Disputing the Declaration of Independence
That the United States declared its independence in July 1776 is well known; that the British state commissioned, but never published, a counter-declaration is not.
The American War of Independence was a war of words as well as a war of arms. It has sometimes been said that books cause revolutions but it is often the case that revolutions cause books – and lots of them. In British history alone, production of political print spiked in the 1640s and again during the Glorious Revolution, as duelling pamphlets debated every subject under the sun, to the benefit of Britain’s printers and booksellers. The British imperial crisis of the 1760s and 1770s marked another publishing peak in which a relatively obscure writer such as Thomas Paine could vault to fame with the appearance of 200,000 (Paine’s figure) or even by some later estimates 500,000 copies of his Common Sense, which first hit the streets of Philadelphia in February 1776.
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