This chapter recasts America’s revolutionary origins as an imperial crisis brought on by changes in the Atlantic. It surveys Atlantic-wide developments over the course of the eighteenth century to suggest that the issues British Americans grappled with in the 1760s were not exceptional. The watery space was transformed by the movement of peoples, goods, and ideas for all. Slavery and the slave trade were the catalysts to systemic change. With these changes, the Atlantic became an entangled space. War heightened the stakes for domination of the oceanic system. Imperial reform was the result. All creoles throughout the Atlantic world experienced similar tensions over relations with their respective metropoles, and consolidation of the Atlantic created similar conflicts within all Atlantic societies. The chapter then explores how and why the British case diverged from the Atlantic-wide model and how a crisis over systemic consolidation became a civil war that fractured an empire. What we know as the American Revolution represented the fallout from these tangled dynamics.

This chapter traces the United States’ status concerns from the early nineteenth century leading up to the 1856 Declaration of Paris. It examines the US approach to the maritime laws of war during this period and derives expectations for how the United States would react to an international agreement such as the Declaration of Paris from two competing perspectives: material interests and IST. It tests these hypotheses through a detailed account of the US approach to the international maritime order from the 1820s, when the United States began rising, to 1856, when the Declaration of Paris became the first universal instrument of international law; as well as in the opening stages of the Civil War when the Union government strongly considered signing the Declaration. It finds that contrary to the commercial interests and status aspirations that influenced initial US support for the maritime laws of war, the country’s leaders rejected the Declaration of Paris and sought to undermine it through an alternative (failed) treaty, because the United States was excluded from the deliberations leading to the Declaration and US leaders viewed the Declaration as relegating America to the status of a second-rate power.

Chapter 9 is the first of two chapters that provides a non-Eurocentric explanation of the rise of modern industrial capitalism in Britain—focussing here on the ‘global-Atlantic production driver’. This chapter argues that the Atlantic production sites comprised an important source of British industrialization. While the empire, especially in the Caribbean, was particularly important, as was the post-imperial United States after 1793, nevertheless the role of Black slavery provided the lowest common denominator of the American/Caribbean contribution. But while there were important global causal factors, I also factor in the role of British developmental agency under conditions of global uneven and combined development into the explanation. For other great colonial powers such as France did not make the breakthrough into industrialization. The analysis of the American/Caribbean contribution unfolds in stages. First, I argue that slave-produced raw cotton in the Caribbean and subsequently in the United States was one vital input. I quantify the overall Caribbean contribution together with that made by imperial military spending as supplying between 38 and 51 per cent of British domestic investment. Finally, I consider the twin roles of slavery and imperial warfare in driving forward the British iron and steel industrialization.