School of War - The American Revolution Was a World War, with Richard Bell

Episode Date: July 3, 2026

Richard Bell, historian, professor at the University of Maryland, and author of The American Revolution and the Fate of the World, joins School of War to discuss how the American Revolution became a global conflict that stretched from Boston to the Caribbean, Europe, India, and beyond. How did George Washington's strategy force Britain to fight a world war? Why was France's intervention decisive to American victory? And what does the revolution reveal about the nature of coalition warfare? 00:53 - Rick Bell's background 02:05 - The American Revolution was a global war 06:09 - What led to the Boston Tea Party 12:45 - Patriot motivations 14:38 - Who was Edmund Burke? 16:50 - Britain divided over the Revolution 20:47 - Why France backed the Patriots 23:45 - France and Spain vs. Britain 27:01 - The Caribbean: Britain's crown jewel 30:08 - The forgotten theater of the Revolution 35:49 - Washington's global coalition strategy 38:55 - Germany and the Hessian soldiers 41:50 - The Patriots' European officers 43:10 - The myth of guerrilla warfare 44:50 - Final thoughts Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find more at The Free Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Happy Independence Day and happy 250th birthday to the United States of America. Today, we're going to talk about the American Revolution. Truly a world war, where conflict raged not only in North America, but in the Caribbean, the waters, off of Europe, all the way, indeed, to India. Let's get into it. It is for a war. This is the Lopjean region of April. A date which will live in India.

experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the landing ground. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never have no rest. Hi, Marion McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today. Richard Bell. He is a historian and professor at the University of Maryland, and he is the author most recently of the American Revolution and the fate of the world. Rick, thank you so much for joining School of War. It's my pleasure to be here. We are, of course, here in the 250th anniversary of that happy year for the United States of America, a little bit less happy for the British Empire. And, you know, the upshot of your book is obviously that the revolution had a global character

and global impact. And I don't think that's too controversial to say as in a sense of how everything is played out. That is to say that the American Revolution had an impact globally such that in the 21st century, looking back at Madison, that seems obvious. But that at the time, it was global in character and not just a theater-level dispute between the United States and the Empire. What possessed you to take that angle in that look at it? Did you encounter something? How did that idea come to live in your head? Strange and secure as path, actually, not normally how book ideas pop into my head. I'm originally British, as I hope some of your listeners and viewers can tell from hearing me talk.

but when I grew up in the UK in the 80s and 90s, I didn't study American history at all, certainly didn't study the American Revolution. I wonder if you can figure out why that might be, why British kids don't get taught the American Revolution. And so it was only in college when I even discovered the topic. So I came to it as a newcomer. But I was giving, and I teach now at the University of Maryland, I'm a U.S. citizen, and I teach early American history every semester. And I was giving some talks about some pretty standard American Revolution topics in bars in Washington, D.C.

For a fun organization called Profs and Pints, which is exactly what it sounds like. And I was, you know, give a talk about, let's say the Boston Massacre or something like that. And someone came up to me after one of those talks and said, well, you're British. What did the British people in Britain think about the American Revolution? And I had to say to this man, I have no idea. No one's ever told me that before. Ask me that before. I had to go off and write a talk about what British people thought about the American Revolution,

using all the great scholarship out there on British society and politics in the 18th century. And then I started giving that talk in bars. And people would say, okay, that's great. That's fascinating. But what about the Irish? Or what about what about Jamaicans? Or what about people in West Africa? And so at some point, after writing all these talks to give in bars,

I figured out I was actually writing the first draft of a book about all the global dimensions and perspectives of the American Revolution. I think what people picked up on, Aaron, is that, you know, today we live in a global and entangled world. And that it turns out the 18th century is not that different. It's global, it's imperial, it's entangled. Everything's connected. You could speak of ripple effects, even butterfly effects and learn something new about the American Revolution, which people back there, absolutely knew and understood. They knew they were part of a global conflict, but we've chosen to remember it, I think, in a much narrower way.

