Empire Ablaze

In 1776, as Britain fought its rebellious American colonies, a house painter named James Aitken had his own plan for ending the war. Aitken, who was also a highwayman and an escaped indentured servant, travelled through the colonies convinced that the surest way to help American independence was to wreck the British navy. His targets were the Portsmouth dockyard and the harbour at Bristol, and his method was fire.

Tom Cutterham uses this little-known episode of insurrection inside Britain as a way into a larger story. As a historian, he asks how ordinary working people on both sides of the Atlantic lived through the upheaval and crisis of the eighteenth-century British empire, and how a new sense of class consciousness took shape among them. Enlightenment ideas about universal rights, and about the corruption of imperial rulers, had already shaped what many of these people believed, and they fed that awareness.

The book recasts the American Revolution as a civil war within the British world rather than a clean break between two nations. In doing so it gives a fresh account of how the United States was born and where radical politics in Britain began. Cutterham also draws lessons from this period for those facing revolutionary struggles in the present, in a time of crisis of our own.