Amid an unseasonably sunny spring in Oxford, the Rothermere American Institute hosted its 2026 Harmsworth Conference titled “The Meanings of Independence: The American Declaration in Global Context, 1776–1826.” The Rothermere American Institute (RAI) is the University of Oxford’s research center focused on supporting public and academic understanding of the history, culture, and politics of the United States and its place in the world. The Harmsworth Conference (March 18–19) was part of a series of events RAI is hosting throughout 2026 to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The conference featured presentations by 14 scholars over five panels as well as an introductory graduate workshop panel showcasing the work of 10 graduate students from Notre Dame, the University of New Hampshire, and Oxford. Keynotes were delivered by Peter Mancall (Southern California) and Annette Gordon-Reed (Harvard) along with remarks by the Rt. Hon. Lord Hague of Richmond, the chancellor of Oxford. Overall, 29 scholars from around the world presented, commented, and discussed the Declaration of Independence.
The conference was convened by Eliga Gould (New Hampshire) and Patrick Griffin (Notre Dame), Harmsworth Professors, respectively, for 2025–2026 and 2022–2023. Gould and Griffin asked conference participants to put the Declaration in a global perspective, approaching it from broad social and cultural contexts. Through the five panels, the conference traced the Declaration’s intellectual lineage, its formulation, how it was perceived and adapted, and what impacts it had on the global stage. The conference’s focus on a global context led to discussions of the Declaration that used imperial-revolutionary and global-transnational approaches. The former uses “empire” to blend identity, process, and power to explain the American revolutionary movement. The latter adjusts the geographic scope outside national boundaries to continental, oceanic, and hemispheric proportions to link ideas, movements, people, and places in previously unexamined ways.
To open the conference, Nicholas Cole and Holly Megson (both of Oxford) gave a short presentation on the Quill Project. The Quill Project explores the drafting of the Declaration as a collaborative process,tracking and charting the changing attendance of the Continental Congress and how grievances were adopted or deleted from drafts of the Declaration. The Quill Project also links the language of preceding local declarations of independence to the final version of the 1776 Continental Congress’s Declaration of Independence. These local declarations were made by juries, counties, town meetings, associators, and militias, giving a charming sense of localism to nascent republican institutions. Through their research, Cole and Megson probed questions about the Declaration’s limits and authorities from these local and individual perspectives. The introduction of the conference by the Quill Project immediately exposed the conference participants to exciting new research tools, methodology, and the new questions those methods provoke.
Origins and declarations
After opening remarks, the conference launched into its first panel, titled “Origins.” The panel theme traced the motivations behind declaring independence while also questioning the significance of the Declaration and independence as lived reality rather than rhetorical flourish. James Fichter (Hong Kong) argued that despite the apparent popularity of the Continental Association boycotts on tea, transatlantic consumerism and Anglo American economic ties remained entrenched during the Revolution because enforcement was left to local committees as opposed to preserved in law. Eric Hinderaker (Utah) took a broad scope, reaching beyond the Atlantic to look at the Western Hemisphere from 1492–1850. He argued that the late 18th and early 19th centuries were not an Age of Revolution but better viewed as an Age of Imperial Fracture. For the majority of the Western Hemisphere, independence was a result of Napoleon’s invasion of Spain; the reactionary independence movements were not coherent movements embracing republicanism and democracy, just local juntas reestablishing authority. Slavery also persisted and underdeveloped areas were invested with capital and settler colonialism. From Hinderaker’s hemispheric context, neither in form nor in function did the Declaration do much to herald or reflect a budding Age of Revolution. In the final presentation of the panel, Christa Dierksheide (Virginia) situated challenges to the slave trade by Chesapeake planters by looking at free and unfree labor in the Ohio Valley. For planters and colonial legislatures, the slave trade hindered their westward expansion; resources were required to protect against slave revolts and pushing the plantation system west would have opened the colonies up to interference by foreign powers hoping to incite slave rebellions. The respondent, Andrew Edwards (St. Andrews) grouped all three responses under the umbrella of disillusionment; the Revolution was not ambiguous, but it was inadequate. The three papers of this panel adjusted the popular narrative that the Declaration was in response to a resistance against taxation without representation.
