent places these days. And even in the Indian case, which of course involved a great deal more violence than those other cases. There was no revolutionary war, per se.
And I'm wondering whether you think there is-- well, first of all, is this a general feature of declarations of independence historically? And second, is there something about this particular origin, the military origins or the origins in military conflict to the Declaration of Independence that help us understand perhaps its particular evolutionary path?
DAVID ARMITAGE: Well, I would argue that the Declaration of Independence of 1776, not a declaration of independence, at least self-announcedly, was a declaration of war, and a transformation of the terms of war at the time. And that's pretty consistent with most declarations of independence for at least the next 50 years in the Americas.
The Haitian Declaration that I showed from January 1804, the letters across the top talk about the Indigenous army. It's spoken in the words of the leading Haitian General Dessalines. It is a very violent document indeed. And far from showing a desire to reconnect with the former colonial power, like the British brethren of the US Declaration, speaks of the necessity of expunging entirely the French presence, the individual French people, as well as the French colonial presence in Haiti itself.
The Spanish American declarations are less violent than the Haitian one, but they too-- almost all of them occur within the context of the battles of multiple armies. So at least-- and then if we fast forward in US history up to 1860, 1861, the secession proclamations and ordinances of the Confederate states are, of course, declarations of war, as well going back behind the union document, the Constitution to the Declaration to recover independent statehood, and then to militarize that in the context of a war between states. So one could unspool that further, but that's as much as I will say into the middle of the 19th century for now.
DANIELLE ALLEN: I'll add a comment or two here. Here, I'm actually going to also argue against my good colleague David about whether it's declaration of independence or not. I think the difference between the word "independent" and "independence" is not of much significance. They declare themselves free and independent states. So in that regard, their project is clearly one of independent statehood, and it serves that purpose. It is simultaneously a declaration of war.
But it's the fact that those two things go together that matters, because it says something about how they conceived of violence. And it's often forgotten that before the colonies declared independence or declared themselves free and independent states on July 2, they had already drafted constitutions in a lot of the colonies. So four or five of them had completed that work by July 4. Several more would complete it that summer. They genuinely did not fully embrace the project of violent revolution before they had actually already constructed the thing they intended to live in.
I think one of the challenges we have now, thinking about violence and revolution, popular uprisings, and the like, is our relative difficulty actually in understanding how the kind of productive work of construction can be connected to violence, as in general, analyzes of revolution-- it's pretty common in the public press and the like. The assumption is that there's a violent act that comes first.
And I do think this is actually quite relevant to the current moment we're watching in Iran where the struggle is there have been protests for all these months. Now there's this incredible act of violence coming from the US.
And there is genuinely no stable forward path coming from any party, whether that's coming from the heir of the shah, or whether it's coming from the US, or whether it's coming from the mass protest movement in Iran, or whether it's coming from any of the minority ethnic groups in the region. None of them actually has a stable governance pathway available, or even the existing regime, which does not know how to continue itself in the context of this kind of total assault on its core infrastructure.
So I don't know precisely-- you know, so I want to raise a question, I suppose really in some sense for our disciplines, for those of us who work on revolution, violence, and the like. What do we need to do from a disciplinary point of view to make space for the consideration of how these kind of proactive governance agendas get constructed in the first place? And then how does that interact with how we evaluate the nature of violence in any particular case?
ELISABETH LEAKE: Yeah. I mean, I think-- I completely agree with Danielle. I think that's such an important question. I mean, and linking that, I suppose, to David, to so much of the work you've done, which has really demonstrated the significance and the importance of taking these sort of longer term perspectives on things, whether the Declaration of Independence or histories of constitutions.
But I think if we take, let's say, the late 18-- yeah, late 18th century as a starting point for histories of decolonization. And if we're integrating what happens in the United States, in Haiti, in most of Hispanic America, what really comes clear is that actually, decolonization as a process is overwhelmingly violent. And violence is so critical. And especially then when we get into, in some ways, a more globalized 20th century, even if the violence is not taking place within a specific colony, violence in other colonies is still impacting and influencing processes and negotiations around what independence could be, what it should be, and how it can be implemented as well.