So I think it's high time we recover the global dimensions. Yeah, I want to come back to British attitudes towards the war in a few minutes. But, you know, it's striking. We just recorded an episode really specifically on military history, harder military history, with Hugh Davies, who teaches at, I believe, at King's College,

on his book about the 18th century British Army and the evolution of its officer class and the art of war as practiced by its officer class. It was really, really interesting. And one of the things that was really striking about it to me is I spent a lot of time today talking to officers, mostly American officers, but also some Brits, about the role of big data and robotics

and how the state of the art is changing and bureaucratic resistance to accepting what needs to be accepted political resistance to learning from places like Ukraine for all kinds of, basically, frankly, silly reasons if being good at war fighting is really your most important goal. And then talking to Hugh about the processes and obstacles and sort of small sea conservatism in the face of innovation in the 18th century, I was struck by my God. It's the same thing.

It's just the same thing. In those days, it'd been the evolution of the light infantry and it's use in, you know, terrain like we have in North America. Today it's, you know, drones and AI. But it's the same dynamic. It's, in a way, it's a very banal point. But I think it's important to to make it from time to time is just what happens in the 18th century really mattered, not only because of the consequences it has for us today, but also because we could learn from it. I mean, it's so much is so much is detectable there that is familiar. I think that's right. Certainly the British Army and Navy, the Royal Navy, which at one time was the most powerful

Navy in the world in my period, the 18th century, they've been fighting global wars at long distances with delicate supply chains and logistical concerns for a very long. time. So I think there are some parallels to how modern governments try to extend themselves and project their power around the world and the lessons maybe we can draw from looking back at the 18th century. So let's start with the T-trade, which I don't know if that's the root cause of the war, but certainly a kind of proximate cause. And you tie this into effects of the war, perhaps surprisingly, in China, given that, you know, the East India Company, people associate that, not illogically with the subcontinent.

What was the nature of the global trade in tea and how did it lead to these events in 1773? Most listeners will know about the Boston Tea Party. They will know it had something to do with coercive mercantilist measures from the British government. I have a feeling that I'm describing myself here as of a few days ago before I was reviewing your book

that the knowledge might stop there. What led to that moment in Boston? Yeah, I think that's right, Aaron. I think that's a common reaction. that when we study the Boston Tea Party, let's say in school or in college, we often come in at the end of the story, right? And that means we don't know how we get to the events on Griffin's Wharf on, what is it, December 16th, 1773. We should be reminded, of course, that the tea they're dumping into Boston Harbor is Chinese tea from the Fujan Mountains in the Fujan province, not too far from what was then Canton, what is now Guangzhou, and that that Chinese tea has been carted on ships primarily halfway across the world

by the world's largest global conglomerate, the British East India Company. They've transported that tea to Britain, to London, and then they're in the process of trying to re-export it to the consumer market in Boston and Philly and Charleston and New York, where seven East India company ships are all headed. Four of them end up in the Boston area. Many Bostonians especially, but colonists in other port cities too, do not welcome the entry of this British mega conglomerate into the consumer market for tea in their cities because they have primarily been consuming smuggled Dutch tea, which has been avoiding taxes and therefore is pretty cheap. And those Dutch smugglers and their American merchant allies have built a lot of goodwill with American consumers,

especially since the consumer boycotts of the 1760s. And so when the British East India Company muscles its way into that consumer market using leverage granted to it by a huge bailout that the British government offers the East India Company in the form of the T Act in 1773, many colonists are very wary. And that's because they are well aware through, American newspapers of the conduct of that global conglomerate in Asia over the last 20 years. The British East India Company is a deeply morally problematic expression of British commercial imperial power. It's autonomous from the British government and it runs roughshod over all sorts of obstacles standing in its way in India. It controls territory in Bengal and eastern India. And it's

presided over a massive famine in Bengal in the early 1770s that's seen 1.2 million minimum Bengali people die of starvation on the East India Company's watch. And that awfulness has been front page news in Boston and in Philly and New York in the early 1770s. And now that company that's presided over the Bengal famine is trying to muscle its way into consumer markets in places like Boston, you can see why commentators in those port cities, whether or not they have connections to Dutch smugglers, see this as a threat to colonial liberties and ways of life. They don't want these big guys muscling in. And so that leads to the protests against the East India Company. We call the Tea Party, although I should say no one called it the Tea Party at the time. That's an 1830s invention of a

