Tom Cutterham's new book, Gentlemen Revolutionaries, is about the fallout of the American Revolution in the 1780s, and the creation of a new ruling class for the United States.
Looking at struggles over inheritance, debt, schooling, banking, and democracy, it shows how elites in the new republic constructed an approach to justice that allowed them to champion freedom while maintaining their positions of power—in other words, to be both gentlemen and revolutionaries. Beyond adding to our knowledge of the revolution, the book aims to make a point about how power and class shape our world, even to the point of redefining central concepts, like justice itself.
In a recent interview, Tom explains that the book's aim is to change the way we think about 'the process of revolution and the founding, both as a social and cultural epoch and as a series of political events'. There will be a launch event at the Rothermere American Institute in Oxford, on Friday 20 October 2017, and one at Benjamin Franklin House in London, on Thursday 15 February 2018.
Gentlemen Revolutionaries is published by Princeton University Press.