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An account of Spain's and Portugal's empires in the age of revolutions, this book argues that modern notions of sovereignty in the Atlantic world have been unstable, contested, and equivocal from the start.

Adelman explores the relationship between the crises of empires and the making of nations during the so-called age of revolutions in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Looking especially at the Iberan Atlantic, with comparisons to the British and French imperial spheres, he argues that colonies did not repudiate empire in the name of a new model of sovereignty, thereby simply hastening the demise of old imperial regimes.

The financial crash of 2008 pulled the veil off the myth of the freestanding market. A movement of ideas and interests championing privatization and decontrol, especially over the movement of money, had redefined public authority over economic life from the 1960s. Seizing position after position across location after location, this movement came to challenge the coalitions that managed the post-World War II models of development and welfare. The appeal to market fundamentalism yielded new interests and new coalitions, creating the vertebrae of a neoconservative brand of politics to power and swayed even social democratic forces to the middle-or the margins. Entire political systems molded to the model across a vast range of societies. Perhaps the ultimate success of the appeal to market rhetoric and individual choices was in blunting counter-arguments in favor of regulation, providing public goods, and equity. There is no alternative to the free market, the story went. It was, as one of its apostles-the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, who lionized the virtues of the informal sector and the powers of shanty-town capitalism-noted, \"the only game in town.\"1 There was no choice but to strip down public policy until all it did was grease the mobile wheels of supply and demand with the least friction possible. This collection of essays opens up a history of moral arguments about economic life, a history that has been forgotten or obscured in the long, circular triumph of market fundamentalism. The moral economy has existed as a concept long before it was revitalized by the recent choleric turn in political discourse, as has the idea of the dignity of the human being. In fact, it was central to framing the convergence of interests and the styles of argument that gathered the development and welfare coalitions that guided policymaking from 1945 onwards. It informed New Dealers in America, Indian planners in Delhi, and Colombian populists in Bogota. It was, as Samuel Moyn has recently shown, key to a turn in human rights thinking in 1930s Christian debates.4 That is, even before the Holocaust and internationalist discussions of human rights that were later enshrined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights there was a sense that states had obligations to their citizens, and that these might include the commitment to defend a dignified life. These rights did not rely only on secular notions of the individual. The idea of collective goods and arguments about ethical dimensions of production and exchange, survival and wealth, circulated widely in part because, in the midst of economic Depression, the appeals to nineteenth-century dogmas about the market, were as discredited as socialism would become in the 1980s.

This article places empires as interlocking parts of a broader global regime, a term invoked as an alternative to a world system. By focusing on connective processes and political contingencies, it presents a strategy that avoids rendering empires as radial hubs of a European-centred arrangement. Two features lie at the core of the approach: the way in which empires competed with each other, and the way in which they imitated, borrowed, and learned from each other. Instead of looking at the cyclical rise or fall of great powers, the accent here is on the tensions and intervisibilities between the parts that make up a whole. The regime was, therefore, inherently unstable and integrative at the same time. The article looks in particular at European empires embedded in the broader, unstable, yet increasingly integrated global context that shaped them. The period at stake covers the fifteenth century to the nineteenth and concludes by pointing at some longer-term legacies. It suggests an alternative political economy to the familiar models of ‘European world system’.

This essay examines the ways in which the age of revolutions expanded the repertoire of political ideas and identities available to new and old political subjects. It questions the traditional narrative that replaces a model of old regimes and empires with a new one of imagined unitary nation-states. Instead, it argues that the nature of the political crisis of the Iberian empires gave rise to a reinvention of familiar categories, like monarchy and empire, and sired a wider range of new ones that did not fit the national mold.

Hannah Arendt and Albert O. Hirschman, political theorist and economist, fled Berlin in 1933 from France, and from France to the United States in 1940. Their parallel lives of flight and exile contributed to their ideas and to the books that would pave the way to their entry into American academe. Along the way, their experiences and insights as pariah scholars would lead them to explore the possibility of a post-nationalist social science.