America’s independence fight wasn’t just about 13 colonies — it was a world war that transformed humanity

An unemployed Prussian drillmaster named Baron von Steuben clutches his (largely fabricated) letters of recommendation as he awaits a job interview in Pennsylvania.

Molly Brant, a Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) woman struggling to hold together a fragile military alliance, moves her family to a makeshift refugee camp across the Canadian border.

Harry Washington, a black American formerly enslaved by George Washington, leads an uprising against the British in Sierra Leone.

What do these people have in common?

They lived and died in the orbit of the American Revolution: They helped shape its trajectory, and it in turn defined their fates and the fates of millions more around the globe.

Their stories remind us the revolution was not only about the determination of 13 colonies to break free from Britain.

It was a world war that sent navies, armies and refugees surging across oceans and continents, disrupting trade, fracturing empires and toppling political orders from Boston to Bengal.

Growing up outside London in the 1980s and 1990s, I learned almost nothing about any of this.

At the kind of budget Hogwarts I attended, all blazers and Latin declensions, history began with the Tudors, those serially married monarchs who — at least as my teachers told it — defeated Catholic France, Catholic Spain and the pope himself, all while inventing naval supremacy and the Protestant work ethic.

From there, we leapt over centuries of empire, slavery and revolution in America to arrive triumphantly at the First and Second World Wars, the national curriculum’s equivalent of comfort food: Britain standing alone, plucky, defiant, saving civilization twice.

The elisions were deliberate; the creation of national myths always is.

To linger on the American Revolution would have been to dwell on defeat, humiliation and loss.

Who wants to teach schoolchildren their nation once fought a war against farmers with muskets — and lost?

And yet somehow the American Revolution managed to reach across the Atlantic and find me — and when it did, it changed my life.

As an undergraduate at Cambridge, I studied medieval European history: popes, plagues, cathedrals.

But I soon exhausted every medieval offering a monolingual Englishman like me could manage.

In search of needed credits — preferably a course that met no earlier than 10 a.m. — I ended up stumbling into a class on colonial and revolutionary America taught by Betty Wood, one of just three North Americanists out of a full-time faculty of 70.

What I found was a revelation.

Wood was a working-class northerner who had become one of the most formidable historians of her generation. She was brilliant, biting, funny.

She made the history of colonial America enthralling and seismically important.

I began to grasp how what started as a quarrel over taxes and tea metastasized into a global war.

It swept enslaved Africans into British and American armies, tore Native nations apart, forced Irish sailors and German conscripts across the Atlantic and dragged the Spanish and French into the fray.

It inspired revolutionary movements but more crucially crackdowns, in Spanish America, India and Ireland. It reached into Peru, Jamaica, Bengal and Guangzhou. It shook empires to their foundations.

I was hooked. Within a year, I had abandoned medieval Europe for the swamps, plantations and battlefields of the Atlantic world and set off for graduate school in the United States.

But after I completed my doctorate and began to teach history to US college students, I discovered Americans have their own collective amnesia about the revolution.

They do not forget it — they remember it constantly — but they remember it badly.

They cherish it, parade it, costume themselves in it. But they crop it, like a family portrait in which only George Washington and Paul Revere make the cut.

In American classrooms, the revolution is generally taught in ways that shrink it down to bite-sized bits.

Most high-school graduates arrive in the first-year courses I teach at the University of Maryland convinced they already know the story: Washington crosses the Delaware, Jefferson writes the Declaration, Cornwallis surrenders at Yorktown.

Lafayette might make a cameo, but the rest of the world is left out of the frame.

Studying the American Revolution in depth reveals that this narrowing of the narrative is itself a crucial part of the global story.

By the time the ink was dry on the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the clear victors, the newly minted Americans, were already retelling the revolution as a self-contained morality play: the colonies versus the crown, rebels versus redcoats, David versus Goliath.

The messy, global reality of the war — that France bankrolled it, Spain fought to recover lost territory from Britain, enslaved and Native peoples were both actors and victims —  was inconvenient for the new project of national mythmaking.

The fresh nation’s boosters needed to reduce the messy realities of the international conflict that had just ended to a neat origin story of plucky colonists triumphing over tyranny all by themselves.

And the British, all too eager to ignore their debts to erstwhile allies, did nothing to dispute this streamlined version.

The problem with myths, though, is that they stick.

Generations of Americans have grown up with a revolution stripped of its entanglements, reduced to a few heroic yet simplistic set pieces.

The result is the revolution appears less a part of world history than as an exception to it: a story apart, rather than a story among.

The truth is more complicated and more interesting.

The revolution was, from beginning to end, a global struggle.

It provoked a German father to take a hatchet to his eldest son’s trigger finger, to make certain the boy could not be conscripted into the army his ruler had rented out to King George.

It led a descendant of the Incas to be drawn and quartered by Spanish troops in Peru, for trying to stage his own independence movement.

It led Chinese dockworkers to dump thousands of chests of East India Company opium into the Pearl River in intentional homage to the Boston Tea Party.

The evidence is everywhere, once you look.

I see it in the unnoticed statue of Bernardo de Gálvez, victor of Pensacola, moldering in a forlorn Washington park.

I see it in a storefront museum in Nova Scotia, where I recently stood listening to a descendant of black Loyalists recount his ancestors’ journey from slavery to refuge in Canada and then to Sierra Leone.

I see it in the questions of high-school students I taught in Shanghai, who wanted to know about the East India Company’s tea trade in Canton rather than Thomas Jefferson’s quill pen.

As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, it will be tempting to return to the familiar script, along with the powdered wigs and fireworks.

To recover the wider history of America’s founding fight, however, is to tell not only a truer but a richer story.

It means asking the Sons of Liberty to share the stage with Mohawk warriors and enslaved black Americans who saw a chance at freedom with the British.

It means setting the Continental Congress alongside Irish privateers, French sailors, Spanish weavers, Indian rulers, Jamaican washerwomen and British pacifists.

It means recognizing that America’s founding struggle was not a self-contained story but part of a worldwide convulsion.

To acknowledge this is not to diminish its significance but to enlarge it.

Richard Bell is a British-born, American-trained historian of the early United States. His new book is “The American Revolution and the Fate of the World.”