David Armitage - WMQ Critical Forum

== Summary ==
Based
on this critical review, David Armitage’s book challenges scholars to adjust
the prevailing interpretive framework of the Declaration of Independence. Just
as much as it was a document that professed individual rights and freedoms, it
also presented the idea of a nation-state that required international
recognition. It thus must be examined within a global/transnational framework.
The Declaration led to the proliferation of nation-states, which have come to
define the world and create the structures in which individual rights are
supposed to be protected. What
is key for Armitage is how the document led to the recognition of the U.S. as a
free, sovereign state: The Franco-American treaties of 1778; overt French aid;
recognition by Spain, the Dutch Republic, Morocco and others; and the British
Crown’s formal diplomatic acknowledgement in 1783 of the “said United States as
Free Sovereign, and Independent States.” Individual rights dependent on state
rights/sovereignty. Thus, the declaration’s global history is a story of the
worldwide spread of statehood. It is also the story of the rise, fall, and
resurgence of the language of human rights. 
See also: Ashli White