romanticized term that shaves off all the violence and opposition to the rule of law and opposition to property rights, though, is what actually happened that night on Griffin's Wharf. It's a massive act of destruction of private property belonging to a global mega corporation. The corporation is furious. The British government is furious about the violation of the rule of law. And it's one of the instigating moments, Aaron, in which you see a real change in at least. In at least, least the king's position in relation to the American colonists. The British Parliament has made some blundering decisions in the 1760s. Think of the Stamp Act and the townshend duties. But back then, the king had been like, hold your horses, Prime Minister. I'm not sure these are good decisions

you're making. Could you maybe rethink them? But after the Tea Party is like, maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was too lenient on these American colonists. If they're willing to violate property rights, If they're willing to abandon the rule of law to attack this Chinese tea owned by the East India Company, then maybe I should toughen my stance against these colonists. And that's when we see the king actually pivot to embrace, I think, an offensive stance against British colonists in America. And I would argue, therefore, it's the king's reaction to the destruction of that Chinese tea and that debate over global free trade, Aaron, that brings on Lexington and Concord and everything that follows.

Yeah, it's a fascinating account as you give it, and what I take away from it is it's almost a kind of perfect storm of arguments available to the colonists. You have, of course, offense taken by people for commercial reasons. I mean, they might express it in the language of economic freedom, but it's also about their own financial interests. That's right. which is a long-running line of analysis about the American Revolution.

But in your characterization of the East India Company's catastrophic record of humanity in the subcontinent, there is also a kind of idealistic trend to the argument that, you know, these people are monsters and we don't want that kind of monstrousness controlling, you know, trade in our country. So it's, and more dimensions beyond, it's just sort of a multi-level set of things. of arguments with which to express your anger if you're one of the colonists. That's absolutely right. So, you know, we think about patriot motivations these days with the benefit of 250 years of distance. We often simplified, I think, to cartoonish ideas that, first of all, every white colonist was a

patriot, which is factually very, very wrong. And also that, you know, every white patriot was motivated, you know, by high ideals and natural rights philosophy, taxation on that representation, right to revolution. and self-determination, etc., etc. And those arguments are certainly circulating, and they do capture the hearts and minds of many people. But the idea they're the only motivating cause is, I think, is fantasy there. It should be no surprise to your listeners and viewers that, you know,

economic motivation, self-interest is often a motivator to do dangerous things. And sometimes even baser instincts can drive people towards that sort of thing. There's a great piece of scholarship, a book called The Common Cause by Robert Parkinson, an American historian. And he argues that clever patriot propagandists and writers like Paul Revere and Samuel Adams and even Thomas Jefferson try to whip up certain segments of the American people in sort of racist and xenophobic ways to get them very upset about invading Hessian German soldiers, to get them. very upset that Britain is about to free the slaves and black people will murder them in their beds and get them very upset about so-called merciless Indian savages on the frontier who are going to rush in and kill their wives and family. These fears are based on hyperbolic reporting and some cheap racist and anti-foreigner tropes. But then as now, pushing those buttons can actually be very powerful. A good way to transition from the global T-trade to British sentiment is the figure of Edmund Burke, who is sort of central both to the question of the British debate over American independence. But also it strikes me this debate about the British role in India.

I'm digging deep here, conscious of your book, but also of things I looked at as an undergraduate. So forgive me if I'm about to commit some errors here, Rick. You will correct me, of course. But I remember taking a seminar where we read Burke's writings on India and Mills' writings and compared them. And I remember having my mind blown, because this is the early 2000s. So this is, you know, peak of sort of Republican, in the United States, Republican conservative interventionism.

The Republican Party, the right, the conservatives are the party of intervention, the party of, you know, robust American power abroad. It's the party of the center left, the Democrats. who are more restrained in their post-9-11 policy wishes. And here I am reading these two authors, Mill, the famous liberal, Burke the famous conservative, and who's the imperialist? Well, it's Mill. Mill's the imperialist.

