David Armitage (Harvard University): "Poland was but a breakfast": or, why 1772 helps us to understand 1776
13 May 17:00
The Annual George Rousseau Lecture at Magdalen College
Date: Wednesday 13 May
Time: 17:00
Venue: Magdalen College, Grove Auditorium
The American Revolution is now widely accepted to have been the last civil war within the British Empire of the Atlantic world. However, British, imperial, and Atlantic contexts do not exhaust the historical frames essential to understand the Revolution or, more specifically, 1776. For contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic, Europe—particularly the European balance of power—was the most important setting for the fears raised by the American War. The greatest assault on that balance of power had occurred only four years before 1776 in 1772 with the first Partition of Poland by Austria, Prussia and Russia. This lecture shows how fears of partition, "Poland like", drove the decision for American independence and how the Polish response to partition shaped the British counterblast to the Declaration of Independence.
