By the end of the eighteenth century the plural language of liberty was under widespread attack, denounced by radicals as a denial of innate human rights and a tool of monarchical despotism. This evolution was partly powered by the consolidation of nation-states that picked up speed in the sixteenth century, but this centralization was long incomplete. In this situation the terms “liberties” and “privileges” were almost universally regarded as equivalents, even by so radical a movement as the English Levellers of the seventeenth century. The dissolution of this equivalence took place in France, first as the monarchy’s political and fiscal shenanigans sapped people’s faith in the system, and then as the Revolution mounted a full-scale attack on privilege as a source of inequality and despotism. Supporters of the Revolution followed its lead, but the old language still played a role in Britain and Germany, a reminder that the old language, even with its equivalence of liberties and privileges, long persisted in fostering self-government and resisting oppression.

This chapter brings readers’ attention to the fact that throughout United States history, government has been an active and necessary part of building the country. In the colonial period, for example, laws regulating taverns and other businesses proliferated. After the Founding, under the leadership of Alexander Hamilton and the federalists, the central government was seen as the necessary force needed to support an economy that then enabled the country to participate on the world economic stage. The anti-federalists, led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, aceded to the need for the government to support the economy in the ways proposed by the Federalists.

British military institutions embraced a hierarchy backed by cruel physical punishment. The defiant soldier could face gauntlets, brandings, wooden horses, floggings, hangings, and firing squads. In certain places in British North America, though, White male colonists in militias and provincial armies enacted a more egalitarian organization - one that tilted authority toward the common soldier and curbed the most egregious aspects of military discipline. Such egalitarianism structured the Massachusetts Army in the American Revolution. But the supposed democratic rebellion would not feature a more democratic fighting force. When George Washington assumed command of the Massachusetts troops (soon known as the Continental Army), he made sure that hostile differences and bodily reprimand shaped the inaugural institutionalization of American state violence. “Every one is made to know his place and keep in it,” said the Reverend William Emerson of Washington’s army, “or be tied up and receive thirty or forty lashes according to his crime.”

Jamaica’s history between the American Revolution and the Morant Bay rebellion was full of turbulent change. Sugar still dominated the island economy, though other marketable crops, livestock pens, a complex web of internal exchange and provision grounds were additional features of Jamaica’s economy. Until 1834 slaves dominated the labour force. Planters were on the back foot in dealing with the movement to abolish the British slave trade, passed by Parliament in 1807, and they faced greater challenges from abolitionists after 1823, culminating in a well-mobilised and strongly supported campaign for slave emancipation, which was granted by Britain in 1834.

During a major rebellion in 1831–2, many sugar properties were destroyed. The revolt was quashed by British military forces. Planters were compensated for the loss of their slaves, but the island’s black population received nothing. A brief period of apprenticeship was followed full freedom in 1838. Many ex-apprentices left estates and became independent peasants. But despite positive signs of progress, low wage levels, poor housing, a restricted franchise and the continuance of whites in positions of power made life problematic for Jamaicans. Difficult economic conditions influenced the violence of the Morant Bay rebellion in 1865, which the authorities put down.

This chapter considers the Federalist Papers, an essay collection by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay under the pseudonym Publius and advocating for the ratification of the US Constitution starting in 1787. Beginning with reflections on the origins of the word essay and its many meanings, particular attention is given to one of these: the essay as an attempt to do something, either as an action or through writing. A central question guided the ratification debate: Could there be an essay – a concerted effort – striving toward just representation? In the passionate debates between Federalists and Anti-Federalists, a secondary, hidden debate was simmering: In what kind of prose should arguments be articulated? Was the essay, with its notoriously loose style and method, up to the task? In its ability to accommodate multiple, sometimes contradictory viewpoints in the same textual space, was it ideal for puzzling out the nation’s future? Or was it too distracted, a form of bad thought scribbled in haste, unsuited for such a momentous task? This chapter shows the correlative features of striving toward a political ideal and the striving involved in essayistic writing.

This considers the impact of systemic critiques of war, developed in the period of the American and French Revolutions, upon the work of two novelists. Samuel Jackson Pratts Emma Corbett, written during – and in opposition to – the American War of Independence, describes a young Engish heroines growing awareness of the role of property relations in supporting martial ideals and causing wars, and her conversion to a form of pacifism. Charlotte Smiths The Old Manor House, written in the early years of the French Revolution, describes a British soldier fighting in the American War of Independence, who comes to question the purpose and causes of the war, including the chivalric values of the ruling class. Both novels show how war exposes the selfish foundations of ordinary social life. While Jackson Pratts heroine escapes compromise through death, Smiths hero inherits the estate of the woman whose aristocratic values he despises.