And who's the great skeptic of British imperialism in India and indeed just an absolutely slashing critic of Hastings? Am I getting this right? No, Warren Hastings, right. Warren Hastings, the head honcho is being impeached, is the conservative. Edmund Burke, the same man who was somewhat sympathetic to the American cause. And my mind was blown, and this, you know, having your mind blown as an undergraduate is a good start to sort of actually starting to figure things out, is realizing what you thought you understood, you don't really understand.

And it's been a 20-plus-year journey since then of understanding what conservatism and liberalism actually are. help the viewers of the School of War podcast understand let's just start with Edmund Burke. Why is this man sympathetic to the American cause a skeptic of British imperialism in India you would think

if you were trafficking in stereotypes about conservatives well he should like the British Empire and he should be opposed to people who want to wiggle out of it. What gives? Yeah and I'm going to leave Mill out of this because it's been a long time since

I've been Red Mill-Mil-Mil to grab you a queen. How'd I do? How'd I do? That was 20-plus. Well, I'm on the same page, right? So let's not go dive too deep in that direction. But Burke, I'm happy to talk about it because Burke, of course, is part of my book here. And one of the chapter, the book is arranged thematically, by the way. Each chapter takes on a different global topic, one of which is India, one of which is the British view from within Britain, the American Revolution through British eyes. And I call that chapter Disunited Kingdom, which I think tells you everything about my argument there. that actually the British people are not lined up loyally behind their king and their prime minister, Lord North, in the prosecution of the war against the American patriots. There's actually a huge amount of internal division among the British people about whether King George's war is a good idea or not.

And for some of those, let's say, dissenters against the king's policy and Lord North's policy, their rationale is economic. And this is where Burke comes in. If I'm remembering correctly, Burke is the MP for Bristol at the time. Bristol's a major port city on the west coast of England, about 100 miles west of London. And historically, it's been the British port most commercially oriented towards the Americas in general and the Caribbean as well. And if you've ever been to Bristol, you know, it's a gorgeous place today with lots of sort of big stone buildings from the 16th, 60s, 70s, and 80s. And that's all the money sloshing into that port from the transatlantic trade. And of course, when George, when the two Georges, George Washington and George the third

go to war against each other, all that lovely profitable trade flowing through Bristol and Liverpool and Glasgow and White Haven and London dries up because the British Empire is at war with itself. There are naval embargoes placed on American port cities, and the patriots are introducing consumer boycotts of their own against British goods. So both sides are putting obstacles in the way of the perpetuation of that lovely commerce. Edmund Burke cries foul early in the war in 1775 and says, guys, guys, guys, he's talking in Parliament. Guys, guys, guys, this is economically a disastrous move. for the British economy, let alone the American economy and the imperial economy, but just for us in Britain, right? All my merchant friends in Bristol, the guys who prop me up, they can't send their cargo ships out because they'll get harassed by Patriot Privateers on the high seas or they'll run into naval blockades put there by the Royal Navy.

And the upshot is that Bristol is going to wither and die on the vine. and other MPs are making similar points in other port cities. So it's a reminder that in Parliament there are all sorts of factions. They don't actually have political parties yet. They will come later. But there are all sorts of factions arrayed against the government faction, which is by far the largest faction. But all of those factions are united in the idea that the American War is counterproductive for Britain. Some of those critics are sympathetic to the patriots and their cries for representation in Parliament.

But for many like Burke, it's simple economics, right? We are shooting ourselves in the foot to be at war with our primary trading partners. Give them some of what they want and let's resume this trade. Even give them independence if it means we can keep trading with these people after independence. So it's a reminder just how divided the British people actually are. Now, the revolution as a focal point or banner for the cause of liberty has an electrifying effect in a lot of places, Ireland, France, we could go on, that intersects with, you know, ruthless state interest. You know, the electrifying effect it has on certain people in France intersects with a French monarchy, of course, which is nothing but ill to the British Empire. Yeah, the Frenchman.

Maybe let's go. Liberty is a bit debatable. Let's say that. Yeah, yeah. But let's go to France then. These complicated dynamics, this is pre-revolutionary France, of course, where ideas of liberty abound, but not so much in the execution. What is the reaction in this country, which ultimately it's the French reaction, of course, that proves pivotal and essential to American success? Yeah, let's start with that last point there.

