This chapter is a study of slave resistance during the Revolutionary era that examines the ways in which enslaved women, who comprised one-third of runaways, endeavored to gain their freedom during and after the Revolutionary War. Women and girls of diverse circumstances fled or attempted to flee bondage during the Revolutionary era, often at great cost to themselves and others. Some escapes were collective; others were individual. Women ran away to claim their liberty which they viewed as acts consistent with the ideals enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. There were in fact two wars being waged: a political revolution for independence from Great Britain and a social revolution for emancipation and equality in which Black women played an active role.

The American War of Independence felt the influence not only of statesmen and generals but also of subordinate officers, enlisted men, women, Native Americans, and African Americans. Red-letter events were triggered by incidents as diverse as grassroots rebellions and epidemics. A crucial mistake might cost a general a battle – but it could also have the ironic effect of leaving him better off than before. Factors such as climate, disease, and geography further complicated commanders’ decisionmaking process, if anything increasing their significance. Various white, enslaved, and Indigenous leaders excelled at everything from manipulating morale to obtain their ends using nothing more than threats. But commanders’ influence was not always positive. For example, it took George Washington most of the Revolutionary War to learn what his British counterparts had known all along – that the war was his to win so long as he stifled his own aggressive instincts and mostly stayed on defense.

The New Cambridge History of the English Language is aimed at providing a contemporary and comprehensive overiew of English, tracing its roots in Germanic and investigating the contact scenarios in which the language has been an active participant. It discusses the various models and methodologies which have been developed to analyse diachronic data concisely and consistently. The new history furthermore examines the trajectories which the language has embarked on during its spread worldwide and presents overviews of the varieties of English found throughout the world today.

This chapter examines the non-violent and violent actions of laboring people against injustices perpetrated by those in power prior to the American Revolution. It takes a transatlantic approach to examine riots, mutiny, piracy, and insurrections by free and enslaved peoples. The chapter takes a dialectical approach to when and how laboring people acted out against authority. Reduced economic opportunities, attacks on the moral economy, and food shortages often led to riots or more extreme insurrections on both sides of the Atlantic. Attacks on individual freedom, such as the institution of naval and military impressment or taxation, tended to meet petty resistance in Europe and lead to more severe action in the Americas. Meanwhile, enslaved people resisted at all levels and sought to take advantage whenever cracks in the system appeared. Together, the resistance of laboring people generated examples of action and a language of liberty for rebels in North America seeking independence from the British empire on the eve of the American Revolution.

Movement and the freedom to move are concepts intertwined with the origins and impact of the American Revolution. This chapter views the Revolution and the decades that followed through the lens of those concepts to examine whether that conflict sparked new opportunities for physical movement to, from, and within the newly established United States. To do so it explores the experiences of Loyalists, African Americans, immigrants, citizens, and Native Americans within a thematic framework that identifies the forces and actions altering the dynamics of power, ideology, and policy from the Atlantic seaboard to the trans-Mississippi West from the 1780s to the 1810s. Those diverse experiences demonstrate that the freedom to move was inextricably intertwined with efforts to define the meaning of “we the people” in the new American republic.

Historians have long debated the impact of the American Revolution on the institution of slavery. Did the war create a nation devoted to liberty or one mired in slaveholding? Beginning in the 1780s, Black and white abolitionists won hard-fought battles for gradual emancipation and manumission in some states even as slaveholding expanded across much of the South. At the national level, the choices that federal leaders made to secure a strong union of states gave enslavers unprecedented access to the land and labor that would make the United States a significant slaveholding power. As the United States grasped territory over the next forty years, slavery spread with the nation. These changes were devastating for enslaved people, who lost their families, communities, labor, bodily autonomy, and lives to the world that slavery created. Within just a few decades after the American Revolution, the landscape of slavery was entirely transformed.

This chapter traces the two different movements in British imperial history that occurred post-Revolution: the geopolitical “Swing to the East” and the corresponding ideological “Swing to the Right.” Examining first India, then the Pacific, then Australia, it shows how the British empire became more assertive in each place from the 1780s, while at the same time experiencing a narrowing of imperial sentiments toward jingoism at home. It also considers colonized and Indigenous reactions to these assertions, delineating how they sometimes affected the course of empire in this period despite the overall negative effect of British incursion into their homelands. Colonized and Indigenous people certainly saw British assertions as anything but an improvement on their liberties. The chapter argues that the British empire’s survival after the American Revolution is best understood as a simultaneous refocusing on new oceanic possibilities and on a new kind of conservative imperative.

