The secession of thirteen colonies from the British empire upended the political landscape of eastern North America. Beginning in the mid-1770s, British and US diplomats traveled to Indian country to build new alliances or reinforce old ones, and as they met with imperial representatives, Indigenous nations pursued strategies that would best allow them to defend their sovereignty and homelands in this tumultuous era. Although the contours of diplomacy in the Revolutionary era were new, the work of alliance-building required participating in longstanding practices and necessitated, in particular, creating and maintaining the personal relationships that provided a foundation for political cooperation. Focusing on the Native nations of the Upper Ohio River Valley, this chapter examines the complex diplomacy of Delaware, Shawnee, and Haudenosaunee Indians with one another as well as with the rival British and US empires.

The Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) was the world’s first global war. All of the Europe’s major powers along with their multiethnic allies in their vast transoceanic empires were embroiled in this conflict. Diverse rival forces comprised of Indigenous, Black, and European fighting men clashed in sea and land battles across the planet. This chapter considers the connections between this global war and the American Revolution that chased hot on its heels. Focusing on the British and Spanish empires, it offers an analysis of the worldwide war that reveals the fragility of colonial rule. In the Atlantic and Pacific worlds, communities resisted sending men to fight, and the War sparked massive anticolonial revolts. It also highlights the sources of imperial resilience. Patriotic popular support for war flourished alongside anticolonial eruptions that empires rallied to suppress. The road to the American Revolution was not inevitable in 1764.

Old English differs from Present-Day English in two main respects. The first is that Old English has relatively rich inflectional morphology, most of which is no longer present in Present-Day English. The second is that Old English word order is relatively free compared to that of Present-Day English, particularly when it comes to the position of finite verbs. These differences are the result of a number of changes that can be observed in the recorded history of English and that are commonly understood as representing a typological shift towards a more analytic type. The key changes include the loss of inflection, the shift from OV to VO and the development towards a fixed position of the lexical verb, which have also resulted in a divergence from the continental West Germanic languages.

“Political economy,” in the late eighteenth century, signified the statesman’s practice of managing the resources of a political “household.” In 1776, thirteen self-declared American states took control of their political economies. Under the Articles of Confederation, these states, in carefully delimited ways, acted as a composite body with a political economy of its own, and in 1787, the revised federal Constitution became a blueprint for a unified project of economic, political, and social ordering. Thus the history of US political economy can be seen as the story of an emerging One. During the 1790s, two opposing political economies emerged, envisioned and promoted by Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Recent scholarship, however, has moved beyond visions of early American political economy either as a constitutionally defined One or as a partisan Two. It envisions, instead, a postconstitutional landscape composed of many political economies – competing, overlapping, and evolving.

This chapter discusses the extent to which language contact between the indigenous inhabitants of England and the Germanic migrants (fifth to sixth centuries) may have influenced the evolution of English in its earliest stages. It then considers the possible consequences of contact with Norse in the Danelaw (eighth to eleventh centuries), the so-called Viking/Norse hypothesis. It furthermore addresses theories concerning the emergence of the first literary forms of language, associated with the Kingdom of Mercia and the School of Winchester and the tenth-century Benedictine Reform. Theories about the possible influence of the Mercian and West Saxon proto-standards on other dialects are also reviewed, since they may have obscured, at a vernacular level, the results of language contact with Scandinavian in the Old English period.

Diverse Americans have appropriated the Revolution to justify wideranging causes and visions of the American nation. Over the two centuries following the Revolution, Americans’ memories of the founding tended to conform to one of two broad patterns. The first, “monumentalism,” seeks to create a single, unified civic culture around an understanding of the Revolution that is associated with the state, conservatism, tradition, and cultural homogeneity. The second, or the “fulfillment narrative,” argues that the Revolution was motivated by certain ideals (freedom, equality, self-determination) that are worth pursuing but have not yet been achieved. Despite their differences, monumentalism and the fulfillment narrative share the assumption that the legacy of the American Revolution is fundamentally positive. But, on occasion, some Americans have instead questioned or outright rejected the American Revolution’s legacy, and such dissenting memories can highlight perspectives that are obscured by a near-universal embrace of the Revolution.

This chapter provides an overview of the evolution of English morphology, focusing on inflection. Beside a largely synchronic account of the nominal and verbal morphology in the individual historical periods, the chapter explains the underlying mechanisms and motivations behind morphological developments pertinent to individual stages. These include changes such as loss of inflections, transformation of case, number and gender systems, or the restructuring of the formal marking of tense and mood. The typological drift which English experienced over the last 1300 years stays central to the discussion, as does language contact with Celtic, Norse and Norman French, whose role as a potential catalyst for morphological changes will be explored. The discussion emphasises the dynamic nature of the morphological system and the continuity of the processes involved in its gradual transformation over the centuries.

