The first 2026-2027 David Center for the American Revolution Seminar will take place September 30, 2026 at 3:00 p.m. ET on Zoom.
The speaker will be Steve Pincus. Steve Pincus is the Thomas Donnelly Professor of History at the University of Chicago. He has published several books including 1688: The First Modern Revolution and The Heart of the Declaration. His new book, Making a Global Empire will appear from Yale next year. He has written widely on British, imperial and early American history. He has written on comparative revolutions, the history of political economy, and on comparative empires. He is the President elect of the Social Science History Association.
Steve will be presenting his paper titled "The South Asian Origins of American Independence." A description of the paper is below. The paper will be pre-circulated to registered participants in advance of the seminar meeting.
To attend the seminar and to receive a copy of the paper, please register via Zoom.
The David Center for the American Revolution Seminar serves as a forum for works-in-progress that explore topics in the era of the American Revolution (1750-1820). Questions about the series may be directed to [email protected].
NOTE: Seminars are designed as spaces for sharing ideas and works still in-progress. For this reason, this event will not be recorded.
"The South Asian Origins of American Independence"
This essay explores the global nature of the American Revolution, showing the deeply intertwined nature of developments in North America and South Asia. In both cases British imperial actors pursued centralizing and extractive economic policies designed to maximize imperial revenue and pay down the deficit. In both ventures these policies produced disastrous results, fomenting what must be understood as a global imperial civil war. It was events in India which compelled British administrators to redeploy resources, fiscal and military, to the Indian Ocean and away from the Atlantic that enabled Washington’s victory at Yorktown. It was also French reverses in the Carnatic which eventually led the French to contemplate ending the global struggle and sign the peace of 1783. No understanding of the American Revolution is complete without deep engagement with South Asian developments.