2026/01/01 by Nguyen Truong Giang
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #American Constitutional Law and Politics #Scottish History and National Identity #Commonwealth, Australian Politics and Federalism
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/jbr.2026.10276
Abstract Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context. This article reinterprets 1776 not as an American event alone but as an imperial crisis that reshaped the terms of sovereignty across the British world. Focusing on Malta, Mysore, and Kedah-Penang, it argues that subordinate polities facing strategic vulnerability responded to the loss of North America by bargaining for recognized status within an unequal imperial order, converting material dependence into acknowledged standing through treaties, charters, and ceremonies. The concept of “subordinate sovereignty” is developed to capture arrangements in which rulers retained meaningful internal authority while accepting externally managed external relations. In so doing, the argument shows how practices later associated with nineteenth‑century protectorates and indirect rule were already being improvised at the empire’s margins in the decades around 1776, not as a designed policy from London but as an emergent outcome of peripheral agency and imperial necessity.