The first day of the conference was closed by a keynote given by Peter Mancall titled “What Makes a Revolution?” Mancall looked at four violent reactions to governmental encroachment that occurred between 1675 and 1680: Bacon’s Rebellion (Virginia), Cuffee’s Conspiracy (Barbados), King Philip’s War (New England), and the Pueblo Revolt (New Mexico). Mancall linked each conflict through their commonalities: None of the societies involved were stable, each outbreak of violence was not spontaneous, each spread from geographic flashpoints, and none of them succeeded. The respondent, Nicholas Guyatt (Cambridge), highlighted how Mancall’s connection of the four rebellions forces us to reconsider how we define, temporally and spatially, an Age of Revolution and to reconsider revolutions not as national projects but as reactions to overreach in areas of already fragile peace.
Panel two, titled “Declarations,” was moderated by Patrick Griffin. The panel broadly addressed the form and language used in the Declaration while also encouraging audience members to look beyond declarations as written words. Steve Sarson (Jean Moulin) argued that the Declaration was the last early modern declaration; the Founders understood the exigency of the moment but also saw themselves as acting within a long tradition of natural law. Their decision to rebel was rooted in the natural law and specifically related to their historical circumstance rather than an attempt to establish universalist proclamations. Ashli White (Miami) showed in her presentation “Words and Things” that the dynamism of material things is different from that of ideas. Through cockades, she showed how things could be used to communicate political stances while also being imbued with religious or cultural meaning. Carine Lounissi (Rouen) addressed the reception of the Declaration by French intellectuals. In the 1770s the reception was dominated by geopolitical events and global warfare but by the 1780s, the Declaration was discussed in light of the Declaration of Rights. The meaning of the Declaration among French intellectuals shifted from a diplomatic tool to a modern document proclaiming universal human rights because of intellectual and political arguments over the slave trade. The response provided by Brendan McConville (Boston) connected the three by context. The Declaration was both modern and pre-modern, connected to Anglo American heritage but having universalist appeal in its translation and reproduction in France while the circumstance of the 18th century enabled this rapid, revolutionary shift in ability to change meanings of things.
Connections and fractures
Daniel Rowe (Oxford) moderated panels three and four titled, respectively, “Connections” and “Fractures.” Lisa Ford (George Washington), Bertrand Van Ruymbeke (Paris 8), and Ian McBride (Oxford) addressed on “Connections” how intellectuals and politicians debated issues that lead up to the American Revolution and continued those debates after independence by introducing reforms. Ford argued the drive to bolster Crown authority through the consular model in the post-Revolution British Empire rested on reactions to the unravelling of prerogative power in North America. Van Ruymbeke analyzed how closely the American Revolution was watched in France. From Versailles to salons, the Revolution was the subject of conversation and even essay contests. McBride aimed to imagine connections between Belfast, the Boston of Ireland, to the American Revolution through Francis Hutcheson. He revisited the influence of Hutcheson on the American Revolution generation of Northern Irish Presbyterians to understand why ideas might have influenced revolution in North America but not Ireland. “Connections” discussed the Declaration as a vehicle for intellectual curiosity, discussion, and political reform abroad.
Panel four, “Fractures,” examined the geopolitical realignment that American independence entailed as empires interacted with a federal system of government. William Anthony Hay (Arizona State) argued that American independence changed how British leaders thought about strategy since the former colonies were no longer a supporting force but now a neutral or even hostile one. Initial American political neutrality was favorable to Britain until Napoleon’s Berlin and Milan decrees, which introduced economic warfare; suddenly, neutrality was not so neutral. Hay’s main point was that the Anglo American alliance was not obvious from the outset as many have assumed. Grace Mallon (Oxford) used the Kozlov Affair (1815) of the Madison presidency to illustrate how Americans and foreign governments grappled with this new system of federalism. The arrest of a Russian diplomat by Pennsylvania authorities raised questions about state jurisdiction. Could states participate in international diplomacy in semi-independent ways? Mallon’s presentation highlighted the befuddlement of foreign governments at the deference shown to lower-level, what they saw as inferior, governments. Mallon’s presentation generated the most lively question and answer section of the conference as it intersected global interests with parochial concerns, reflective of the new American type of government.