When France does eventually formalize its alliance with the Patriot Rebels in February of 1778, in a pair of treaties, France becomes the first European nation to recognize American independence and to commit overwhelming military resources to propping up George Washington and to commit their own Navy, the second largest, second most powerful navy in the world at the time, to take on the first most powerful. And that creates a permission structure for Spain to do the same. same the following year and eventually the Dutch as well. So by 1780, Britain's naval advantage has completely evaporated and Britain finds itself defending territories around its global empire that haven't rebelled but are now under the threat of French and Spanish attack. Think of Florida, think of Gibraltar, think of Jamaica, think of Ireland, for instance. And that makes the war, you know, arguably unwinnable for the British military at that point. So France matters, I guess, is the first point. And yet, whether or not France is going to get in is not a done deal and not a given until it actually happens. You are right to say that there are plenty of ordinary people in

France who have some ideological sympathy with the natural rights ideas being espoused by, you know, leading patriot writers, taxation without representation, self-government, right to revolution, etc. Natural rights, enlightenment ideas have a strong locus in France, right? Think of Rousseau and Voltaire, for instance. It's not just John Locke, who's being drawn on by the American Patriots. There's a lot of French writers and thought leaders who are part of that sort of foundational enlightenment belief.

At the senior level, at the government level, they are definitely not committed to spreading enlightenment ideas around the world because they work for an absolutist monarch, right? If you're looking for someone with unbounded powers who sits on a European throne in the 1770s, you won't find that in King George III. He's actually bounded in a constitutional monarchy. You're actually thinking of the Spanish king, King Carlos, and you're thinking of the French king, King Louis. They are the absolutist monarchs. They are on paper the tyrants of Europe. And they are committed to monarchy. obviously as an institution. They're also committed to empires as institutions because they each have their own. And so backing the patriots on one level is a deeply counterintuitive choice for an absolutist

monarch who runs an empire. You'd be propping up an anti-monarchical, anti-imperial insurgency, which is also led by Protestants, by the way. And these are Catholic kings in Europe. So there's something very unnatural about the prospect of France or Spain getting into bed, so to speak, with George Washington and the Patriots. But of course, as all your readers and listeners, I'm sure are well aware. France and Spain, nonetheless, have lots of reasons to wade in. And most of those reasons are called Britain, because France or Spain have an historical animosity towards Britain and its creeping empire. They see Britain as usurping their own role on the global stage as the big powers in North America. France has suffered a crippling defeat in the last global war, the seven years war at the hands of Britain, which seized Quebec. Spain would love to get Gibraltar back from the British and even Jamaica, which used to be a Spanish colony back in the day. And Florida, They'd like to make Florida Spanish again, if you will.

And so there are strong sort of geopolitical reasons why these two Catholic powers cannot wait to rush back into war against this Protestant power. They can see that as a religious war as well. And so you see these dynamics erin playing out in the corridors of the palace of Versailles, where the very canny French foreign minister, his name is Vergen, one of the great statesmen of Europe in the 18th century, is making that case to his much more skeptical cabinet members and to his king that wading in now is actually going to be cheaper in the long run than sitting this one out and then going to war against Britain 10 years from now, because Britain is at war with itself in the American Revolution. The British Empire is on fire, and Virgin is saying, we have the chance to pour all this gasoline on top of that fire and really inflict damage, which would be unheard of, if it was just the normal Britain versus France and Spain geopolitics of the seven years war, or the Napoleonic Wars. This is something special. The British Empire's on fire. Let's

weighed in and try to knock them down. And that's the argument, which is even accompanied by some very dubious cost projections that Vagien circulates that ultimately wins the day. You know, people are probably familiar with the end game of the revolution, French assistance in that final campaign that leads to Yorktown and American victory. But you spent a lot of time in the book talking about other things to include all the pressure brought to bear in the Caribbean and events there. The Caribbean really has a theater of war in the revolution. So I'd like to talk about that.

