How asking a question rocked an author's view of America's past

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise

I spent nine years in graduate school studying American history, then another four researching and writing three books on colonial America. By last year I had read enough to be pretty sure I understood how America came to be. I decided to write a book for young people explaining why the Revolution took place. But, just as John Keats found new worlds when he read Chapman's Homer, I had the exceptional experience of seeing a new ocean of understanding open before me.

Keats's sensation of looking out from a peak and glimpsing a vast and previously unknown expanse is exactly what I felt as I researched what became The Real Revolution: The Global Story of American Independence (Clarion, 2005). What made it even more delicious is that as I pieced together my new sense of why the American Revolution took place, I was describing a world of global contacts very much like the one we live in today. When I was an undergraduate in the late '60s, we had a similar sense of discovery as we sought to add the experiences of women and minorities into the narrative of America's past. Now, I came to realize, it is time to knit American history into world history, where it has always belonged.

It all started with a quotation, and a simple question. In 1815, John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson, "What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the Revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected from 1760 to 1775." That was both definitive and daunting. I had the dates for my study and the nature of the beast I had to find: a revolution in the minds of the people. Now how exactly do you find that? And why those dates?

As I hunted for moments of what, in the '60s, we used to call revolutionary consciousness, I landed on just about the most obvious one of all: The Boston Tea Party. And, conveniently enough, as the broken tea chests bobbed in Boston Harbor, the same John Adams called it a turning point in history. Even though it is easy to find information about the Tea Party, there was one question that kept bothering me: why tea?

Why did the English, who knew perfectly well how the Americans were likely to react, send the tea in the first place? In every textbook, tea appears in Boston Harbor, and Sam Adams and his men do their thing. Enter tea, stage left. Cue Revolution. But that is like reading Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead instead of Hamlet. I wanted to understand the story of the tea.

A few academic monographs do elaborate on the arrival of the doomed cargo. They explain that the East India Company, which owned the tea, was having financial problems. Which leads to an obvious second question, why? Why was the East India Company in trouble, and why should the government care?

I found a good history of the company, and that is when I began to catch the scent, not yet a glimpse, but a hint of salt in the air, that suggested there was a big story here. The history of the East India Company begins just around the time Sir Walter Ralegh was sponsoring a colony in Virginia. But it really gets interesting in 1744 when 17-year-old Robert Clive arrived in Madras (now called Chennai). I'm old enough that as I child I'd read about Clive of India and I had also seen a grim account of the Black Hole of Calcutta. But I did not know of any link between the Black Hole and Clive, and had no sense that he had any connection to American history. That changed.

In 1751, Clive led a fabled stand against an army allied with the French that was 20 times the size of his own, became a hero, and went home rich. Still, despite his wealth and fame, he did not manage to hold on to a seat in Parliament, and returned to India.

The next phase of this story has recently become interesting to historians precisely because it was such an international moment. The early 1750s was exactly when George Washington entered the scene. Three times Washington marched off into the region of modern-day Pittsburgh to warn off the French. Clive was seven years older than Washington, but the two men-on-the-rise were fighting similar battles—for companies (Washington was working for a land-speculation firm) as well as the king, and against the French and their native allies.

In fact Washington's clashes with the French helped set off the Seven Years War, which was officially declared in 1756. In America we show our myopia by calling this the French and Indian War. But several new accounts stress that it was actually fought on or near five continents and could well be called the first real world war. That same year the new nawab, or ruler, of Bengal, captured Calcutta from the English, and, though he did not know it, a number of English prisoners were crammed into a very small cell that came to be called the Black Hole of Calcutta.

The following year Clive triumphed over the nawab and achieved the greatest victory of his career: at Plassey he and three thousand men defeated 50,000 Indian and French soldiers along with their armored elephants. (How he did it is another story.) And by 1759, when James Wolfe took Quebec, the English were well on their way to winning complete global victory.

Notice where we are? 1760 looms, the beginning of Adams's countdown to Revolution. I began to have a sense of two interconnected histories—one strand unfolding in India, the other in North America. But there was also a third strand in this unfolding saga: London.

When the war ended in 1763, the English had to figure out how to pay for their grand success. Their effort to tax the Americans is such a familiar story that I am sure it appears on eighth-grade quizzes throughout this land: identify and define the Stamp Act, the Declaratory Act, the Townshend Duties. Yet we entirely skip the other events in London. Even as Parliament tried to tax the Americans, it had to deal with chaos on its own streets. A demagogue named John Wilkes kept mocking King George III, whipping up crowds, and terrifying Parliament.

Here's where I ran into some good luck, which you can see in the illustrations at left.

Ferment in London and Boston fed each other. The rise of Washington paralleled that of Clive. I was beginning to see that the familiar story of the Revolution was just a two-dimensional slice of a truly global set of crises. There are many twists I'm having to leave out here but the lynchpin tying everything together came in 1765. Clive, now Lord Plassey, signed a treaty with the Mogul emperor that made the East India Company effective ruler of the richest parts of India. On word of this, company stock soared. Following the trail of footnotes in economic encyclopedias, I reached Darien. There is just one article, published in 1960, that really explores this boom, but what it reveals is fascinating. The entire world stock market, linking London bankers, Scottish merchants, Jewish traders in Amsterdam, West Indian sugar planters, the kings and princes of Europe, and ministers and members of Parliament, was trading nothing but East India Company stock.

When I read that article, I saw the ocean. The historian T. H. Breen has shown that those same Scottish merchants held the growing debts of the Virginia tobacco planters. When the company suffered losses in India and then famine broke out in Bengal, the stock began to slide. In 1772, Alexander Fordyce, one of the Scottish bankers, took his money and fled, setting off a cascade of bank failures across Scotland, down through England, through the West Indies, and into Virginia. The Virginians were furious. They felt led on by the Scots, by the English. They yearned to be independent. This was one of those crucial changes of mind Adams had spoken about. And there was another to follow.

As the economy of England weakened, the value of products from India declined. The East India Company itself reached the brink of bankruptcy. The government was willing to bail the company out, so long as it was given control of Bengal, and the company could offer some way to repay the debt. The company did have one asset it could sell outside of England: tea. And so three ships carrying tea Americans did not want sailed in to Boston harbor.

The history of the Revolution is also the history of the English in India. Neither makes sense in isolation. The perfect proof of this came after the Americans won. Though Washington and the French beat Lord Cornwallis, the king thought the lord had done well. As a result, he was the perfect man to bring order to the rest of the empire, and he sailed off to India to do just that.

There is coda to this story. When I finished my research, I learned that Emma Rothschild, a prominent scholar in England, is working on her own book on the East India Company and the American Revolution. The path to the ocean is open. But I had the thrill of finding it for myself, and letting young readers be part of this exciting moment of discovery.