Lynn Hunt

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Lynn Hunt | Reviews of Books: The Meaning of Independence | The William and Mary Quarterly, 65.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Editor's Note: This is the first in a proposed series of critical forums. Respondents have been invited to consider the work under discussion in its broadest historical and scholarly context. Their comments and the author's rejoinder are the inspiration for the second round of responses.

The Declaration of Independence: A Global History. By David Armitage. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. 308 pages. $23.95 (cloth).

The Meaning of Independence

IN his elegantly compact yet wide-ranging book, David Armitage shifts our attention away from the individual rights message of the Declaration of Independence toward its assertion of independent statehood. He assembles and analyzes many other declarations of independence worldwide to locate the American declaration within a "grander narrative" (20) of the emergence of a world of states "from an earlier world dominated by empires" (21). This focus on statehood within a global narrative enriches American and world history by showing the sometimes surprising ways in which they were interconnected. Viewed in the manner that Armitage proposes, the American Revolution becomes "the first outbreak of a contagion of sovereignty" (103), and globalization has as one of its prime effects "the blanketing of the Earth with states" (105).

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