The American Revolution was a dispute over empire’s course, not a rejection of empire.

Evidence

The United States was itself a product of British imperialism, but it was also its heir, enthusiastically embracing such concepts as manifest destiny, which the British had developed long before it became a guiding principle for American expansion in the nineteenth century. The British believed in the right of conquest of “backward” peoples in the name of civilization (for example, the Irish and Native Americans), while the rapidly growing population of land-hungry settlers (the majority of whom had been dispossessed of land in England through enclosure) pushed for more expansion. The expansionist pressure accumulated so much momentum that by the middle of the eighteenth century, it drove the Anglo-American colonists to provoke the Seven Years’ War and a little over a decade later to rebel against the British Empire. Rather than a rejection of empire, however, the American War of Independence was in many respects a dispute over the proper course of empire in North America. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 198

The United States was itself a product of British imperialism, but it was also its heir, enthusiastically embracing such concepts as manifest destiny, which the British had developed long before it became a guiding principle for American expansion in the nineteenth century. The British believed in the right of conquest of “backward” peoples in the name of civilization (for example, the Irish and Native Americans), while the rapidly growing population of land-hungry settlers (the majority of whom had been dispossessed of land in England through enclosure) pushed for more expansion. The expansionist pressure accumulated so much momentum that by the middle of the eighteenth century, it drove the Anglo-American colonists to provoke the Seven Years’ War and a little over a decade later to rebel against the British Empire. Rather than a rejection of empire, however, the American War of Independence was in many respects a dispute over the proper course of empire in North America. Indeed, through the mid-eighteenth century, the Anglo- Americans had been the most enthusiastic of British imperialists, fighting in four colonial wars. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 198

Rather than a rejection of empire, however, the American War of Independence was in many respects a dispute over the proper course of empire in North America. Indeed, through the mid-eighteenth century, the Anglo- Americans had been the most enthusiastic of British imperialists, fighting in four colonial wars. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 210

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges the standard founding narrative in a way that resonates with recent revisionist histories of the American Revolution (e.g., the empire-of-liberty literature) and with Decolonial readings of US history. — connects to: Paine presented American independence as a world-historical opportunity, not mere colonial grievance. — Edward J. Larson, Declaring Independence, 94
• SEED: An essay angle reframing American exceptionalism: the ‘revolution’ as an imperial succession dispute — which recasts how contemporary US empire-building narratives borrow British civilizational rhetoric.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that dispossessed landless settlers — themselves victims of enclosure — became the engine of imperial expansion is a dense knot of contradiction worth sitting with: the colonized-as-colonizer dynamic at the founding.
• QUESTION: This reframing of the Revolution as intra-imperial dispute is strong enough to trace how it connects to later 20th-century US empire-building chapter claims.
• corroborated: 5 independent passages support this claim — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 198; Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 210