So I think-- my feeling is that especially with thinking about the 20th century, there's been a bit-- there's been a bit of an inclination to separate out kind of violent decolonization struggles. So think about Algeria or Vietnam on one hand, and then thinking about negotiated or more peaceful transfers of power where people have come and sat at the table beforehand and come up to an agreement.
But Erez pointed out India, which really points to the problematics of trying to draw separations between this notion of a negotiated transfer of power and violent overthrow. And I think also thinking about the actors at hand and the ways in which they perceive violence or what they perceive to be violent as well, not only in terms of militarization, but systemic issues as well is just so fundamentally critical. But I think taking those longer term perspective and starting with the US onwards really helps to reinforce how violent these processes have been rather than to try to sugarcoat some of the events of the 20th century.
EREZ MANELA: Hmm. Yeah, thank you. That's a really bracing reflection, the Declaration of Independence as a declaration of war. I'm going to-- so thank you, all of you. I'm going to go to the questions. We have a number of them already piling up. I'll start with a question from Laurelynn Middelkoop. I hope I'm pronouncing that more or less correctly.
So Laurelynn asks, while there is no mention of the word "American" or "America" in the Declaration, there is notably an assertion that one people is separate-- can separate from another people, which does point closely to something like nationhood, or at the very least, the people claiming their own sovereignty by virtue of being a people. Does this not imply that there is some loose sense of nationhood at work, as it would later be articulated?
DANIELLE ALLEN: Yeah. I would agree with that. I'll just start, David. Then you can answer more fully, and it's more directed to you. But I would agree with that. I mean, that is an argument that I make in my book, Our Declaration.
And there was a conception of America coming into existence, certainly. It hadn't consolidated in terms of whether the states were the center of gravity or the national consciousness was the center of gravity. That's certainly true. But that is exactly what people were working on. James Wilson and the Constitution tries very intently to bring that conception of a single people into focus as what will define the new governing articles. But it's very much in progress. But anyway, I'm sorry, David.
DAVID ARMITAGE: No, not at all. No, no, I'd agree with that, but also say that it's more prospective than diagnostic in 1776. According to the prevailing understandings of a people, I think it means two different things, not necessarily a nation, but first of all, a people in the sense of a demos, the good people of these colonies who have authorized the Continental Congress and its declaration.
There is that underlying sense of an authorizing people, but also people as a literal translation of the Latin word gains, as in the jus gentium, the law of nations as it's coming to be described at the time. I say this in particular because when one people, as we have it in the first paragraph, is mentioned, I think that's a people in the sense of a nation among nations, as in, say, Vattel's Law of Nations, a very important document for the formation of the US Declaration.
But also crucially, thinking about the spectral presence of the passage on the slave trade that Jefferson introduced into his draft, but of course gets struck out in the Congressional deliberations, he refers there to the African people, those who have been transported, allegedly by George III, across the Atlantic. And I think he's using "people" in the same terms there. In that passage, the African people, and then the people who are separating from the British people in the Declaration itself. These are groups who have an international identity, but not necessarily a self-identification implied by that at the time.
Of course, the Declaration becomes a very important document through the 19th century and beyond for the formation of nationhood. But I think that nationhood is more incipient and prospective than actual there. Thinking in terms of, I would say, the consensus among historians is the American Revolution is a crisis of integration rather than of disintegration, but integration with Britain leading to a sense of unfulfilled promises necessitating separation rather than the elaboration of a separate American identity demanding a new set of sovereign-- new sovereign container or containers for the projection of nationhood into the future.
EREZ MANELA: Yeah. Elisabeth, I don't know if you want to take this up, but I was struck apropos this question that the whole concept of nation and nationhood, David, in your word cloud, I don't believe I saw the word "nation" mentioned at all. And Elisabeth, you made the point that subsequent declarations of independence, I think particularly from the mid-19th century on, have a much greater focus on identifying the nation as the object or subject of independence rather than a people, per se.
And I'm wondering if we can say a bit more apropos this question. What do we think-- what do we think happened? What accounts for that-- I mean, that's a big question, but what accounts for that shift? Because nationalism, of course, it's on a lot of people's minds these days.
ELISABETH LEAKE: Oh, Erez, that's a big question. I mean, this is like my entire book manuscript right now, so I don't really-- I don't feel-- [LAUGHS] I don't have a quick answer. But I mean, obviously, there's so much that's been written about, I guess, kind of the romantic revivalism and this reaction to the scientificness of the Enlightenment, particularly because of the violence of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars.
But I guess-- I think this notion of-- yeah, this notion of ways in which history and an attention to culture in the early 19th century is becoming kind of such a-- I realize I'm just mumbling, but becomes so in vogue, I suppose, across so much of Europe, and elsewhere becomes really critical, and the ways that these ideas are circulating.
And obviously, if we're thinking too about the ways in which so many people have written about how technologies are making it more and more possible for ideas and peoples and goods and cultures to circulate and to shape each other. So I mean, I could give the traditional answer and go into Mazzini and Garibaldi, but I'm going to leave that out for right now.
DAVID ARMITAGE: But interestingly, there isn't, say, an Italian Declaration of Independence or a German Declaration of Independence. The moment we think of as the high tide of nationalism in that sense is also the low ebb of declaring independence. And I'm still puzzling over why that should be.
ELISABETH LEAKE: Hmm.
EREZ MANELA: Yeah. So I guess bottom line here, stay tuned for Elisabeth's book, and also look for the books of our other panelists on this topic. I'll go over to another question from the audience. Curtis J. Hill is asking about the last panelist's comments about Native Americans-- I think that's you, Elisabeth-- not being included as citizens during the American Revolution.
Does that reflect a modernist view of the time period? Does the Declaration of Independence cite the insurrections and conflicts between Native Americans and settlers/colonists that was caused by British forces through the destruction or confiscation of victuals, resources, and lands?
ELISABETH LEAKE: I would say it's not a modernist view, per se. I think it speaks to the historical realities of the time. But also, I think one of the-- I think this links actually really well to the previous question about the people, right? And even in terms of thinking about this question and-- the Declaration of Independence as a declaration of war is also about finger pointing. And who's to blame, right?
So even this and this pointing to an alliance between British-- it's just like-- there's a lot of othering going on here. I'm not going to get into it too much, because there's been so much written about this topic, fortunately. I mean, obviously, just most recently, Ned Blackhawk's book is a great way to get into this point.
But a lot has been written about the ways in which, on one hand, a lot of early American-- a lot of early US American sort of spectacle or cultural artifacts really try, on one hand, to draw on Indigenous cultures and re-appropriate them in a very specific-- and specific sort of-- kind of vogues and framings. But I mean, at the same time, I mean, what becomes very clear is that in terms of citizenship rights-- I mean, it's not just about the Declaration of Independence, right? We have to think about this as a slightly longer term process.
And I was thinking about with this question about the people as well, right? We see this notion of who is the people, and what constitutes a people shifting really drastically in terms of the Articles of Confederation and then the Constitution, and all the debates that are taking place about these political structures. Who is the people, but also, who gets to contribute them from the people? That idea is really shifting rapidly here. And I think the on-the-ground realities of what's happening to a lot of Indigenous communities during and after the War of Independence really demonstrates the ways in which-- [COUGHS] excuse me-- they're being actively excluded from being part of the people.
EREZ MANELA: Danielle, David?
DAVID ARMITAGE: Of course, the Declaration refers both to domestic insurrections among us, uprisings of the enslaved, the promises of freedom from the British forces which were taken up by many of the enslaved, particularly in the South, and then also, in very heavy quotes, the merciless Indian savages who allegedly the king and his forces are brought down upon the colonists themselves.
Balancing that is the fact that we now know that the first sovereign nation to recognize the United States was not France in February 1778. It was the Massachusett people in the late summer of 1776 with the Treaty of Watertown, who, through a French-speaking intermediary, had learned about American independence and then desired to engage in diplomatic relations with the new United States as well. So it's a very complicated picture at that point.
But if we're coming back to the question of nationhood, Robert Parkinson, a historian, has argued very powerfully recently that one of the major bonds of nationhood in the period of the early Republic is anti-Native Americanism, along with, of course, a broader racialization of the United States in that earlier period, the seeds of which can be found in that grievance towards the end of the list of grievances in the Declaration itself.
EREZ MANELA: Danielle, do you want to weigh in on that, or shall I go to the next?
DANIELLE ALLEN: Well, I mean, I would largely agree. I mean, I would only maybe add one thing, which is to say, I think the questions of race and Indigeneity are actually handled quite differently, both in the text and at the time.
So David already alluded to the passage in the draft that criticized George III for the maintenance of the slave trade, and talked about the African people as having sacred rights of life and liberty. So there was a willingness actually across race lines to bring people into the same universal principles. There was not a willingness to share political power with the people who had the same rights. So there was a distinction between the idea that the rights applied and the question of, who should be in the political community?
But then yes, I think Native Americans were held out in a separate category. And you can see then the differences in that abolition gets underway with the revolution. So slavery has been abolished in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Vermont before the end of the war, building on the language of the Declaration of Independence. And so there was a meaningful anti-slavery faction at the time of the revolution. There was also a pro-slavery faction. There were always both sides operating in American politics.
Yet both sides were, in fact, united around continuing war against the tribal communities, with the exception of some of the treaties, as David was alluding to. But in general, there was a kind of continued project of war against Indigenous communities. So I think of that as a bifurcated question, actually.
ELISABETH LEAKE: And I mean, I just-- to add one final point to that as well, right? I mean, I think obviously to relate it back to this question, I guess, of the people, it's important to think about the debates of the time about, yeah, who are the people who can be involved in government, and who are those who are going to be-- for whom citizenship and subjecthood the lines are going to be blurrier?
And this is such an active debate that takes place both within the burgeoning United States, but certainly then too in Hispanic America when so when so many states there become independent. And those kind of questions around literacy requirements and this question-- this assumption about learning as well and degrees of education for being allowed to participate in government as well. So these are also very much-- so these categories are fracturing not only in terms of questions of race and Indigeneity, but also in terms of class.
EREZ MANELA: So I'll just read out one last audience-- it's not really a question. I guess it's more of a comment or a statement, but worth reflecting on. This is Muriel Royer. Forgive me if I mispronounced that. Maybe the decolonial violence or-- decolonial violence of the 20th century should be qualified in terms of its authors. Colonial empires were very violent in the first place. I imagine that no one in the panel will disagree with this wholesale, but I don't know if you have any final words on that point.
ELISABETH LEAKE: The one point I would say is that I think it's important to remember in that respect-- I totally agree. But I think it's important not to just focus on that as a 20th century phenomenon, because often, especially in historical scholarship, there's a little bit of a tendency to look at the first wave of empire across the Americas, and then a second wave of empire across most of Asia and Africa from the mid-19th century onwards.
But what's really critical to remember is that actually, a lot of imperial practices that are tested out across the Americas are then exported and replicated and finessed, for lack of a better word, in a lot-- in Asia and Africa. So that history of violence is very interlinked, and histories of colonial practices and subjugations and divide and rule have these much longer histories. So I think it's important not to just recognize that purely as a 20th century phenomenon, but think about, what are those longer roots and lineages?
DAVID ARMITAGE: I [INAUDIBLE] and say that's not just the historian's perspective, but often the perspective of those who ran empires themselves. The French empire is spooked by Haiti well into the 20th century. The British imperial bureaucrats remember the American Revolution as something never to be repeated. We have to take all of these stories of colonization, empire, and decolonization back at least to 1776, if not before.
EREZ MANELA: Well, this has been an absolutely fascinating, fascinating conversation. Thank you, Danielle, David, and Elisabeth, for doing this. And thank you, all of you, who joined us for this Weatherhead Forum. This is the final Weatherhead Forum of this academic year, but please join us again in future years or in other Weatherhead Center events.
DANIELLE ALLEN: Thank you so much.
ELISABETH LEAKE: Yeah, thank you.
EREZ MANELA: Thank you.
DAVID ARMITAGE: Thanks, Erez.