Currently reading GERALD HORNE. The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America.

Currently reading: 

GERALD HORNE. The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Pp xiv, 349. $34.23 USD.

Andrew W Taylor

The victorious 1776 American White Colonialist revolt against British rule in North America has been hailed by historians from right to left as a progressive national democratic revolution. But egregious details belie the dominant narrative on American independence: Gerald Horne asks why the Africans then residing in the colonies overwhelmingly sided with Britain.

In this study based on an analysis of the records of the slave-trade, the plantocracy and the Slave Revolts, Gerald Horne demonstrates that in the years leading up to 1776, the abolition of slavery seemed an inevitable action by the British parliament , -- inspiring Africans in the American colonies as much as it enraged the slaveholder elite, and fuelling the reactionary American colonial revolt for independence.