Revolutions without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World

by Janet Polasky

Overview

A sweeping exploration of revolutionary ideas that traveled the Atlantic in the late eighteenth century

Nation-based histories cannot do justice to the rowdy, radical interchange of ideas around the Atlantic world during the tumultuous years from 1776 to 1804. National borders were powerless to restrict the flow of enticing new visions of human rights and universal freedom. This expansive history explores how the revolutionary ideas that spurred the American and French revolutions reverberated far and wide, connecting European, North American, African, and Caribbean peoples more closely than ever before.
 
Historian Janet Polasky focuses on the eighteenth-century travelers who spread new notions of liberty and equality. It was an age of itinerant revolutionaries, she shows, who ignored borders and found allies with whom to imagine a borderless world. As paths crossed, ideas entangled. The author investigates these ideas and how they were disseminated long before the days of instant communications and social media or even an international postal system. Polasky analyzes the paper records—books, broadsides, journals, newspapers, novels, letters, and more—to follow the far-reaching trails of revolutionary zeal. What emerges clearly from rich historic records is that the dream of liberty among America’s founders was part of a much larger picture. It was a dream embraced throughout the far-flung regions of the Atlantic world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300219845
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	05/24/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	392
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Janet Polasky is Presidential Professor of History, University of New Hampshire.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Dramatis Personae xi

Introduction: Revolution without Borders 1

1 "The cause of all mankind" in Revolutionary Pamphlets 17

2 Journals Relating "A share in two revolutions" 48

3 The Revolutionary Narratives of Black "citizens of the world" 75

4 The Press and Clubs: "Politico-mania" 111

5 Rumors of Freedom in the Caribbean: "We know not where it will end" 138

6 The Revolutionary Household in Fiction: "To govern a family with judgment" 172

7 Correspondence between a "Virtuous spouse. Charming friend!" 194

8 Decrees "in the Name of the French Republic": Armed Cosmopolitans 232

9 Revolutionaries between Nations: "Abroad in the world" 264

Chronology 277

Notes on Sources 283

Notes 293

Acknowledgments 353

Index 359

Interviews

What was the inspiration for your book?

As an undergraduate studying in London, I discovered a misfiled letter from Thomas Paine in the Public Records Office. That letter introduced me to unlikely alliances among London mechanics, Parisian lawyers, and abolitionists from Philadelphia—eighteenth-century revolutionaries I had never met before. Ever since that first encounter in the archives, I have been discovering Paine’s itinerant friends, most of whom would have agreed with him that “a share in two revolutions was living to some purpose.”

Who are some of those interesting friends?

Thomas Jefferson’s next-door neighbor was one. A Tuscan merchant who enthusiastically adopted the American revolutionary cause as his own, Filippo Mazzei later served as the Polish king’s emissary in revolutionary Paris. Or Anna Falconbridge, whose journal describes the settlement of black loyalists from America in Sierra Leone—to her mind, “a premature, hare-brained, and ill-digested scheme.” And dozens of others who connected with one another in various ways—sometimes aboard ship, sometimes in salons and cafés, and often through notes scrawled in pamphlets, where encounters on the page transformed readers into revolutionaries.
 
What important insights did you uncover in your research?

The interconnections of today’s global society are inescapable. So why should we imagine that the founding fathers who dreamed of liberty lived in isolation? Revolution loomed as an ever-present possibility over four continents at the end of the eighteenth century, two centuries before the Arab Spring. The rich variety of revolutionary possibility in the past reminds us that revolutions readily traverse national borders, and that they lead in a multitude of different and often unexpected directions.

Editorial Reviews

Selected as a finalist for the 2016 George Washington Prize sponsored by George Washington's Mount Vernon, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and Washington College's C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.

Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History - George Washington Prize

“Janet Polasky’s Revolutions Without Borders does three things, and does them well. It identifies and traces the fortunes of the most zealous promoters of the ‘universal cry of liberty’ in the tumultuous twenty-eight years after 1776. It demonstrates the importance of understanding the failures, the dead ends, the unrealized dreams, as well as the successes of past eras. And it contributes to our knowledge of Atlantic history. . . a deeply researched book . . . a solid and imaginative work of scholarship.”—Bernard Bailyn, New York Review of Books

New York Review of Books - Bernard Bailyn

“Revolutions without Borders is a pathbreaking work. It brings supposedly marginal places and little-known figures, including women, into the center of a transnational narrative, demonstrating the intersection of sentimentality and politics on both sides of the Atlantic.”—Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Harvard University

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

‘...what sets Revolutions without Borders apart as a work of history is that Janet Polasky tears down walls… Instead of telling the usual heroic national story, she ranges wherever her wayfaring revolutionaries take her: to Paris and Washington, but also to Poland, Sierra Leone and the Caribbean. Instead of confining herself to the deeds of valiant men, she also gives the stage to women and slaves. The result is a spectacle that conveys the thrill of the enlightenment as as the delirium of revolution.’—The Economist.

The Economist

‘Janet Polasky charts the movement of the revolutionary ideas between 1776, with the American declaration of independence, and the 1804 Haitian revolution. It was not muskets, she says in this thrilling work of history, but pamphlets that ignited the revolutions that swept through America and Europe at the end of the 18th century.’—Jad Adams, the Independent.

The Independent - Jad Adams

“A tour de force. Hugely informative and a joy to read, this is global history at its best.”—Richard Whatmore, author of Against War and Empire: Geneva, Britain, and France in the Eighteenth Century

Richard Whatmore

“A thrilling, moving, lyrical account of the Atlantic revolutions. Janet Polasky weaves together a remarkably diverse range of sources and narratives to reveal the cosmopolitan spirit of the revolutionary era and its role in the making of the nation-state.”—Malick W. Ghachem, author of The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution

Malick W. Ghachem

“Significantly enhancing how previous scholars perceived the Atlantic world as spawning related but clearly discrete revolutions, this elegantly written book instead evokes a movement whose participants ebb and flow across borders, connected through print and personal ties.”—Jack Censer, George Mason University

Jack Censer

“In this riveting and elegant book, Janet Polasky weaves together stories usually told separately about the many late eighteenth-century revolutions. This is an example to be followed in the new modes of transnational, Atlantic and global history.”—Lynn Hunt, author of Writing History in the Global Era

Lynn Hunt

“[A] bold and captivating book.”—Gavin Jacobson, The Guardian

The Guardian - Gavin Jacobson

★ 03/01/2015
Polasky (history, Univ. of New Hampshire; Reforming Urban Labor) has conducted extensive research into the archives of the American and French revolutionary period to produce a well-executed study of myriad ways in which revolutionary ideas and enthusiasms spread across the Atlantic world in that era, focusing on the years between 1787 and 1804 and ending with the Haitian Revolution. In so doing, the author expands our perspective on the vitality of revolutionary ideology outside its French epicenter, discussing activities in places such as Sierra Leone, Saint-Domingue, and Guadeloupe. She analyzes the radical content of a variety of transmission vessels, including pamphlets, memoirs and narratives, newspapers, clubs, rumors, novels, and family and diplomatic correspondence. In some chapters, Polasky concentrates on the writings of selected individuals who stand in for a larger group, but overall, the breadth of her research is daunting. The picture that emerges is of a world filled with "revolutionary possibilities," in which no one interpretation of freedom rules. A side virtue is that the people featured here aren't the same revolutionaries we always read about in books such as these; some aren't even Europeans. VERDICT A thoughtful treatment that will make scholars think but appeal to the lay history lover as well.—David Keymer, Modesto, CA

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