It is, at last, July 2026. Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair is pulling in dozens of visitors to revel in the semiquincentennial spirit. There are conferences, events, talks, and books aplenty. And in three weeks’ time, Empire Ablaze will officially add to their number!

In the runup to the book’s launch, I’ve been writing a few magazine pieces that trail some of its main themes. First, in Jacobin back in May, I wrote about how “Class Struggle Was a Crucial Part of the American Revolution.” More recently, I wrote for The Conversation (a platform specifically designed for the public dissemination of academic research) about “The Britons who supported the War of Independence.” Before that, I also had a piece on the website of the magazine History Extra, called “Fire and freedom: how the American Revolution inflamed passions in Britain.”

Since that last one is behind a fairly tight paywall, I thought I would share the unedited draft version especially for you, the much-neglected readers of this newsletter. So that’s what you’ll find below the line. I’ll aim to check back in here with news about in-person events coming up. In the meantime, have a wonderful summer and a very happy Independence Day.

Fire, Freedom, and Britain’s American Revolution

It was mid-January, 1777, and the ground must have been hard with frost as twenty-four-year-old James Aitken left Bristol on foot. At six in the morning, the sun had not yet begun to rise. The young man did not look back until he was about three miles out of town. But when he did, it was as if the sky was burning.

“I thought the whole element was in flames,” Aitken recalled, “so dreadful was the effect it had at that distance.” Instead of walking on, away from the blazing city, he decided to head back, “to be an eyewitness of the destruction I had wrought.”

This was the last fire Aitken ever set, but it was not his first.

A few weeks earlier, he had burned down the massive rope-house at Portsmouth Royal Dockyard, causing £20,000 of damage—double the cost of the tea destroyed at Boston harbour by the Sons of Liberty.

At Bristol, the damage turned out to be less serious than it had seemed in the dawn light. Only a few buildings were destroyed, and no-one killed. Aitken’s attack on the city had achieved one thing, though. Everyone in England soon knew there was an incendiary in their midst.

After nearly two years of destructive fighting in the colonies, it was British people’s turn to be afraid for their lives and property. The American Revolution had come home to the mother country.

In this 250^th anniversary year, the history of the American Revolution is easily conflated with the origin story of the United States. If we think about the British side of the picture at all, it’s usually to look at the government policies that helped provoke colonial rebellion, or the men who led the war effort to put it down.

There is, however, a much bigger story to be told about Britain’s American Revolution—one that helps us to explain James Aitken and his campaign of incendiary sabotage.

Seeing the revolution from a British perspective helps remind us, too, that there is nothing uniquely American about the struggle for freedom against a corrupt and tyrannical political system. It was, after all, British notions of liberty that inspired the colonists in the first place.

Take the protests against taxes that first galvanized a new sense of colonial resistance to the British government in 1765. Americans took to the streets, hanging effigies of tax collectors and in some cases tearing their houses down, building bonfires of their possessions. Two years earlier, attempts to raise new taxes in Britain itself had met a similar response, with widespread rioting against a tax on cider.

Colonists argued that since they were not represented in Parliament, it had no right to levy taxes on them—only their own elected assemblies could do that. But many in Britain made the same basic argument. Parliament, with its tiny and unevenly distributed electorate, was not a truly representative institution. Instead, it worked only for a corrupt oligarchy, easily manipulated by the king and his ministers.

John Wilkes was a journalist and politician who became a leading symbol of the British opposition in the 1760s. He gained mass support on both sides of the Atlantic, receiving gifts from colonists at his cell in the King’s Bench Prison in 1769. Wilkes, in turn, was a vocal backer of the colonial cause, helping make London a centre of pro-American sentiment in the years leading up to 1776.

While some people supported the colonies because they were merchants or manufacturers who saw the tax crisis as bad for business, others were committed to the principles at stake. The scientist Joseph Priestley, for example, writing in 1768, linked the colonists’ arguments back to the basic axiom that all legitimate government had to come from the people themselves.

That same year, John Erskine, the minister at Edinburgh’s Greyfriars Church, argued in favour of the American cause, too. His published sermon denied Parliament’s right to tax or even legislate for the colonists, warning Britain’s government not to provoke them further. Push things too far, he argued, and “we may drive them into measures, ruinous both to themselves and to us.”

James Aitken was sixteen and living in Edinburgh when Erskine gave that sermon. He had grown up attending church at Greyfriars. He also gained an enduring love of reading at the local charity school, known as Heriot’s Hospital, where he read about “the heroes of antiquity” and “the principles of religion and politics.”

Seven years later, in 1775, Aitken was travelling from Liverpool down through the English countryside to London. He had been on a remarkable journey, including a short stint as an indentured servant in Virginia and, as an escapee, living in the revolutionary hub of Philadelphia.

Yet it wasn’t until he got back to England that spring that he started to really associate himself with the American cause. It was only then that he began to realise that the nascent revolution was part of a larger, transatlantic struggle. And it was only afterwards that he decided he would have a role to play in it.

In 1775 the imperial crisis was reaching its crescendo. Shots fired at Lexington in April drove events closer to full-scale war and that August King George declared the colonists to be in “open and avowed rebellion.” As Aitken made his was across the country, regiments of soldiers were being raised to go and fight across the ocean.

