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.
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.