I was a little bit familiar with it just because my beloved Marine Corps, some of its, maybe even its very first, but certainly among its first actions are a landing in the Caribbean, or at least they're close to it, as a part of the revolution. Talk a bit about what the French and Spanish get up to,

specifically, what the dynamics in that part of the world with slavery are such that it constitutes a real problem for the Brits? This is such an important story, and it's a story we've forgotten, right? We don't think of the Caribbean Sea as a major theater of the American Revolutionary War, and yet that would be news to everyone fighting that war in the 1770s. They saw some of the real stakes as finding their locusts in the Caribbean Sea. I teach a University of Maryland in the state of Maryland, and I've done that for 20 years, and at some point every semester, no matter what course I'm

teaching in early American history, there'll be some student who will say, isn't it true, Professor Bell, that Maryland was the most economically valuable state, colony, excuse me, in the British Empire in the 18th century. And I'll have to sadly puncture that students belief that Maryland was the most economically important colony. Maryland's probably not even in the top 20 most economically important colonies in Britain's New World Empire in the 18th century. If you're doing it just by sort of tax revenue or GDP or exports or whatever you care to do it by, it's going to be the Britain's Caribbean colonies, which are going to occupy those top spots. And Jamaica is going to be out front as the number one by far most valuable economic colony a British colony in the new world.

Because Jamaica is the largest of Britain's Caribbean island colonies. And those island colonies cultivate sugar. and cultivating sugar, Aaron, as many of your viewers and listeners will know, is like, you know, growing money trees. It's just immensely profitable in the 18th century. And it is dependent on enslaved labor, as I'm sure everyone is aware. I should say that Britain's Caribbean colonies do not rebel. They largely stay out of invitations to join the Continental Congress in Philadelphia to submit troops to the continental Congress. little army, et cetera, et cetera. And that's because the white planters who do live in these Caribbean

colonies are immensely wealthy and their wealth is dependent on their ties to the British Empire for naval security, for shipments of enslaved people from West Africa, and for markets in the British homeland for sugar exports, right? All the tea, all the sugar that gets put in Chinese tea in a mug of tea in Britain at the time. So they are not rebelling those Caribbean colonies, and yet the Caribbean Sea will become arguably the most vital and volatile theater of the revolution once France and Spain get in the war. Because like Britain, France and Spain are naval powers, and their navies will sweep in to the Caribbean Sea to try to pick off immensely valuable British colonies like Barbados and Jamaica. and seized them for the French Empire or the Spanish Empire. So what had been arguably a sleepy backwater of the revolution before 1778,

becomes after 1778 and 79 the central theatre of the American Revolution. And think about what that means for British military strategy writ large. It means that every naval ship that's been, you know, blockading Boston or Philadelphia or trying to sink patriot privateers in the North Atlantic, many of those Navy ships have to rush to the Caribbean to ring fence places like Jamaica and Barbados from attacks by the House of Bourbon and even British troops on the ground in places like Philly and New York get redeployed immediately to Jamaica and St. Lucia to prop up those Caribbean colonies from falling into the hands of George Washington's new allies. So it totally changes the calculus of the war. I'll tell one little story here about one

battle. Some of us think today the Battle of Yorktown is the last battle of the revolution. That is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. The war continues on for another year and a half. At best, it's the last major battle on the mainland, but there are plenty of smaller skirmishes that continue. And globally, the war plows on. And much of the war will happen in the Caribbean in 1782. And there will be a climactic naval battle in the Caribbean Sea in the spring of 1782, in which French forces are on their way from Guadalupe, which is a French island colony, towards Jamaica to maybe join up with Spanish naval forces and invade Jamaica. And if Jamaica falls, Britain loses its crown jewel.

You might even say that the British Empire would collapse if Jamaica falls. Maybe that's the exaggeration, but there's a lot of stake in Jamaica not. falling. And a British admiral, a semi-retired guy with a very dubious record, he's done a bit of pillaging. His name is Rodney, Sir George Rodney. He leads a British fleet which intercepts the French invasion fleet just outside Guadalupe, a little place in the Caribbean called the Saints. And at the Battle of the Saints, he's able to break through the French line, attack it from multiple sides, and seize the day. And this massive British nation, naval victory effectively sinks the plan to invade Jamaica and raise the French or Spanish flag

over it, effectively securing Jamaica's future for the rest of the war. And so in Jamaica, grateful white colonists build a giant statue of Admiral Rodney, the British victor over the French at the Battle of the Saints, and they put it up in a town called Spanish Town, Jamaica and they dress him in the clothes of a Roman centurion and that statue still stands today. And if you go to Jamaica and you see that statue, you might think, do they think the British won the war? Because of course, if you live in Jamaica, they did win the war, right? They protected Jamaica from falling.

