Politicians, Slaves, and Tangled Roots: A Review Essay of Dunmore’s New World, The Counter-Revolution of 1776, and Independence

Abstract

James Corbett David, Gerald Horne, and Thomas Slaughter have produced three different works that offer some insight to major developments within the British empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, anchored by the American Revolution. David approaches the task from a narrower perspective by focusing on the life and times of John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore (1732–1809). Horne and Slaughter examine the subject from larger viewpoints. Horne offers an examination of the role that slave resistance played in the events leading to the American declaration of independence from Great Britain, while Slaughter seeks to explain how the desire for independence among those who settled in Britain’s North American colonies finally became so radicalized that it led to a separation.