In the early nineteenth century, the Central and South American revolutions and independences invited North Americans to reflect upon “their” Revolution, and their place in the world, laying the foundations of the western hemisphere as a world region with its own history. Likewise, Central and South Americans pondered what it meant to be American and América as their patria/pátria (homeland). They turned to the United States, yet not exclusively, for material aid, diplomatic recognition, trading opportunities, revolutionary literature, and constitutional writings, nurturing thus the exercise of comparing revolutionary experiences. From the transfer of the Portuguese court to Brazil and exile of the Spanish king to Bayonne, in 1808, to the Battle of Ayacucho and the election of John Quincy Adams to the White House, in 1824, English, Spanish, and Portuguese Americans readjusted to their distinctive hemispheric/American geography with territorial, political, economic, social, cultural, and ideological connections of its own.

Laws that prohibited enslaved people from learning to read and write first appeared in the South in the decades before the Revolution. Newspapers were expanding, and literacy rates among white colonists were rising. The first such clause, designed to forbid writing, appeared in South Carolina’s slave statute of 1740, enacted in response to the 1739 Stono Uprising. As enslaved populations grew, other colonies followed this example and expanded on it, establishing a pattern of hostility to all forms of Black literacy and education that persisted beyond emancipation and far into modern American life. Though strict enforcement was impossible, these laws had a huge impact. They created a virtual “Blackout” for generations of enslaved African Americans, and they fostered an abiding Southern suspicion of education and book learning. Historians often overlook the scope and importance of this mass deprivation, emphasizing instead the physical brutality and hardships inflicted by the slavery regime.

This chapter tells the story of Kwadwo Egyir (also known as Cudjo Caboceer), an African trader and employee of the British Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, in the town of Cape Coast in the modern Republic of Ghana. Egyir amassed wealth and power by working with the British Company, and he eventually used it to usurp power from the ruler of Cape Coast. Like the Patriots in North America, he found ways to benefit from a system of violence, slavery and overseas trade that was made possible to a great extent by Britain’s forced removal of Africans from their homeland and the forced labor of Africans in the Americas. His life serves as an example of how British influence in West Africa and North America were similar, in spite of many differences.

After an outline of the basis of scientific historical linguistics, this chapter discusses what can be learned about Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the earliest recoverable ancestor of English, from archaeology and the study of ancient DNA. It then discusses some characteristics of PIE, outlines how its daughter languages diversified and sketches how Proto-Germanic developed. The chapter closes with a survey of words of PIE and its immediate daughter languages that survive in Modern English (ModE). A special theme is the first- and second-person pronouns, whose development is sketched very briefly from PIE to ModE.

English historical sociolinguistics traces the transition of a ‘small’ language into a ‘big’ one. Old English was a small language in terms of its regional coverage and number of speakers, whereas Present-day English is a comprehensively documented world language with hundreds of millions of first-language speakers. Its 1500-year history involves gradually developing social structures of different timescales, but it was also affected by abrupt changes brought about by forces such as invasions and pandemics. Sociolinguistics highlights the agency of language users in shaping and changing their language and, consequently, the society they live in. Written records on individual language use are sparse from the earliest periods but multiply as people from different walks of life become literate and pass on data on their linguistic practices. With time, increasing efforts are, however, also expended on regulating usage with the aim of language standardisation.

The so-called “Imperial Crisis” (1763–1774) was in fact a series of conflicts between the British government and different groups of North America’s inhabitants. In the struggle between North Americans and the British imperial government, a wide variety of Americans joined marches, signed petitions, and complained vociferously. These conflicts did not divide neatly between “British” and “American,” however. The power of sovereign Native nations shaped Revolutionaries’ protests as surely as the decrees of the royal government. African-descended people found opportunities to force a partial reckoning with chattel slavery. Most remarkably, the stuff of ordinary life – from clothing to the food and drink that women and men put on their tables – became part of the argument. Those protests and protesters were the foundation of the American Revolution.

This chapter analyzes how the War for Independence affected Caribbean colonies and how they, in turn, shaped the revolution. It organizes the impact into two moments: before and after the 1778 Franco-American alliance. In the first phase, Patriots turned to the French, Spanish, and Dutch Caribbean for war materiel and, more generally, to fill the economic gap resulting from the break with Britain. Meanwhile, British Caribbean colonies weathered the shocks of North American independence to trade and to preserve their precarious slave societies. After 1778, with the official entrance of European powers into the war, the Caribbean became an active theater of conflict, as all empires looked to protect and to add to West Indian claims. Pressed for more soldiers in this region, some militaries armed Black men, who, through their actions, undercut patriots’ racist basis of freedom – a challenge that reached even fuller fruition during the Haitian Revolution.