Out of Their Grasp: Space, Power, and the American Revolution

Abstract

Over the course of twenty years after 1763, thirteen of the Britain’s most-prized colonies tore away from their imperial fold, erupting eventually into a bloody civil war and a global revolution. Central to this all too familiar story, however, is an otherwise forgotten factor, one which shaped the nature, conduct, and outcome of the entire conflict: space. Moving from the end of the Seven Years’ War to the start of the new republic, this thesis attempts to parse the precise manner by which continental and oceanic spaces combined to collapse an early modern superpower from within and without. Throughout, I explore how imperial authority was utterly dependent on its assertions of what I term “spatial dominion”; a novel historiographical concept which unites the militarized, economic, and acquisitional dynamics at the heart of the British Empire’s overseas territories. As this dominion faded over the latter half of the eighteenth century, American colonists were able to imagine a world after empire, and thus transformed the spaces around them into theatres of revolutionary violence. After 1776, I show how these theatres continued to confound imperial efforts to subdue them and their resident populations, making them into critical sites of the Revolutionary War. I argue finally that a collection of spaces including the Atlantic Ocean, the Delaware and Hudson Rivers, and the Revolutionary South impacted the war’s primary action by both alienating and animating its many combatants. All told, this thesis presents a unique interpretation of the American Revolution and contends that, by 1783, the Thirteen Colonies and the spaces over which they had rebelled had slipped once and for all from the British Empire’s grasp, signifying an important moment in the continent’s long history.