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Book Review
| David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. 300. $23.95 (ISBN 978-0-674-02282-9).
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| This valuable book seeks to place the Declaration of Independence in "multiple global perspectives" (12). Armitage identifies the document as one primarily about sovereignty rather than rights. The book then traces reactions to the Declaration of Independence as both event and text in the Atlantic world and surveys the proliferation of declarations of independence across the globe. Armitage argues persuasively that the document should be understood as both a turning point in international law and a foundational text in a new genre of modern political writing. |
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In highlighting the American Declaration's message about sovereignty, Armitage contributes to recent efforts by scholars to place American independence in the context of global history and international law. This approach has been used in writing about both federalism and the Constitution but never before in analyzing the Declaration of Independence. Though later interpreters quoted most frequently from the second paragraph's enumeration of the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness," contemporary readers of the Declaration of Independence, and its authors, placed greater emphasis on the claim to sovereignty by "free and independent states," the phrase proclaimed in capital letters in the last paragraph. This formulation drew from Vattel and was intended to position the new nation within a global political and commercial order "operating under the prevailing norms of the law of nations" (38). |
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Armitage is careful to treat this international system as one that was emergent rather than already constituted. He is then able to analyze the Declaration of Independence as both a reflection of the global order and a catalyst in its formation. We learn that no prior document was so explicit in affirming that sub-imperial polities might become—through their own actions—sovereign states with international standing. |
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In the book's middle chapter, Armitage is at his very best in tracing the Declaration's interpretation around the Atlantic. The flawed assumption that the American and French revolutions were similar political events encouraged some writers to embrace the Declaration's language about rights. But this move occurred precisely at the moment of ascendance of a view of the international order as a product of positive law. One response to the Declaration of Independence, illustrated in Armitage's brilliant and concise analysis of Bentham's writings on the Declaration, was to deride its natural rights claims as "nonsense" because they could be called into existence only by positive law, through the acts of legislators. Meanwhile, within the United States, the interpretation of the Declaration as a document about sovereignty retained a following among slaveholders and Southern secessionists, who insisted that they were operating within the founding vision of a nation of "free and independent states." |
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If the book offered only this analysis of the political "afterlives" of the document, it would mark a major scholarly contribution. But Armitage goes further and argues that the different readings resulted in part from possibilities inherent in the text itself. The Declaration of Independence was "jurisprudentially eclectic" (89). This feature directly served the goal of establishing membership in the international order, itself imagined as the product of both natural and positive law. This original insight opens new ways of thinking about the development of international law as a non-linear process drawing on sometimes contradictory currents. |
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The third and last chapter of the book offers a comprehensive overview of other, subsequent declarations of independence that, Armitage argues, also constituted "primarily assertions of sovereignty" while embracing the language of individual rights (137). Some fascinating episodes are reported here, including Ho Chi Minh's appropriation of language and forms from the American Declaration in the 1945 Vietnamese declaration. But the diffusionist approach—Armitage writes of a global "contagion of sovereignty"—presents some limitations (103). In surveying declarations of independence, Armitage cannot pause to provide the detail and subtlety he brings to the Atlantic story. Though the book is undeniably a global history of the Declaration of Independence, its globe is rather lop-sided. Other scholars will perhaps take up the task of probing later declarations and their contexts more deeply, employing Armitage's approach as a model, and his global map as a frame of reference. |
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The useful Appendices include not only the draft and final forms of the Declaration of Independence but also Bentham's essay on the American Declaration, a comprehensive table listing declarations of independence, and a diverse collection of 10 declarations (some extracts). This feature, together with the volume's very clear writing and scholarly notes, will make it an excellent resource in the classroom. |
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Taken together, the book's three chapters and the documents reveal the Declaration of Independence, and the discourse of rights and sovereignty surrounding it, in a new light—a big achievement for a short book. It should be required reading for anyone interested in American independence or the origins of the international order. |
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| Lauren Benton
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| New York University |
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