Northern Ireland authors launch book branding American Revolution the ‘Glorious Revolution 2.0’
A new book by two Northern Ireland historians to mark the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration has described the American Revolution as "essentially a Glorious Revolution 2.0".
The book’s release follows a lecture by Lord Hannan earlier this year, in which he highlighted the close political and ideological links between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the American Declaration of Independence in 1776.
In June, Lord (Daniel) Hannan, a former Tory MEP, delivered the keynote address at an event to mark America’s 250th anniversary at Riddell Hall in QUB, organised by the Orange Order.
He explained how the Glorious Revolution shaped British and American constitutional democracy.
Now the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland has launched its own publication on the theme, ‘Declarations of Liberty’.
Co-authors historian and documentary maker Mark Thompson and Orange Museum Curator Dr Jonathan Mattison both addressed the launch at the Museum of Orange Heritage in east Belfast this week. .
Dr Mattison told the News Letter the aim is to show how the ideas and events that shaped the Glorious Revolution would lead to the birth of America.
"Our motivation for this publication was to highlight the ideological cross over between the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which we as an Institution continue to celebrate today, and the motivation of those ‘reluctant revolutionaries’ who would go on to shape the most powerful democracy in world history," he said.
The book is timed to mark the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence, which has seen high-level cultural exchanges between the Northern Ireland Department for Communities and major American cultural institutions.
Seventeen US presidents, including Andrew Jackson and Chester A. Arthur, have ancestral links to NI and at least five signatories of the Declaration of Independence had roots in Ulster.
"The movement of a quarter of a million Ulster-Scots to North America during the eighteenth century was not merely a movement of people but also a transference of ideas, history and heritage," Dr Mattison said.
"Many of those families who fought during the Williamite and Jacobite War to secure the new Constitutional arrangements, set in place by the Glorious Revolution, would also influence events in the Colonies. Families whose ancestors fought from Londonderry to Limerick would see action from Valley Forge to Yorktown. Many of the principles that we hold dear as central to our modern democracies find their origins in the Glorious Revolution."
The benefits of both revolutions are clear in 21st-century democracies, he said.
"Liberty of the Subject, Freedom of the Press, Religious Toleration (certainly the beginning of such), Limited Monarchy, Economic Stability and advancement, promoting the ideal that government was a social contract, all these became the lifeblood of Britishness and would shape the very nature of Constitutional Democracy in the Western World.
"The events in the American Colonies were essentially a Glorious Revolution 2.0, the influence of which can be seen everywhere. The main protagonists wrote about the liberty of the Glorious Revolution and demonstrated how successive Westminster Administrations had eroded these fundamental rights; the American Revolution was a way of resetting this."
The book has been supported by funding from the Department of Communities through the USA-NI 250 fund.
Copies are available free from Schomberg House, Belfast, or can be ordered at: https://www.goli.org.uk/product-page/declarations-of-liberty