Entangled Alliances

Entangled Alliances is a reinterpretation of the American Revolution through analysis of diplomacy in the emerging United States during decades of hemispheric transformation. Ronald Angelo Johnson brings to light the fascinating story of American patriots and rebels from Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) allying against European tyranny.

The American Revolution occurred between two of the greatest achievements in diplomacy of the eighteenth century: the peace treaties at Paris in 1763 and 1783. In Entangled Alliances, Johnson draws on original multilingual sources to offer readers fresh, lively stories in a timely study. While modern understandings of freedom are often linked to the US Declaration of Independence, Johnson argues that the desire of Black Atlantic inhabitants for liberty and their will to resist slavery predated the fateful standoff between minutemen and redcoats at Lexington and Concord.

Entangled Alliances is a US history of the American Revolution, fusing the search for freedom by Black and white founders in the United States and Saint-Domingue into a coherent story of collective resistance during the most explosive twenty-year period of the eighteenth century.

Ronald Angelo Johnson holds the Ralph and Bessie Mae Lynn Chair of History at Baylor University.

In this exceptional book, Ronald Angelo Johnson convincingly demonstrates that revolutions in the United States and Haiti interacted in highly significant, racially-charged ways, and that these had wide-ranging international implications. Entangled Alliances makes an important contribution to the scholarly discussion of the age of Atlantic Revolutions.

Ashli White, author of Revolutionary Things:

With a capacious and inventive approach to diplomacy that persistently emphasizes individuals, Entangled Alliances advances our understanding of the relationship between British North America and French Saint-Domingue. Ronald Angelo Johnson recovers the central contributions of diverse Black actors to the entwined revolutionary histories of these two regions.