They protected the crown jewel in the British Empire from falling into the hands of their dastardly enemies. So a global perspective really changes the. calculus of who can win and how, and also changes the sort of memory of what was important about the war and that sort of thing. So Jamaica and the Caribbean absolutely essential. You know, this conversation puts me more and more in mind of a great conversation we've had on this show. This is several years ago now, not long after Russia invaded or re-invaded Ukraine in 2022. We brought Andrew Lambert in to talk about the Crimean War. And he wrote a

phenomenal book about it years and years ago. And, you know, I just sort of summarize part of his argument at a very high level, which is that if you want to understand the events of, um, uh, of military history, typically, simply understanding the, the sort of linear explanation of battle to battle and what was prominent in the press at the time, um, or has come down to us as, um, uh, the things to pay attention to, you know, Yorktown, et cetera, in this context is, is radically insufficient. and at times misleading. And of course, for the Crimean War, his whole point was what actually happens on the, the Crimean Peninsula is actually fairly negligible in its strategic importance compared to

things that happen or even don't happen in the Baltic that actually determine, you know, the outcome of that conflict. And your account here puts me in mind of that thing that I learned for Andrew Lambert, that the broader global context of things, the things that are happening slightly off stage in terms of present-day popular historical imagination aren't just matters of sort of curious interest to enthusiasts. But actually, if you really want to understand why what happens happens,

you do have to widen your aperture. And if I could jump in to make a point in response to that, Aaron. It would be to say that this is actually Patriot strategy, almost from the beginning, right? I'm able to document in the book that George Washington, John Adams, Ben Franklin, you name a patriot leader, battlefield commander or, you know, Continental Congress person, they are all agreed from the get-go

that the Continental Army can't win this war on its own, right? George Washington is sending up metaphorical flares to Congress throughout 1775 and 1776, saying, you know, I've only got like 3,000 soldiers who can get up and hold a bayonet today, right? Whereas the British are bringing in 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 soldiers, British and Hessians, the British have native allies. The British have native allies that we really don't. We can't win this out on the battlefield. I, George Washington, need you Congress to create a broader chess board in which we pull Britain into 10 different directions, forcing them to defend things which aren't on fire, which aren't in rebellion. And that's the only way our troops can do what we think they're capable of. That's why they send their best man,

Ben Franklin, to France and John Adams to the Netherlands and John Jay. to Spain is why they send out emissaries to native groups that haven't yet picked aside and said, have you thought about the Patriot cause and make that offer successfully to some native nations like the Unidas, for instance. So it is Patriot strategy to generate a coalition, for lack of a better phrase today, to pull the British Empire in as many different directions as possible. And I would argue that the British military loses, not just because of George Washington's extraordinary tenacity on the familiar mainland battlefields, which should never be, you know, understated, but also because his strategy and Franklin's strategy and Adams' strategy succeeds globally.

By the end of the war era, and Britain has control over about 100,000 soldiers and sailors globally. But the key word there is globally because only three out of ten of them are free to try to route the insurgents in North America because the other 70% are fighting the French in the Caribbean or fighting Aida Ali in the Kingdom of Mysore in India who's allied with France by the way, which is effectively allied with Washington. Or they're fighting the siege of Gibraltar, which is the longest, largest siege of the American Revolution, Britain versus France in Europe. Britain's forced to commit troops to Central America, to hold on to Honduras from Spanish attack. So all these things are nibbling at British troop strength, and they can't send everyone they want to send to take on Washington up and down the I-95 corridor, so to speak. And that's the success, the culmination of Patriot Strategy, which has been in the works since 1776. I think in the 18th century we would have called it the fall line. That's my nerdiest contribution for today.

