Next July marks 250 years since a handful of upstart American colonies declared independence from Britain. A war was fought, as we all know, and almost immediately after it was over, Richard Bell asserts in “The American Revolution and the Fate of the World,” a “collective amnesia” took hold.

The preference for historians and Americans alike was to tell a simple story, one in which “plucky homegrown heroes faced down all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, all on their own.” The truth is, Bell says, the country’s founding required “a world war in all but name.”

The transnational nature of the conflict can’t be understated, he goes on. Its reach was felt far and wide, so much so that it is “not an exaggeration to say that the American Revolution set much of the world as we know it i

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