Empire Ablaze

In 1776, Britain is at war with American rebels. One man sets out to bring the empire down from within. Released on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Empire Ablaze tells the story of James Aitken — housepainter, highwayman, and escaped indentured servant — as he wandered the colonies on the eve of the American Revolution, and his dramatic mission to cripple the British navy by destroying Portsmouth dockyard and Bristol harbour. In the process, it explores how an emerging transatlantic working class experienced the transformation and crisis of Britain's eighteenth-century empire, and how enlightenment philosophy turned into popular ideas about the rights of ordinary people and the corruption of imperial authorities. Reframing the American Revolution as a British civil war, Empire Ablaze offers a fresh account of the United States' birth and the origins of radical politics in Britain, finding insights for the revolutionary struggles of our own crisis-ridden times.Introduction

Part 1
Chapter 1, Virginia
Chapter 2, Edinburgh
Chapter 3, London
Chapter 4, Philadelphia

Part 2
Chapter 5, Theory
Chapter 6, Practice
Chapter 7, Captivity
Chapter 8, Freedom
Conclusion"Passionate, provocative, and deeply humane, Cutterham's urgent reinterpretation of the American Revolution restores sabotage, solidarity, and working-class dreams to the center of a world-changing upheaval."
—Richard Bell, author of The American Revolution and the Fate of the WorldTom Cutterham is an associate professor of United States history at the University of Birmingham, and the author of Gentlemen Revolutionaries: Power and Justice in the New American Republic. He has written for Jacobin, the Nation, and the New Republic, as well as a handful of scholarly journals.