Robert A. Ferguson

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Robert A. Ferguson | Reviews of Books: Still Not Global | The William and Mary Quarterly, 65.2 | The History Cooperative

Still Not Global

IN our exchanges about The Declaration of Independence: A Global History, no one disagrees about the rhetorical tour de force of a document that looks both inward and outward. Nor is there any question about David Armitage's erudition, again very much in evidence in his response to the first round of comments in this forum, as he continues to come to grips with "the competing imperatives at the heart of the Declaration itself, between peoples and states" (140). Questions begin over whether these competing imperatives justify his decision to analyze the Declaration "by highlighting the outward-looking rather than the inward-looking face of the state" (19), and they continue over Armitage's claim now that the Declaration itself signals "nothing less than a genealogy of the modern international order."¹

Missing from this analysis is the blood of the Revolution. Also missing is the first priority of its leaders in reaching so precariously for a confederated republic of unprecedented size and diversity. The Declaration is one of two documents proposed in June 1776, and it would have come to mean nothing, either at home or abroad, without the second, the much more painfully constructed Articles of Confederation (mentioned only three times in passing in Armitage's pages). The Continental Congress fought hard over the Articles for more than a year before formal adoption on November 17, 1777, and this first struggle to form an effective union was given only grudging state ratification much later, in March 1781.

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