World Crisis: Richard Bell on the American Revolution as a global event

The often extremely quotable Hannah Arendt once wrote that “the French Revolution, which ended in disaster, has made world history, while the American Revolution, so triumphantly successful, has remained an event of little more than local importance.”

My guest Richard Bell emphatically disagrees. In The American Revolution and the Fate of the World (Penguin, 2025), Bell argues that the Revolution was global from the very beginning. It drew participants from multiple continents, reshaped patterns of migration and trade, altered imperial policy from Canada to India, and inspired movements for liberty around the world. What Americans often remember as a national story was, in reality, a global convulsion.

Richard Bell is Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home, was the focus of a conversation on this podcast that was published on December 30th, 2019.