Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 2 of Jonathan Israel’s 2017 book, The Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775-1848:

The [American] Revolution commenced the demolition of the early modern hierarchical world of kings, aristocracy, serfdom, slavery, and mercantilist colonial empires, initiating its slow, complex refashioning into the basic format of modernity.

DBx: Yes. And note how this assessment by Israel is rather at odds with the assertion that the American Revolution was chiefly about the maintenance of slavery.