Colloquy Podcast: Was the American Revolution a War Against or for Empire?

Here in eastern Massachusetts, you can't take more than a few steps without tripping over a marker or a monument to the American Revolution. Middle school students take field trips to where it all happened: the Boston Massacre, Lexington and Concord, and Bunker Hill. Teachers present the war as the struggle of humble farmers and merchants to free themselves from the clutches of the British Empire. 

The University of California Berkeley historian Brian DeLay, PhD ’04, author of the forthcoming book, Aim at Empire: American Revolutions, Arms Trading, and the Birth of US Empire, 1763–1815, says that the great paradox of the Revolution was that the Patriots were fighting not only for their independence, but also for an empire of their own—one that rolled through the lands of indigenous peoples west of the boundary set by the British at the end of the Seven Years War in 1763. Moreover, DeLay says the Revolution was one of many that spread across the Americas over a 50-year period in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The common thread throughout these conflicts—and the determinant of success and failure—was often access to guns and ammunition.

So before we explore the history of the struggle for arms in America, I want to talk about an even more fundamental framing that’s right in the title of your forthcoming book, Aim at Empire. As I mentioned in the intro, we tend to think of the Revolution that birthed the United States as the Patriots’ struggle for independence from the British Empire. So, how is it simultaneously a war for empire as well?

I think all revolutions are twinned stories. It’s a story about an exit and a story about an entrance. It’s a story about exiting a political arrangement that no longer serves a people’s interests and the creation of something new that hopefully will. It can be difficult when you’re narrating the history of a revolution to be attentive to both of these stories at the same time.

In the US case, the venerable way of trying to do this is to pair the exit story out of the British Empire with the story of the creation of a new political structure, from the Articles of Confederation to the drafting and the ratification of the Constitution. And that’s a venerable, true, very important story. But it’s also a story about interactions between white people.

So it’s a story in the first instance about interactions between colonists and the empire. And in the second instance, between citizens of the new emerging republic as they try to figure out their political future. The problem with that framing is that it obscures how totally fundamental an imperial project was to the revolutionary project writ large.

And what I mean by that is that the Revolution was launched, fought, and then elaborated upon after the war was over with Great Britain in large part to secure two kinds of imperial goals. The first was control over hundreds of thousands of war captives, essentially enslaved people of African descent, who constituted about a fifth of the population in the United States at the time of the Revolution.

And the second was to obtain land and resources from the Indigenous people that controlled most of the trans-Appalachian West. These were not minor sideshows that some white Americans were involved in. They were integral to the entire political project. And so the reason that I’ve called the book Aim at Empire is to try to capture that double story in the exit and the entrance.

Right. The first is that the colonists are aiming at empire in the sense of trying to achieve independence against Great Britain. And in the second instance, they’re aiming to create their own empire across eastern North America, one that’s founded upon slavery and dispossession.

The Revolution was launched, fought, and then elaborated upon after the war was over with Great Britain in large part to secure two kinds of imperial goals. The first was control over hundreds of thousands of war captives, essentially enslaved people of African descent, who constituted about a fifth of the population in the United States at the time of the Revolution. And the second was to obtain land and resources from the Indigenous people that controlled most of the trans-Appalachian West. 

You’ve identified in your response these two “legacy wars” that Europe and the colonists had been prosecuting, really, since the late 15th century. Talk about how that framing then led you to want to explore the era of the American revolutions. And again, we’re talking about revolutions really throughout North and South America. Explore those through the struggle for guns and ammunition. What does it allow us to understand that other kinds of frameworks don’t?

So there’s really, I guess, three reasons, three things that I find appealing and interesting about building a revolutionary history around guns and ammunition. The first, just very practically, almost no other historians have done this. You know, there’s massive scholarship on the age of revolutions, just enormous amounts of brilliant, brilliant work for generations. But very interestingly, almost nothing or virtually nothing in any sustained way on how all of these contending parties equip themselves in order to advance their own interests against armed opposition.

