Explore the vast range of titles available.

Addresses enduring historiographical problems concerning the appearance of the first national movements in Europe and their role in the crises associated with the Age of Revolution.

This essay offers a genealogy and diagnosis of new “situational” narratives about the age of revolutions. It grew out of a WMQ-EMSI workshop, “The Age of Revolutions,” convened at the Huntington Library in 2014. Workshop participants presented papers concerning the massive transnational transformations of the late eighteenth century that rent old regimes from the Americas to West Africa and Western Europe. The essay sets today's historical narratives in relation to those of the revolutionary period and the mid-twentieth century and explores their “situational” form in our present. Situational narratives are marked by a heightened emphasis on place and mobility and a concern for people acting politically and locatedly (that is, from the vista of their own location). They make for new kinds of narrative interpretation and new understandings of revolution. To compose a field, the author argues, situational narratives must retheorize the condition of eventfulness, renovate understandings of politics and of freedom as a set of practices, and overcome narrative's habit of soliloquy by developing new techniques of scholarly communality.

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.

Slave revolts in the Americas during the age of revolutions are commonly viewed as the product of the politicization of the enslaved. Evidence from uprisings in very different settings—cities, mines, and plantations; Portuguese, Spanish, British, French, and Dutch colonies—suggests, however, that slaves were frequently motivated by a rumor that was remarkably stable across time and space. What sparked their rebellions was not a generic desire to be free but rather two specific and connected notions: the king—usually a European, but sometimes an African monarch—had decreed the slaves' freedom, and local officials and slaveholders were preventing the new law from being introduced. The idea of a thwarted royal emancipation decree was not confined to the age of revolutions. It can be detected in slave communities as far back as the 1660s. Yet in the period after 1789, the combination of antislavery, abolitionist activity, reformist measures, and revolutionary turmoil created fertile ground for the rumor to be born and reborn. Inspired by events that often occurred an ocean away, the rumor was usually forged or reawakened locally. Pursuing liberty without flight, rebelling slaves felt they were free and did all they could to obtain what was legitimately theirs.

Cultural history has become a favored method for studying the revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but its application to the wider age of revolution remains spotty. It has been notably absent from contextual histories of the period, those that—in the tradition of R. R. Palmer—compare rather than connect the era’s revolutions. This methodological gap, which isolates the American Revolution from its contexts, risks distorting the revolution's interpretation and meaning. A contextual cultural history of the revolutionary era is nonetheless imaginable; this article traces its methodological contours. Cultural practices that were widely shared around the prerevolutionary Atlantic world provided a shared matrix for patriot politics. Work by theorists of culture-as-practice suggests that these cultures would have persisted intact into the revolutionary period and shaped politics in similar ways across the revolutionary Atlantic. A pair of case studies, focused on letter-writing practices and patriot politics in 1770s North America and 1790s Saint Domingue, illustrate how this approach makes it possible to reread individual revolutionary episodes and figures while bringing together disparate revolutionary movements within a shared Atlantic frame.

In 1786 Francisco de Miranda, the revolutionary ‘Precursor’ of Latin American independence, toured the Ottoman empire. Focused on the Atlantic dimensions of Miranda’s activism, historians have marginalized his experiences in the Balkans. This article argues that Miranda’s Balkan explorations represented a major inflection point in his revolutionary career. By expanding his experience with consular networks, the Balkans allowed him to develop new revolutionary strategies for channelling his discontent with imperial rule. Rather than resorting to print, consulates enabled Miranda to build secret coalitions in his increasingly public confrontation with what he called imperial ‘despotism’, a type of imperial rule featuring burdensome impositions, limitations on freedom of movement, and ethnic or religious discrimination. By excavating the first Latin American revolutionary encounter with the Balkans and stressing the common forms of anti-imperial mobilization, the article charts a more expansive and inclusive ‘south-eastern’ framework for rethinking the global Age of Revolution.