At the same time, though, British supporters were intensifying their defence of the Americans. The historian Catharine Macaulay denounced what she saw as a policy of tyranny and called on the people to “rouse and unite in one general effort.” The antislavery activist Granville Sharp issued a pamphlet asserting “the people’s natural right to a share in the legislature,” in Ireland and America as well as in Britain itself.

One of the most important contributions to this discourse was the three-volume tract, Political Disquisitions, authored by the Scottish-born schoolteacher and religious dissenter James Burgh. He described the book as “an enquiry into public errors, defects, and abuses,” and went into detail on what we might call the British constitution’s democratic deficit. He also came out firmly for the colonists’ rights, and was soon being cited by the revolutionaries themselves.

Aitken devoured such “anti-ministerial” tracts, especially those that “inveighed at monarchical government.” Writers in Britain didn’t explicitly call for the abolition of the monarchy, of course—that would have been treason. But those who read between the lines had little trouble grasping what they meant.

“When kings are base, when tyrants they are grown,” wrote the anonymous authors of The Crisis in December 1775, “may Britons hurl them headlong from the throne.”

By the following spring, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense had shocked and delighted colonial readers with its detailed and scathing critique of monarchy itself. But in England it was another pamphlet that captured public attention. Its author was Richard Price, a Welsh-born dissenting preacher and intellectual who had long moved in the same circles as Priestley and Burgh.

Titled Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America, the book did little more than rehash arguments already current among parliamentary reformers and friends of the colonies, but it did so with a directness that cut through to readers. As one critic put it, even “dunces, dotards, and drunkards” were part of Price’s audience, not to mention “female patriots.” As for Aitken, he “always entertained the highest opinion” of “Dr Price’s Tract.”

Price concluded his book with the thought that “an important revolution in the affairs of this kingdom seems to be approaching.” It was an opportunity, he wrote, to be seized now or never—to overthrow the corrupt establishment and restore a more democratic form of British liberty.

Aitken may have taken Price’s sentiments more literally than most.

A few months later he was sitting in a pub in Oxford, talking about the war in America. Everyone agreed that Britain’s navy was the linchpin of the empire’s power. Without it, there would be no way to carry on the struggle. That night, an idea began to take hold in Aitken’s mind. He lay awake dreaming up a plan.

Before he lit his first fire in Portsmouth that December, 1776, Aitken spent months making careful preparations. He visited dockyards all over the south of England, learning the layouts and patterns of work, figuring out weak spots. Then he took his notes to Paris for a meeting with Silas Deane, the revolutionary colonists’ envoy to France.

Deane remembered Aitken as a shabbily-dressed, unimpressive figure—but one whose eyes sparkled with revolutionary fervour. “I will strike such a blow, ay, such a blow as will need no repetition,” the young Scotsman told him. Deane gave him money, and the address of a spy in London who he said would help.

As it turned out, most of Aitken’s plans went wrong. He managed to burn down the Portsmouth dockyard rope-house in December, but the contact in London turned him away. Then he made his way to Plymouth, only to find the dockyard there locked down after news of the Portsmouth fire.

It was then that he turned to Bristol, a civilian port that was not on his original list of targets. Angry at his disappointment in Plymouth, Aitken “resolved to destroy Bristol entirely, and all the shipping.”

Most people had assumed the Portsmouth dockyard fire was an accident. The fires in Bristol, though, were clearly deliberate, and they created an immediate uproar. The king met with the cabinet at Buckingham Palace and agreed to send troops to the city. A reward was posted for the capture of all those responsible. American-born men were rounded up and held for questioning. Parties of citizens patrolled the streets at night.

For Edmund Burke, one of Bristol’s MPs and an outspoken opponent of the war in America, it was a disaster. He knew the supporters of America would be blamed for the arson attack, and that the government would use it to justify further clampdowns. All he could do was distance himself, calling the incident the work of a madman.

Most of the historians who have written about Aitken—usually using his press nickname, John the Painter—have taken their lead from Burke’s approach. They focus on his youth and his erratic behaviour, writing off his sabotage campaign as a cry for attention.

But, as I argue in my new book Empire Ablaze, taking Aitken seriously as an informed, engaged political actor might help us to better understand his moment. After all, he was hardly alone in his bitter hatred of Britain’s oligarchical regime, or in his desire to find new hope in the colonists’ uprising.

Even after France and Spain, Britain’s age-old Catholic enemies, entered the war, support for the Americans and criticism of government tyranny remained substantial. Few British people wanted to get rid of the empire. What they wanted was to reform it on more democratic principles. Political thinkers like Price, Burke, and others grappled with the contradictions inherent in that goal.

250 years later, people in the United States celebrate the American Revolution as a national birthday, but most of us usually forget that it was a revolutionary moment in British history, too. The spirit of liberty that swept both sides of the Atlantic in the 1760s and 1770s had long-term consequences all over the world.

Aitken was captured within days of the fires at Bristol and brought to London in chains while the authorities built a case against him. Then, after almost a month in jail, he was tried for the Portsmouth dockyard arson in Winchester’s medieval Great Hall. There was never any doubt as to the outcome.

On 10 March 1777, the young revolutionary was hanged—hauled up by the neck to the top of a warship’s mizzenmast, almost seventy feet high.

“Remember John the Painter,” entreated a writer in the Pennsylvania Packet three years later. He was only a poor man, but he had the courage to strike back against the British empire and its war machine. Revolutionaries on both sides of the ocean would continue to need such courage against all the odds.