Read more
"The age of Atlantic revolutions-a six-decade period that packed in the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, the independence of Spanish-speaking Latin America, and a host of lesser-known upheavals-transformed Europe and the Americas, and eventually the globe. Before 1765, most of Europe and the Americas were under the rule of monarchies and empires, and the institution of slavery existed in every jurisdiction. In the ensuing decades, empires were shattered, hierarchies were toppled, new independent states arose, republican forms of government spread widely, and new abolitionist movements arose and, sometimes, triumphed. The modern world owes its basic political complexion to the Atlantic revolutions. But ever since, historians have debated just how radical these changes truly were and how they truly came about"--
About the author
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is a professor of history at the University of Southern California. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the Nation, and the Los Angeles Times. The award-winning author of Citizen Sailors, he lives in Los Angeles, California.
Summary
A panoramic, "persuasive and inspiring" (New Yorker) new history of the revolutionary decades between 1760 and 1825, from North America and Europe to Haiti and Spanish America, showing how progress and reaction went hand in hand
The revolutions that raged across Europe and the Americas over seven decades, from 1760 to 1825, created the modern world. Revolutionaries shattered empires, toppled social hierarchies, and birthed a world of republics. But old injustices lingered on and the powerful engines of revolutionary change created new and insidious forms of inequality.
In The Age of Revolutions, historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal offers the first narrative history of this entire era. Through a kaleidoscope of lives both familiar and unknown—from John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Napoleon to an ambitious French naturalist and a seditious Peruvian nun—he retells the revolutionary epic as a generational story. The first revolutionary generation, fired by radical ideas, struggled to slip the hierarchical bonds of the old order. Their failures molded a second generation, more adept at mass organizing but with an illiberal tint. The sweeping political transformations they accomplished after 1800 etched social and racial inequalities into the foundations of modern democracy.
A breathtaking history spanning three continents, The Age of Revolutions uncovers how the period’s grand political transformations emerged across oceans and, slowly and unevenly, over generations.
