Empire Ablaze: The American Revolution and the Atlantic Working Class

In 1776, while Britain wages war on American rebels, one man sets out to bring the empire down from within

As revolution raged in North America, James Aitken – house painter, highwayman, and escaped indentured servant – wandered the colonies formulating a dramatic plan to cripple the British navy by destroying Portsmouth dockyard and Bristol harbour. He was determined to burn down the empire to hasten American independence.

Through this overlooked story of British insurrection and America’s founding, historian Tom Cutterham explores how an emerging transatlantic working class experienced the transformation and crisis of Britain’s eighteenth-century empire. Behind this new sense of class consciousness was the Enlightenment philosophy that had informed popular ideas about the universal rights 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.

We will be in partnership with Bristol Radical History Group for this event which covers an important episode of radical Bristol history. Tickets cost £7 and include a glass of wine or soft drink and £2 off the book. Presented by bookhaus.

Tom 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.

* > 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 World
* > Tom Cutterham uses the picaresque life of arsonist James Aitken to tell a ripping good yarn about labor, class, radical ideas, and the American revolution. A vivid and well-researched transatlantic history from below.
Marcus Rediker, co-author of The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
* > In this beautifully-written gem of a book Tom Cutterham tells the story of James Aitken, a Scot who sought to sabotage the Royal Navy in Portsmouth in the name of American independence. In so doing Cutterham makes a larger argument about class and the roles played common people, like Aitken, in making a new, revolutionary, world. In Cutterham's hands James Aitken emerges as a subject worthy of Broadway musical or a Netflix series. The 250th anniversary of US Independence will see the publication of many books on the American Revolution. Empire Ablaze stands out from the crowd and deserves the widest possible audience.
Frank Cogliano, Professor of American History, University of Edinburgh