Ahead of the 250th
anniversary of the signing of a Declaration of Independence by representatives,
or delegates, from thirteen British colonies in North American, a rare copy was
discovered at the British government’s archives. Besides the obvious irony, how
the copy had come into the possession of the British is a reminder of just how
much the rebelling colonists risked by taking on the mighty British Empire. Although
the task of actually achieving political independence must have seemed
formidable, the political elites on both sides “of the pond” (i.e., the Atlantic
Ocean) had already grasped the inherent instability in there being an empire
within an empire, for an empire as a political category or type consists of
kingdom-level polities rather than empires. The British Empire had run aground in
terms of the logic, and the American Revolution can be interpreted as a working-out
of the illogic.
The full essay is at "The Declaration of Independence at 250."
