Empire Ablaze

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.