Empire Ablaze

<b>In 1776, while Britain wages war on American rebels, one man sets out to bring the empire down from within</b><br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>Reframing the American Revolution as a British civil war, <i>Empire Ablaze </i>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.