I read this and didn't find it totally convincing that the American Revolution was to blame. He could just as easily said the Seven Years War was to blame.

TO BEGIN THE WORLD OVER AGAIN: How the American Revolution Devastated the Globe
Matthew Lockwood
Hardcover: 512 pages
Publisher: Yale University Press (October 22, 2019)
ISBN-13: 9780300232257
Reviewed by Alex von Tunzelmann

"[The author] is interested in how the ripples caused by the American Revolution affected everywhere outside the modern United States. The narrative hops from Britain and Ireland to the Spanish Empire, Russia, India, Australia, Africa and China, with a glittering cast of historical characters, including Catherine the Great, Tupac Amaru II, Horatio Nelson, Tipu Sultan and the Qianlong Emperor....his introduction set out eyebrow-raising claims, including that this is 'the story of how Britain won the American Revolution.' Partly as a result, he writes, “'or the vast majority of Earth’s inhabitants, who did not give a damn about a civil war in British North America or the ideas and ideals that inspired it, the American Revolution was a disaster.' He finds it at the root of a long list of ills, including increasing authoritarianism within Britain itself and the wider British Empire, the failure of Irish, Indian and Peruvian movements against imperialism, the Russian conquest of Crimea, the establishment of penal colonies in Australia and the growth of the global opium trade....Lockwood’s grander claim that the Revolution “devastated the globe” relies on the reader’s sense of a “butterfly effect”: that the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas. What soon becomes clear even from the evidence Lockwood presents is that all of these events had much deeper pre-existing causes and in many cases more immediate triggers than Betsy Ross flapping a flag...."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/01/books/review/to-begin-the-world-over-again-matthew-lockwood.html