Title is a joke but it's a lot of info to process and if anyone else here has read it they should converse with me about it.
One thing I was thinking about when I was in the middle of it was the fact that I have heard some pop materialists (podcasters don't misunderstand me) who are quick to disagree with the book's premise, saying it's too focused on only one aspect of the revolution. And even in the text, Horne mentions frustration with people who overlook racism in favor of only class analysis
I was only a history minor in college, I'm not well-read enough to dispute either of these positions. But the idea of the revolution being primarily a sort of "brexit to keep slaves" fits so well into my understanding of the situation, so I'm finding myself leaning towards Horne's position.
So naturally I want internet strangers to help me decide instead. What true proletarian elements of the revolution am I ignoring?
The book succeeds in answering this one simple question: why did Indigenous and Black people almost exclusively sided with the British?
This author talks a lot about how the early momentum of the American Revolution had a proletarian character- with the first year of open hostilities and the handful of years before that being characterized by riots and runaways- and was later coopted by gentry and businessmen. It's an analysis that pretty broadly applies to other state-threatening events, especially color revolutions: they aren't orchestrated from the ground on their own, but rather occur as capitalists work to steer any unrest in a direction that favors them.
The French Revolution was pretty similar, started with hunger riots in Paris which spiraled and were taken over as a vehicle for the grievances of the bourgeoisie.
If we're lucky there are organized communist revolutionaries to steer the unrest
Fascinating read, right? That first half was a heck of a slog, but once you get through it I remember things moving pretty fast.
Keep in mind, I'm not in anyway a historian, just a guy who realized he was lied to as a child and has spent the last few decades trying to suss out the truth of reality. CR1776 was probably the most in-depth book I've read regarding the American Revolution, before that I had read Zinn's People's History and Lowen's Lies my teacher told me, after I read Beard's Economic Interpretation of the US Constitution (Which I recommend as a great followup to CR1776.) Add on a bunch of random other articles and dollop episodes on top of all that.
My big take away from CR1776 is simply that regardless whether you agree with Horne's views or not (and tbh I do) there's a massive gaping hole in the Mythology of the US regarding Slavery and the Revolution. The general consensus might as well be a freshly released CIA document mostly covered in black marker as far as I'm concerned. Much of the threads I've pulled over the years pretend that abolition sprung into place years after the revolution and are often attributed to some great man theory. Somerset's case and the consequences are often buried and the general consensus ignores uprising after uprising before and after the revolution. Almost every argument against questioning the standard revolution myth goes into some bullshit about the idealism of the founding fathers and their belief in Liberty as if that means anything. Or, it'll be about how letters from the front spoke to the patriotism of the folks fighting the British as if some poor schlub fighting in Iraq 20 years ago had any say as to why we invaded.
There's a sickness in our history that make it myth, not just in that winners write it, but that in order to be published you have to toe the line of the Cultural Hegemony. The lessons we get from understanding how Manufacturing Consent works are, I feel, for the most part applicable going back far further than recent history.
I forget who but a few months ago a
user lambasted this book and Horne for his lack of evidence and poor scholarship. They provided no further commentaryI'm not the most discerning academic reader but the book seemed pretty dense with sources. But I can see why this book might draw some ire, it makes some pretty unflattering claims about the Revolution.
Evidently @JoeByeThen@hexbear.net and @420blazeit69@hexbear.net have read the book and can give more perspective
All revolutions are driven by different material contradictions for the different participants
It was a brexit to keep slaves for the southern Bourgoisie. If was a brexit for financial centralisation for the Northern Bourgoisie. For the PB and Yeomenry and Proles, it was a radical liberal revolution like that in France.
What was the primary contradiction? I'm not convinced there is always a single one.
I don't know if it can be so neatly separated into North and South at that point. It seems (at least in this book) like slavery was being depended upon pretty fundamentally all over the colonies at that time, not just the Southern ones.
But this point you are making is why I think this book is worth discussing. Horne does make the claim that, for the PB at least, there was a deep fear of (justified) slave uprisings alongside deeper fears tied to the fact that the slave population was becoming larger than any other group.
Basically Horne does claim that it wasn't only supremely wealthy landowners who were afraid of the consequences of abolition. And it does make sense to me that the special cruelty of America being a slaveowning society fucks with the usual dynamics of class--the creation of the "white" identity not much earlier than this time is important here. Horne had no shortage of primary source examples of people whose class interests should have been aligned with the slaves, but whose ability to recognize that had been made fuzzy by that new manufactured racial identity and by their ever-present terror of the slaves' justified animosity.