So the novelty of it is one of the appeals. The second and more substantial reason, I think, that this is a useful lens is that we’re very accustomed to building revolutionary histories around things like ideas, discourse, ideology, you know, even culture. These approaches have been enormously productive and have reshaped our understanding of the period.

It’s also true that those kinds of approaches exclude some actors and include others in a way that guns and ammunition cut across these divisions. So whether you were literate or not, whether you spoke English or Cherokee or Haitian Creole or Spanish, whether you were a Republican or a monarchist, whether you were a slaveholder or an enslaved person, it didn’t matter. You know what your connection was in any of those realms. If what you’re really trying to do is to find the capacity to advance your own vision of freedom in a way that guns and ammunition would allow you to do. So the basic materiality of these things cuts across these divisions, and I think makes it more possible for us to see the wider tableaux of actors involved in the revolutionary story.

The third and final reason that I found this to be such a, for me at least, really interesting lens onto the revolutionary era is that almost no one in the story, except for the Europeans, had the capacity to mass-produce these things. That meant that everybody, again, whether we’re talking about George Washington in the Continental Congress or we’re talking about an enslaved person in Virginia, or we’re talking about the Shawnees or an insurgent movement in Saint-Domingue.

Everybody had to find a way to tap into the international arms market, and that fact introduces so much uncertainty and contingency into the story. The guns are moving in ways that almost no one can completely control. Obviously, some people have lots more power over it than others, but all kinds of unpredictable things happen. And as a historian, you know, we all love contingency.

We all love being able to point out moments where things could have turned out differently. And I think when we focus on guns and ammunition and the way they snake through these stories, the moments of contingency are so easy to see. And they’re so pregnant with possibility. That, for me, it kind of took a story that I had felt maybe overly familiar with and made it newly strange and exciting to me. So I hope readers are going to feel the same way.

You’re talking about the need for access to mass production of weapons, and really, only the Europeans have that. The British obviously had such an advantage. How did the Patriots get access to the kinds of arms that they needed to effectively oppose the largest empire in the world?

If you’re looking at facing organized military resistance to what it is you want to accomplish, you need weapons in quantity. There are three basic ways you can do it, going from sort of least reliable to the most secure. So the least reliable way to do it is to rely on foreign patronage. You are useful to some other foreign power that has the capacity to mass-produce and deliver these items to you, and they’ll do it as long as you continue to be useful to them.

That’s one way. The intermediate way, the way that gives the weapon seeker a little bit more power, is through the market. You know, if you have things that you can sell in sufficient quantity and you have access to these international market outlets, then maybe you’ll be able to buy what you need on the open market, right? That’s the second mode. The third and the most secure mode, the mode that everybody most wants to be able to do, is just make it all yourself. And at the beginning of the story, again, no one in the Americas can do that. They all have to rely on some mix of foreign patronage and market access.

So when the American Revolution begins, you know, there’s all kinds of informed observers who are scratching their heads and saying, This is the most insane thing I’ve ever seen. Because, you know, again, as you say, these farmers are going to go up against the mightiest empire that’s ever existed in the world. They have absolutely no chance. They don’t even have an arms industry. How are they going to do this?

But there were really insightful figures in the American Revolution who today, for weird reasons, their, you know, reputations have been minimized, and they’re not very well known. They were merchants, and they had an understanding of these international networks. And they had this really brilliant insight, which is that alone among colonial regions in the Americas, British North Americans were uniquely positioned to overcome these problems because precisely because they had so long belonged to the mightiest empire in the world, that membership had conferred real, distinct advantages upon them.

So, for example, they had an enormous merchant marine, and that was a consequence of belonging to the British Empire. And that merchant marine not only gave them the infrastructure to manage the transportation problem with all of these materials, but it also gave them all kinds of market connections to other places around the world that otherwise they wouldn’t have enjoyed, and they immediately began to operationalize in order to buy arms and ammunition, as early as late 1774.