The final panel, “Outcomes,” again put the declaration in a global-transnational context. Moderated by Gould, the panel agreed that, from their perspectives, the Declaration had little appeal in Europe, did not do much to end the slave trade, and enshrined an unsustainable system of political economy. Joanna Innes (Oxford) argued there were limits to the appeal of independence as a concept of liberation and self-government. While Americans discussed independence as an achievement, Europeans conceived of it as a process. Christopher Brown (Columbia) challenged the view that the American Revolution was a watershed in the British Atlantic world slave plantation system. In the global context, the stoppage of the slave trade in North America during the Revolutionary War allowed Spain and France to step into the void left by British realignment. The American Revolution might have changed the rhetorical sphere of the politics and culture but did not do much else. The final panel presenter of the conference, Mark Peterson (Yale), argued the use of ideas from the American Revolution as a propulsion system, an appeal to an ever-unfolding promise of freedom, liberty, and independence, is a harmful trope. What made the American Revolution unique was the packaging of specific political ideas with economic and demographic changes. According to Peterson, the ideological package of the American political economy, continuous population growth, territorial expansion, hyper-production and hyper-consumption today threaten life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness around the globe.
American aspirations
In the final keynote, Annette Gordon-Reed presented “The Declaration of Independence and American Identity at 250.” Most of the conference focused on contexts of a global nature and implicitly gestured towards the meaning of independence. Gordon-Reed explicitly addressed the “meaning of independence.” She argued the Declaration created the content of American identity, but it was largely through the efforts of marginalized Americans to interpret that content and create the understanding of the Declaration as it is commonly perceived today. She highlighted the contributions of Prince Hall, who in 1777 submitted one of the earliest petitions to the Massachusetts legislature demanding the abolition of slavery. Hall was the first American to publicly use the language of the Declaration not to justify independence from Britain but to advocate for abolition of slavery. David Walker founded the first black abolitionist group and highlighted in 1829 the hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson by directly quoting the Declaration. Frederick Douglass in his famous 1852 address “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” characterized the Declaration as a promise. Gordon-Reed then continued to trace the contributions of marginalized Americans from factory workers and immigrants in the early 20th century to Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Cold War-Civil Rights era. Their struggles, she emphasized, made the meaning of the Declaration what it is today.
As the respondent to Gordon-Reed, Francis Cogliano (Edinburgh) provided closing remarks and presided over a brief question and answer. Cogliano jokingly characterized the themes of the conference as denying any positive significance to the Declaration. He questioned what the conference would have looked like had it been held in 1976 instead of 2026. Fifty years ago, Cogliano said, historians agreed that 1776 mattered. Today the aspect of the Declaration that catches the most attention is the catalog of grievances. Although conference participants addressed the context of the Declaration through imperial-revolutionary and global-transnational lenses, their approaches were undergirded by a commentary on the nation-state itself. Context and meaning were interrelated rather than disparate questions. The conference’s presenters did not simply offer context but argued for causation and consequences. Embedded within each argument was a meaning of the Revolution intimately related to the contextual lens.
In a brief question-and-answer, the final question addressed to Gordon-Reed asked why historians and Americans should hold on to the ideals of the Founders when their motivations have so clearly been unmasked. Gordon-Reed responded, “Because aspirations matter.” Cogliano noted that an air of disillusionment permeated the conference because of the failure of America’s founding generation to fulfill the promise and values of a rhetorically impressive Declaration. Where, when, and how aspirations matter depend on the contextual framing of the subject and the historian.
The second day of the conference began with reflections on the Declaration of Independence by Lord Hague, Britain’s first secretary of state from 2010 to 2015 and foreign secretary from 2010 to 2014. He closed his remarks saying that today there is no defense of liberty around the world without America. The conference’s global context was not only an important interpretive device in probing the meaning of the Declaration in history, but matters in the present as well. The United States Constitution was not ratified until 1788, making its 250th anniversary June 21, 2038. As the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution continues to unfold, the context, framing, and meaning that historians apply to the Revolution will continue to shift with contemporary circumstance.
CJ Sloan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame.