Sunday, September 8, 2013

Was the American Revolution the first of its kind? Did other countries engage in similar rebellions before the American colonies did?

The American Revolution was one of the few early successful revolts for independence against a European empire, but it was not the first. In the Philippines, for example, rebellions against Spanish presence began shortly after the establishment of the Spanish colonial government in 1521; the First Carib War, a revolt by the indigenous people of St. Vincent and British colonial agents, occurred in 1769, a decade before the American Revolution began. However, rebellions against European imperialism prior to the American Revolution failed to gain independence for the colonized states, unlike the U.S. Additionally, many of these attempts at revolt were by indigenous people resisting the colonization of their land, while the American revolutionaries were colonists who wanted to form an autonomous independent state from the former colonies. The American revolution was inspired largely by Enlightenment ideologies of liberty and democracy, rather than previous revolutions, and it was the first of the 18th century Atlantic Revolutions along with the French, Haitian, and Batavian Revolutions.

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