They have, again, a number of connections that they wouldn’t have otherwise had to merchant houses and centers of financial power in continental Europe. And they mobilize all these things in the first two years of the war through this astonishingly effective play into the international arms market. And it’s far more successful than any of their enemies believe that it would be. And even many of their proponents were shocked at how successful it was.

But by late 1776, the British Empire had figured out how to really fatally disrupt this market through all kinds of different strategies, mainly through the exertion of British naval power. And so by the end of 1776, early 1777, it’s looking extremely grim for the North American insurgency. And then in early 1777, these giant ships began to arrive straight from France, absolutely packed to the gills with guns and ammunition. And that’s the savior of the entire project.

So it’s foreign patronage that makes the Revolution a viable, ongoing movement. And then, of course, it’s the decision of France and Spain to formally enter the war on behalf of American independence, indirectly for Spain, but directly for France, that contributes their navies to the cause, that turns it into a global war, and transforms the whole conflict. So it’s, you know, one way to think about the United States is that it’s neither uniquely bad nor uniquely good, but it is arguably uniquely lucky. And the American Revolution, you know, time and again, that is borne out.

The basic materiality of [guns and ammunition] . . . makes it more possible for us to see the wider tableaux of actors involved in the revolutionary story.

Let’s now expand our lens to revolutions where the actors didn’t necessarily have the benefit of being part of the British Empire for so long. You talk about two in particular. I’d love it if you could kind of unpack them a little bit. What were they, and how did access to guns and ammunition secure the success of one but the failure of the other?

Well, the American Revolution is the first in a series of geopolitical earthquakes that are going to remake the Americas over the course of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. And I’m interested in that broad hemispheric movement. But for this book, there’s just so much going on that I’m focusing really on two other revolutions rather than, you know, twenty other revolutions.

So the two that I’m focusing on are the Haitian Revolution and the revolution of Indigenous people against American imperialism in the trans-Appalachian West in the 1810s. So both of these stories are profoundly connected to the American Revolution and the American imperial project, but in really different ways and in ways that help answer your question about why one succeeds and the other one fails.

So, for the Haitian Revolution, it should have been a practical impossibility for the enslaved majority in Saint-Domingue, this rich French island colony, to have acquired remotely enough raw material to achieve independence from France. That should have been a practical impossibility. They had plenty of courage and self-sacrifice and brilliance, enormous storehouses of those things. And a conduit into the international arms trade is not necessary to start a revolution. It’s just necessary to win one.

So, prior to the American Revolution, in other words, what happened in Saint-Domingue? There could have been a massive rebellion. It could have been remarkably important in the history of slavery, but it could not have conceivably resulted in independence had it not been for access to the international market, and that access would not have been possible without the American Revolution.

So before the American Revolution, there’s no entity anywhere in the Western Hemisphere that is itself a significant arms dealer because, you know, all the territory in the Western Hemisphere is either controlled by Indigenous polities who make no weapons, no gunpowder weapons, or it is under the control of one of several empires. So after American independence, you had something new in the Western Hemisphere, an independent republic that was unencumbered by entangling alliances to European powers. It was deeply committed to the buying, and the selling, and the exporting of war material. And it was also embarking on some really important steps to create its own arms industry.

So that’s the case in 1791, when this inspired revolt breaks out in Saint-Domingue. The event that we call the Haitian Revolution is really an incredibly complicated series of wars that layer one atop another. And it goes from 1791 until 17—pardon me, until 1804. But in Saint-Domingue, what we see is sort of the inverse of this story in the United States. In Saint-Domingue, it’s imperial patronage that helps the rebellion launch. So, almost immediately upon the rebellion getting any momentum, rebels began acquiring war material from Spain, which is in control of the other half of the island in Santo Domingo. And then later, France shows up, and they’re involved in an international war, and they begin arming some of these parties as well. And Britain, for its own purposes, arms others. And so there are imperial patrons to a certain extent, and that helps get it critical mass.