Petitions, loyal addresses, plebiscites, and other displays of popular consent accompanied most episodes of the revolutionary and Napoleonic expansion of France between 1789 and 1814. Petitioning had been adapted and transformed in France during the revolution, through which it became associated to popular sovereignty. Historians have often studied popular mobilisation through the prism of the conquest of rights, thereby pitting subordinate groups against entrenched ruling classes. This article surveys a different development, as French revolutionary administrators and generals, and Napoleon himself, adapted and reconfigured petitioning as a top-down tool for territorial expansion and empire-building, using it to invoke the supposed popular acquiescence to their reconfiguration of the political map of Europe. French propaganda portrayed these initiatives within the same interpretative framework that discussed the value of other, more autonomous, petitions. This work will thus analyse the paradox of top-down-controlled mobilisations that, at the same time, reinforced the symbolic pre-eminence of popular consent and participation.

Interpretive patterns in the scholarship on the American Revolution have been less linear and dual than tripartite and cyclical, spiraling through whig, progressive, imperial, neo-whig, neo-progressive, and, most recently, neo-imperial alternatives. As the Quarterly relaunched in 1944, a transition in the cycle was already under way, from an imperial- and progressive-school détente to a neo-whig ascendancy, even as calls for synthesis abounded: each turn in the cycle has featured the appropriation of themes and arguments as well as the rejection of competing analyses and the specific subjects these analyses tended to highlight. 1993 was a moment of transition—alternately celebrated or lamented—as a neo-imperial view of the revolution arose, decentering its republican, liberal, and nationalizing aspects in favor of imperial or transnational continuities. Whether in continental, Atlantic, diasporic, or age of revolution modes, the recent emphases on imperial connections, parallels, and broader optics have begun to reenliven American Revolution scholarship even as they tend to change definitions of what historians mean by “the revolution.” Moreover, recent trends suggest not so much the centrality of the American Revolution to early American, U.S., Atlantic, and global history as, increasingly, the importance of those fields in shaping views of the American Revolution. Supplement available on OI Reader: Google play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=edu.oieahc.OIReader.Android&h1=en iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/oi-reader/id923811722?mt=8

As a polity that existed for over six centuries and that ruled on three continents, the Ottoman Empire is perhaps both the easiest and hardest empire to compare in world history. It is somewhat paradoxical then that the Ottoman Empire has only recently become a focus of students of empires as historical phenomena. This approach to the Ottoman Empire as an empire has succeeded in generating an impressive profusion of scholarship. This article critically assesses this literature within the larger context of what we term the Imperial Turn to explain how comparative perspectives have been used to analyze the empire. In doing so, it sheds new light on some older historiographical questions about the dynamics of imperial rule, periodization, and political transformation, while at the same time opening up new avenues of inquiry and analysis about the role of various actors in the empire, the recent emphasis on the empire's early modern history, and the scholarly literature of comparative empires itself. Throughout, the authors speak both to Ottoman specialists and others interested in comparative imperial histories to offer a holistic picture of recent Ottoman historiography and to suggest many possible directions for future scholarship. Instead of accepting comparison for comparison's sake, the article offers a bold new vocabulary for rigorous comparative work on the Ottoman Empire and beyond.

Interpretive patterns in the scholarship on the American Revolution have been less linear and dual than tripartite and cyclical, spiraling through whig, progressive, imperial, neo-whig, neo-progressive, and, most recently, neo-imperial alternatives. As theQuarterlyrelaunched in 1944, a transition in the cycle was already under way, from an imperial- and progressive-school détente to a neo-whig ascendancy, even as calls for synthesis abounded: each turn in the cycle has featured the appropriation of themes and arguments as well as the rejection of competing analyses and the specific subjects these analyses tended to highlight. 1993 was a moment of transition—alternately celebrated or lamented—as a neo-imperial view of the revolution arose, decentering its republican, liberal, and nationalizing aspects in favor of imperial or transnational continuities. Whether in continental, Atlantic, diasporic, or age of revolution modes, the recent emphases on imperial connections, parallels, and broader optics have begun to reenliven American Revolution scholarship even as they tend to change definitions of what historians mean by “the revolution.” Moreover, recent trends suggest not so much the centrality of the American Revolution to early American, U.S., Atlantic, and global history as, increasingly, the importance of those fields in shaping views of the American Revolution. Supplement available on OI Reader: Google play:https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=edu.oieahc.OIReader.Android&h1=en iTunes:https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/oi-reader/id923811722?mt=8