Join us in-person OR online for a chat between two leading historians exploring Britain and the American Revolution!

Join us for a lunchtime conversation featuring historians Tom Cutterham and Leanne O’Boyle! In-person tickets include a self-guided tour of Benjamin Franklin House!

In each of their new works (linked below), these historians highlight the ways in which empire influenced ordinary Britons and imperial decisionmakers alike.

Britons from all levels of the social spectrum played a key role in the American Revolution, not as passive observers, but as navigators of roiling political complexities on a rapidly transforming world stage. While some Britons acted as sympathisers and advocates who saw their own social, political, and economic struggles reflected in the American mission to define and uphold liberty, others served as the drivers behind Parliamentary policies.

In this session, we’ll work to unpack these legacies of loyalty, resistance, royalism, and activism and reflect on their global implications.

Tom Cutterham’s Empire Ablaze tells the story of James Aitken – house painter, highwayman, and escaped indentured servant – who, as revolution raged in North America, wandered the colonies formulating a dramatic plan to cripple the British navy by destroying Portsmouth dockyard and Bristol harbour. He was determined to burn down the empire to hasten American independence.

Through this overlooked story of British insurrection and America’s founding, historian Tom Cutterham explores how an emerging transatlantic working class experienced the transformation and crisis of Britain’s eighteenth-century empire. Behind this new sense of class consciousness was the Enlightenment philosophy that had informed popular ideas about the universal rights and the corruption of imperial authorities.

For more on this work: Empire Ablaze: the American Revolution and the Atlantic Working Class

Leanne O’Boyle’s Patriots Radicals & Revolutionaries sets the stage for the summer of 1776, when colonial delegates gathered in Philadelphia to debate the words that would found a new nation: The United States of America. Yet the ideas, arguments, and anxieties behind that pivotal moment were forged not only across the Atlantic, but in Britain.

This work tells the story of American independence from the British side, following five sharply contrasting lives in the run up to 1776, all championing liberty, though rarely agreeing on what that meant in practice. Through the eyes of a king, a statesman, a general, a radical, and a diplomat, it reveals the American Revolution not as a simple tale of tyranny and resistance, but as a shared, ongoing global struggle over the meaning of liberty itself.

For more on this work: Patriots, Radicals and Revolutionaries: the British Role in American Independence

About the Authors:

Tom Cutterham is an Associate Professor of United States history at the University of Birmingham and the author of two books about the American Revolution. He is currently working on a third, about the New York families who tried and ultimately failed to build the new United States in their own image.

Leanne O’Boyle is the Founding Director of Thomas Paine: Legacy, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to advancing public understanding of US Founding Father Thomas Paine’s life, ideas, and enduring influence on democracy worldwide. A writer, broadcaster and lecturer, she is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and an Associate of the Society of Authors.

Description supplied by the event organiser.