But by the middle of the 1790s, it’s the market that is fueling the Haitian Revolution. And, with no close combat competitor, American merchants are the main vendors who are selling war material to multiple parties on the island, but most especially to the formerly enslaved who are now in practical control of most of Saint-Domingue.

So the Haitian Revolution prevails in the first instance, and most importantly, because of the inspired courage and self-sacrifice of the people who fought that war. But there was also this absolutely indispensable component, which was the imported war material, which comes overwhelmingly from merchants in the United States.

The final, the third and final revolution, that’s kind of the end point of the book, is the revolution that coalition Indigenous polities west of the Appalachian Mountains fight in order to try to reverse the ascent of US empire east of the Mississippi. Throughout the whole book, there’s a discourse in Indian Country that says, If we lay aside our old differences and we unite together, we have a chance of stopping this tidal wave. But if we don’t, we have no chance. And that is an argument that gets made over and over again from the 1760s all the way up to the 1810s.

The only way that argument really begins to prevail, the only way that it begins to convince people who are on the fence and not so sure that this isn’t a road to ruin, is when it is attached to an imperial patron. That’s true during the American Revolution, because then Britain is the great patron that’s equipping Indigenous people to resist settlers. It’s true for about a decade after the American Revolution, when both France and Spain, for its own reasons, continue to arm Indigenous polities in the face of the challenges presented by this new polity, the United States.

And then it becomes true again starting around 1812, when Britain and the United States go to war. And so inspired Indigenous leaders, including Tecumseh, the Shawnee leader, use that moment to revive this pan-Indian resistance project, anti-imperial project. And they are relying completely on imperial patronage in order to equip their project. And I said a little while ago that that was an inevitable way that actors in the Western Hemisphere try to arm themselves, but it’s the least reliable way, because, of course, it’s a faucet that the patron can turn on and off.

And so not only are you vulnerable to the possibility that the patron will simply decide it’s no longer in their interest to do this for you, but you’re also vulnerable to their wisdom and their strategy and their ability to manage logistics and all kinds of other problems that don’t cut in the interests of Indigenous militants in the War of 1812.

And so they find themselves fighting poorly equipped against a country that’s just absolutely awash in weapons, because by 1812, the United States had succeeded in creating either a third- or a second-tier arms industry where almost all of the weapons that its army and its militia are using against the combined forces of the British army and these Indigenous warrior societies, they’re almost all American-made, and that’s just not something that was going to be enough.

And so the final coda in some ways to the book is that Great Britain had continually abandoned its Indigenous allies through this sequence of wars in North America, and that the Treaty of Ghent, with these negotiations that are convened to end this latest war between Britain and the United States, the British negotiators come in and they say, Okay, well, one of our nonnegotiable demands is we insist on a protectorate status for our Indigenous allies.

That would have been an enormously consequential development in the history of North America. And the American negotiators say that’s a complete deal breaker. And the British say, Okay, never mind. We don’t contest. And so that’s the end of any question about who is going to be in control of eastern North America. And after 1815, it’s clearly the United States.

The American Revolution really was a remarkable advance . . . when it comes to democracy, to the right to vote, to suffrage, to the destruction of inherited privilege, to the overthrow of the connection between church and state. . . . But we need to have the courage to look with a clear eye at the other sides of the American Revolution in order to understand why we’re in such a fragile moment right now.

You were just telling the story of how the people of Haiti were able to get independence from the French colonialists through their access to guns and ammunition. It’s one of the astonishing things about reading your book: the notion that they were getting their arms from American dealers. When they do achieve independence, how does that have an impact on politics in the United States?

Not all white people in the United States, even in the late eighteenth century, were enthusiastic about slavery. But that was nonetheless a system that the United States committed itself to in its Constitution. And it was only growing, you know, rapidly by then.

