The question in the title is not rhetorical. When Priya Satia steps to the front of the Cape Cod Lounge in the UMass Amherst Student Union on the evening of October 22, 2026, she will be asking her audience to consider that the answer to "Who else opposed monarchy in 1776?" is longer, stranger, and more global than the standard story of a few dozen men in Philadelphia allows.
The lecture, part of UMass's Feinberg Family Distinguished Lecture Series, arrives in the middle of the country's semiquincentennial, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. That timing is the point. Satia, the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History and Professor of History at Stanford University, will examine alternative forms of republicanism that were prevalent in the eighteenth-century world but were eclipsed by colonial conquest. The erasure of those traditions from popular memory, she argues, has fed the myth that freedom is an exclusively European invention and that it is necessarily individualistic in character.
Her subject is not a single lost document or forgotten thinker but a whole landscape of political imagination. Satia will explore British and American republicanism alongside the ways both engaged with South Asian, Middle Eastern, and Indigenous American republican ideas. The lecture's premise is that anti-monarchical thinking was not a European export to the rest of the world but a set of overlapping conversations, some of which the empires of the era worked hard to forget.
Satia is well suited to the argument. Her first book, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2008), won the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize from the American Historical Association, the AHA-Pacific Coast Branch Book Award, and the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies Book Prize. Her second, Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (Penguin/Duckworth, 2018), traced how a Quaker gun-making family and the arms trade helped make the Industrial Revolution, and it collected the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies Book Prize, the Wadsworth Prize in Business History, and the AHA's Jerry Bentley Prize in world history, along with a shortlisting for the Laura Shannon Prize.
Her best-known book, Time's Monster: How History Makes History (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020), is the intellectual backbone of a talk like this one. In it, Satia argues that the modern discipline of history itself helped make empire ethically thinkable. As the Guardian's review of the book put it, Time's Monster is not a straightforward history but an account of how history as a discipline enabled colonization, "making it ethically thinkable." Satia traces the shift from cyclical to linear understandings of time in the Enlightenment, and how a linear, forward-marching idea of history gave empire a moral alibi: some peoples and institutions were simply obsolete, on the wrong side of history. The book won the 2021 Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies Book Prize and a 2021 Independent Publisher Book Award.
That argument gives the lecture its edge. If history-writing can bury inconvenient political traditions, then the memory of 1776 is not a neutral record but a curated one. Satia's current book project, The Lake of Liberation, on British colonialism in Punjab and its legacies, continues the same inquiry into how imperial power reshaped the political possibilities people could imagine.
The setting matters too. The Feinberg Family Distinguished Lecture Series is the history department's signature public program, mounted every other academic year with support from Kenneth R. Feinberg, a 1967 UMass Amherst graduate, and associates. Each iteration takes on a single "big issue" and builds a season of lectures, panels, exhibitions, performances, and film around it, drawing audiences from well beyond campus. Past themes have included mass incarceration in the United States and, in 2024-25, the question of what universities are for.
The 2026-27 series is titled "Escape from Oligarchy: The History and Future of Rule by the Rich." Its framing asks how the power of billionaires and giant corporations took root and how people have fought back, tracing oligarchy's origins in colonialism, capitalism, and racism while centering the popular movements that have contested it. Satia's lecture sits near the start of the season, following a September plenary on the future of capitalism, and it supplies a crucial piece of the series' historical groundwork: a reminder that the political vocabulary of the eighteenth century was richer, and more widely shared across the globe, than the triumphant national story usually admits.
The event is free and open to the public, and it will be recorded with closed captions available, as is standard for the series. It runs from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m. in the Cape Cod Lounge, Rooms 405-415 of the Student Union at 41 Campus Center Way. For anyone spending the 250th anniversary year thinking about what the Declaration did and did not settle, the lecture offers something rarer than a commemoration: a genuinely unsettled question.