1776
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations
A Scottish moral philosopher published a long inquiry into how nations got rich. His answer - through divided labor, open markets, and self-interest restrained by competition - arrived in London just as empire was cracking. The book invented economics. Its admirers and its enemies have been quoting selectively ever since.
Declaration of Independence
After Jefferson's draft was trimmed by committee (they cut his passage blaming slavery on the king), Congress adopted the Declaration. 'We hold these truths to be self-evident...' The signers pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. Some would lose all three. A nation was announced, not yet achieved. The document was rushed to a Philadelphia printer and read aloud to crowds who tore down a statue of George III.
Paine's Common Sense
A failed corset-maker lately arrived from England published a 47-page pamphlet in Philadelphia that argued, in prose a blacksmith could read, for total independence and a republic. It sold 150,000 copies in three months. In the time it took to hand it around, America convinced itself of what a year before had been unthinkable.
Washington Crosses the Delaware
On a sleet-lashed Christmas night, Washington ferried 2,400 men across ice-choked water and marched on Trenton. He caught the Hessian garrison asleep after Christmas celebrations and took the town in 45 minutes. A single small victory resurrected a dying revolution. Enlistments that had been expiring were quietly renewed, and the army that had been melting away in despair suddenly believed it could survive the winter.
Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The first volume of Edward Gibbon's vast history appeared in London. He blamed Rome's fall on Christianity with Enlightenment irony so refined it took readers a page to notice. The prose was Augustan; the footnotes were wicked. Six volumes would eventually arrive, an entire civilization dissected over dinner. It remains the most widely read work of eighteenth-century history and a monument of English prose style.
Virginia Declaration of Rights
George Mason drafted, and Virginia's convention adopted, a ringing declaration that all men were by nature free and independent, with inherent rights. Jefferson borrowed from it directly a month later. Every subsequent American state bill of rights - and the federal one of 1791 - would owe a debt to Mason's morning drafting in Williamsburg.
Bentham's Fragment on Government
A young London barrister named Jeremy Bentham published a cold attack on Blackstone's Commentaries, arguing that law should be judged only by its consequences - the greatest happiness of the greatest number. The Utilitarian movement, that most English of philosophies, was born in a pamphlet about legal jargon. Bentham would spend the next fifty years designing reforms for prisons, parliaments, and the poor, many adopted long after his death.