So the United States is committed to slavery at this point. And it’s also very clearly a white man’s republic, with, you know, a certain amount of kind of normalized contempt for people of African descent. So it’s interesting that in that context, US traders would provide the war material necessary to create the world’s first antislavery republic.

Now, the reasons that that happened, there are a few reasons. One is that I mentioned a moment ago, that the Haitian Revolution, we put that a lot under the umbrella of that term. Among other things, of course, this is a feature; it’s a part of the broader global history of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

And the United States finds itself in a different relationship to France over the course of this long struggle. By the end of it, for example, by, say, 1800 to 1804, there’s a really interesting transformation where initially, France and Napoleon believe that Jefferson’s election to the presidency is going to put them in a commanding position.

And finally, they have someone they can work with. The Adams administration, actually, contrary to US law, facilitated the arming of the Haitian Revolution. And Napoleon was confident that Jefferson was not going to do anything like that. And, you know, I forget what the exact number is. Something like a quarter of the people who were invited guests to Jefferson’s inauguration were French and everything. This is a real French-friendly administration.

So there’s a lot of enthusiasm initially. And initially, the French minister in the United States comes to speak with Jefferson about what’s going on in Saint-Domingue. And he explains, You know, we need to put a stop to this. This isn’t in anybody’s interest to have these savages, quote-unquote, in charge of this important island.

And Jefferson gives a strong signal that the United States is prepared to help France reconquer Saint-Domingue; that it's going to help them do that by shutting down the arms trade and by provisioning French troops. Both these things are really kind of preconditions to making this happen. The French minister takes that signal back to Napoleon, and they think, All right, we’re ready.

And so Napoleon organizes the largest military, single military operation in the history of the Americas to subdue Saint-Domingue, ships all of these thousands and thousands of French powder-hardened French veterans to go in and suppress the Haitian Revolution. But in the interim, what has happened is that the Jefferson administration finally realizes and feels that it has now clear proof that that’s stage one in Napoleon’s plan.

Stage two is Louisiana. Now, that’s a deal breaker for Jefferson’s perspective. And so the administration’s opinion about this, its aversion to Black independence, its aversion to slave rebellion, all that is trumped by geopolitics and by the knowledge that France cannot prevail in Saint-Domingue because its next step is Louisiana. So they don’t do anything meaningful to suppress the arms trade to Saint-Domingue between 1800 and 1803.

And they don’t provision the French army like they promised they were going to do. And so it’s a giant disaster for Napoleon. And that is the reason that Napoleon makes this very grudging decision to sell Louisiana to the United States.

Finally, there’s always the risk of historicizing, particularly in an anniversary year. But how does the fact that the American Revolution was both a war of independence and of imperial conquest continue to shape the country’s character?

Today, people very close to the center of power barely feel constrained to disguise the degree to which they are nostalgic for an earlier America that was explicitly a white man’s republic, where everybody else had some subordinate position behind white men. We did have a country like that for a really long time, and it was destroyed in the American Civil War.

After the Civil War, we finally had a political framework that made possible the dream of a multiracial democracy. And, you know, white resistance and terrorism stopped that from becoming a practical reality for another century or so. But, you know, for my whole lifetime, until now, this has been a multiracial democracy. It still is.

But it’s under attack in a way now that I think few of us really expected 10 or 15 years ago. And so this history becomes deeply relevant. It’s hard when it comes time to commemorate one of these important moments. It’s easy, I think, to fall into a situation where we’re only focusing on the defects of the early republic and the inequality and the predation of the early republic.

And God knows, I’m talking a lot about this in the book that I’m writing right now. But, you know, we also have to acknowledge that in global context, the American Revolution really was a remarkable advance on a number of different levels. World-historic importance when it comes to democracy, to the right to vote, to suffrage, to the destruction of inherited privilege, to the overthrow of the connection between church and state. There are so many really important things that it accomplished that are part of our, you know, heritage in the American Revolution.

But we need to have the courage to look with a clear eye at the other sides of the American Revolution in order to understand why we’re in such a fragile moment right now.