I-95, happens to be built on the fall line. Yes, indeed, right, yes. Let's finish then with Germany, or what becomes a united Germany later, not yet in a position at the late 18th century to bid for continental hegemony, like it will, not too long thereafter in historical terms. And indeed, the response to the war is fractured. And you discuss both the Hessian reaction, but also the reaction of some Prussians. How do all of these complicated dynamics play out in a place that is disunited and fractured

itself during the war. Yeah, if we saw a map of what is now modern day Germany in the 18th century, we'd be looking at a patchwork of different states and principalities, dozens and dozens of them, many of them, surprisingly small and yet highly militarized, right? If you are small, you better have a military to defend your borders. And so each of these dozens of German states are highly militarized. and it's long been the habit in peacetime, so to speak, for some of these German rulers to rent out their troops to European powers who want extra manpower, who are ready to jump into whatever European battle, Britain, France or Spain is waging at the time. And there's a long history of Britain in particular renting troops to augment its own troop strength from different German rulers.

You remember the House of Hanover, the German, excuse me, the British royal family is German in origin itself. So make sense they'd look to some of the German states for those troop searches. So when the American Revolution kicks off in 1775, King George thinks the way to win is to win quickly with a troop search, sending as many troops as Britain can throw as possible early on at the revolutionaries to nip this in the bud, which is why Britain dumps 32,000 troops into New York Harbor in the summer of 1776, and many of them will be rented German troops from six different German principalities, one of which is called Hessen Kassell, which is where the word Hesian comes from as the collective noun for all these German rented soldiers.

And I would say those German rulers get paid handsomely for renting out their soldiers, which is why they do it, and they also hope to incur debt. of obligation from Britain that they can cash in at some point in future. I will say that domestically, renting out soldiers to serve across the ocean is something new under the sun for the German rulers. Previously, they'd only rented out soldiers to fight in Europe. And many of those soldiers don't come home or they're lost at sea, they desert, they die. And this creates enormous political backlash for the German rulers within those German states about having rented out so many, you know, sons and fathers from German families never to be seen again. And I would argue

that puts some pressure on the legitimacy of the German soldier trade and even some pressure on the legitimacy of German autocrats and rulers as a result. So there are political consequences of that Hessian troop surge. And then if I could jump around, to the other chapter in my book, which deals with a person of German origin, I have a whole chapter talking about how the Patriots utilised unemployed European officers to level up their knowledge base and their strategic savvy by hiring out-of-work European officers like Lafayette, but my chapter's focused around a Prussian guy, an out-of-work captain. named Baron Steuben or Steuben in American English, who Franklin and Dean hire, under some

slightly dubious circumstances, they basically fake some letters of recommendation to get the Continental Congress to hire him. And he will go on, of course, to do important work at Valley Ford, teaching, I think, 12 or 13 different sets of colonial regiments how to drill from a common set of standards so that they can all march in the same direction at the same time. They can all turn at the same time. They can all fire, fire in advance or retreat and fire at the same time, stuff they were not capable of before Steuben's drills in the spring of 1778. And if you put Steuben's contributions alongside those of Lafayette's and Casimir Pulaski and Thaddeus Cosschusco and Louis de Porte, we can see something we've forgotten, which is the American army is trying to

European eyes in this phase of the war, to be taken seriously as a fighting force, and to not, you know, scatter and deserve it at the first opportunity. We've long embraced the myth that the key to patriot military success is guerrilla tactics. And that's true at some places at some times, especially in the South, later in the war. But for most of the northern campaigns, they're not engaging in guerrilla tactics to try to beat the British. They're trying to level up and behave like a European army. So hiring European officers, especially those with experience in discipline, drilling, engineering and artillery is the way to do that. So Steuben proves like a great example of that larger phenomenon. And he, of course, will embrace the cause ideologically as well. He'll naturalize

as a US citizen after the war. And he'll be buried in what is, today upstate New York on a massive piece of land given to him after the war for his exemplary service to the Patriot Cause. Rick, this has been a fascinating conversation. The book is called The American Revolution and the Fate of the World by Richard Bell. I'm grateful to you for making the time to come on School of War today and for folks who are looking for a patriotic read, but also a very nuanced and rich read here on this 250th anniversary of Independence. I recommend it to them. Thank you so much for joining. Thanks to the invitation. Thank you.