Beginning in the 1760s, white women’s political activism and agency grew and developed as a result of Enlightenment theory, religious revival, and the politicization of the household economy. Revolutionary fervor created new political spaces for women as they engaged in political protests and boycotts. The circumstances of the war further refined Americans’ perceptions of women’s fortitude, political allegiance, piety, and self-direction. These factors combined to create a new foundation for white women’s participation in the republican political culture of the United States as the guardians of moral and political virtue. These new notions of women’s political connection to the state through moral authority and motherhood, however, created increasingly separate political spaces for women and men. Despite the development of women’s political agency during the Revolution, by the early 1800s many Americans began to look to the patriarchal family to restore order and social authority. Men abandoned the idea that women could be competent political actors and instead promoted a specifically masculine ideal of citizenship. State legislators and jurists revised their ideas about women’s citizenship, inheritance, and allegiance to the state. This refashioning chipped away at most claims women had to economic independence or direct political participation.

At the end of the eighteenth century a wave of revolutionary constitutions engulfs Western Europe and America. Most of these mark a new start and express the tenets of Enlightenment: rule of law, division of power, fundamental rights and the concept of conditional government power ( social contract).

Part II presents writings connected to the first part of Washington’s service as the leader of American military forces during the War for Independence. Here the reader encounters Washington’s remarkable combination of diffidence and self-confidence: a diffidence in his abilities accompanied by absolute confidence in his rectitude and dedication to duty. These materials also trace Washington’s efforts to build the army into an effective fighting force while tirelessly impressing upon the minds of the soldiers the nobility of the aims for which they were fighting. They further reveal Washington for the first time in his life dealing with the delicate problems of justice and prudence that attend supreme military command: learning how to deal wisely with the enemy, the citizenry, his military subordinates, and his political superiors.

Part III compiles Washington’s political writings from the alliance with France – a key turning point in the war – to the concluding of peace with Great Britain and Washington’s subsequent retirement from public life. Here we find the ardent patriot coming to the realization that patriotism alone was not enough to carry the war to a successful end. Enthusiasm, he observed, had done what it could in the beginning of the contest, which could now only be won by realistic appeals to the self-interest of those on whose exertions the outcome depended. Here, too, we find Washington confronting the problems that arose from the lack of effective governing power in the Articles of Confederation—experiences that, for the rest of his life, influenced his political thinking and convinced him of the need for a stronger central government.

Part I collects writings from Washington’s young manhood and early middle age, up to the time he became commander-in-chief of the American army. These materials reveal the public-spiritedness that was a constant throughout Washington’s life, but they also illustrate the most important change in its orientation. As a young man, Washington’s ambition sought distinction in the service of the Crown, while in his maturity that ambition was turned toward defending the rights of the rising American nation from the injustices that arose from British imperial rule.

The Native peoples of North America long possessed a discourse critiquing the violent white invasion of their homelands. This Indigenous conscious of genocide—the belief that whites wanted Indian land and were willing to kill large numbers of Native men, women, and children in order to obtain it—profoundly shaped how Native nations responded in encounters with the new United States from the late eighteenth century onwards. Even in those cases where Indigenous peoples avoided the most extreme forms of violence, the awareness that they could become the targets of genocide still guided Native behavior. The asymmetrical nature of this violence demonstrates the need to stop labeling the nineteenth-century conflicts between the U.S. and Native nations as “Indian wars” and instead to embrace a language that stresses that these confrontations were unilateral colonial invasions of Indigenous homelands. Recentering historical analysis on the Indigenous conscious of genocide also demands greater attention to Native recordkeeping and perspectives, rather than privileging the intentions of the white perpetrators of genocide.

The chapter discusses human rights in history. It addresses the question of whether insights into rights are historically relative. Are beliefs about the legitimacy of rights the mortal children of time? To approach an answer to this question, the chapter outlines the proper methods to study the history of rights. It shows that it is not sufficient to focus on explicit conceptions of rights. Rights can form the implicit content of social struggles and may be expressed by the means of art. Conceptions of history underlying human rights histories are discussed. The development of the human rights idea since the American and French revolutions is reconstructed. The chapter recalls the genesis of the post-1945 system of protection of human rights in the context of major geopolitical developments, including the Cold War und decolonization. It addresses, moreover, the thesis that human rights originated in the Global North. It tries to do justice to the many contributions of the Global South to the development of human rights and to dispel the fog of amnesia hiding the policies of mayor powers of the Global North violating human rights, including but not limited to colonial wars.

This chapter treats the early modern roots counterrevolutionary war, in Johann Ewald’s (1785) Treatise on Partisan War and (1790) Treatise on the Duties of Light Troops. A Hessian (German) mercenary officer, Ewald served in of one of the earliest and most consequential modern counter-insurrectionary conflicts: the American Revolutionary War. I locate Ewald’s ideas in the intellectual and political context of early modern, absolutist central Europe. He believed in military honor and duty, linked to premodern socio-political hierarchies. In America, he confronted modern ideological warfare, backed by a mobilized populace, for the first time. Gradually, he came to empathize with his opponents and distain the English officers he served. In his diaries, he advocated emulating insurgent tactics—transposing the tools of revolutionary warfare into the military-ideological project of counterrevolution. The two manuals he wrote on returning to Europe alloyed his European and American experiences. They resonated well into the nineteenth century, influencing Clausewitz and informing British conduct of the Peninsular War.