Between 1730 and 1775, the quantity of consumer goods bought and sold and the number of people purchasing them significantly expanded in British North America. This economic activity created shared tastes and habits across regional, ethnic, and racial divisions and encouraged the development of shared experiences and identities based on the emulation of British culture. Groups often marginalized in political and cultural discourses found in consumerism new ways to assert their identities and influence. During the Anglo-American crisis, the rejection of British imports became an important means of rallying support for the Patriot cause, politicizing activities formerly considered to be domestic and private. The American Revolution disrupted the economic and cultural ties that had linked American and British markets, but by the late eighteenth century Americans had resumed many of the consumer habits in which they had indulged before independence.

Historians long to understand how historical individuals assessed their circumstances and made decisions, whether about daily life (What will I eat? Who will I meet?) or larger geopolitical contexts (Is this an ally or enemy? What is freedom?) In most historical circumstances, household and family was the context in which such assessments and decisions were made and taken. The overwhelming importance of this most local setting can escape our notice, but it should not: Households were the essential social structures of North America and the early modern Atlantic world. This chapter looks at the ways in which historiographies of gender (especially sexuality and reproduction), economy (especially market economies including the slave trade), and law (particularly laws of inheritance and marriage) shaped the household experiences and relationships of people in British America, North America, and the Atlantic world to 1775.

Despite being significant political and historical actors, Black children have been neglected in our understanding of pre-Revolutionary America. Enslaved or in various forms of bondage, Black children imagined and enacted a potentially free world in the promise of the coming of the American Revolution. This chapter highlights historical individuals – Black boys and girls – who found determination and freedom in an uncertain world.

This chapter explores the link between education and linguistic innovation in the early history of English, by looking at the evolution of the school system and the languages of school instruction. Varieties of spoken and written Latin and Latin as a second (and third) language are among the other sociolinguistic anchors of this chapter. The turning points are located at about 650 CE, the spread of Christianity and formal schooling in Latin among the Anglo-Saxons, at 1066, the introduction of French as a second vernacular and language of school instruction, and at 1349, the reversal of the latter situation in the wake of the socio-demographic changes caused by the Black Death. The survey starts on the eve of the Germanic migration to Britain and ends around 1500; it is illustrated with a selection of lexical and structural features introduced into English through contact with Latin.

The American war, as the War of American Independence was known in Britain, was a highly misleading description; it was much more than just a bilateral struggle between Britain and the rebel colonies that became the United States. Though the conflict began in North America, from when the French intervened in 1778 to support the new states, the war spread to the West Indies, West Africa, South Asia, and the waters off the British Isles. When the Spanish became belligerents in 1779, the geographical reach of the struggle expanded still further, taking in Central America and Britain’s Mediterranean outposts of Gibraltar and Minorca. At the end of 1780, the list of Britain’s enemies extended when the British (rather quixotically) declared war on the Dutch. Dutch possessions in the Caribbean, West Africa and South Asia were drawn into a truly worldwide contest. In all theaters of the war, including in North America, the European belligerents called on the military support of local manpower and the services of other Europeans, making it a transnational as well as a global conflict.

What was the American Revolution? More importantly, what wasn’t it? In the years following the independence of the United States, Americans thought through these questions alongside contemporary events shaking the foundations of the global imperial order. As revolutions gripped Ireland, France, Saint-Domingue, Poland, and elsewhere in the late eighteenth century, Americans began to wonder whether their own revolution was one among many radical attacks on global tyranny or if it was an unusually orderly event that deviated from other revolutions’ drift toward anarchy and terror. By the end of the 1790s, white Americans largely recognized that the American Revolution was fundamentally unlike the Haitian or French Revolutions. Yet for many decades to come, Black Americans held on to a more radical, expansive vision of the American Revolution that tied it to the legacy of the radical revolutions of the late eighteenth century.

The American Revolution gave rise to a new republican logic of empire. Far from rejecting empire, American policymakers believed that their exceptional imperial model marked the beginning of a new era in the history of human progress. During the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson and the Confederation Congress laid out a blueprint for a transcontinental settler colonial empire based on republican principles of self-government. The empire of liberty was tied up with concepts of American exceptionalism. The original architects of the empire of liberty saw their imperial schemes as part of a broader, cosmopolitan enlightenment project to perfect human society. This changed during the early nineteenth century as Americans increasingly embraced a racialized and ethnocentric view of their empire in response to the revolutions in France, Haiti, and Latin America.