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This chapter looks at how the old world ended through a sequence of republican revolutions. The Anglo-Dutch revolution of 1649–1702 was part of a broader process of Anglo-Dutch-American state-making spanning two centuries. Across the Atlantic, between the Dutch Revolt and the American War of Independence, a series of states emerged which were new not only in fact, but in nature. These were products of an Atlantic Age of Revolution which is sometimes located only in the eighteenth century, but which had clear origins in the sixteenth. Although the new states in question were three in number, the ‘Age of Revolution’ involved four political and military upheavals of global importance.

This chapter examines the status of and challenges to slavery in both the Atlantic World and in the young American Republic during the Age of Revolution. It considers the role that slaves played in the wars of revolution and argues that the arming of slaves was a very different proposition during the War of 1812 than it was in the American Revolution. Much of the chapter is devoted to an analysis of Edward Nicolls's radical anti-slavery thought. Nicolls, the Royal Marine who was integral to the maroon community's founding, constructed an unusual anti-slavery ideology that emphasised black humanity and the potential for total equality. Nicolls also believed that slavery was an evil institution that could justifiably be attacked through violence. This anti-slavery ideology would be a key part of the maroon community's identity.

From the nation’s founding inclusion in and exclusion from the U.S. body politic has been racialized. Citizenship and whiteness have been defined in opposition to slavery and blackness, the free white man celebrated as the prototype of the liberty-loving American citizen. “The very structure of American citizenship is white,” political philosophers and historians repeatedly tell us. Yet U.S. democracy took form during one of the most radical periods of human history, the Age of Revolution when the political world appeared remade and the promise of freedom unlimited. Between the 1780s and the War of 1812, increasingly radical political movements crisscrossed the Atlantic challenging absolute monarchies, establishing post-colonial republics and questioning the legitimacy of human slavery. Born of such momentous times, how were U.S. citizenship and democracy constituted as powerful instruments of racial exclusion? How were the majority of US citizens and their political leaders able to reconcile their commitment to the equality of all men with the centuries-old practice of chattel slavery? This essay ponders that conundrum through an exploration of a rapidly growing literary genre, the Barbary captivity narratives, cheaply printed popular accounts of the seizure and enslavement of American sailors by Barbary “pirates.” Focusing on the period between the 1780s and the War of 1812, that epic time when revolutionary fervor — and most especially the Haitian Revolution — made the contradictory interplay of Atlantic slavery and universal rights impossible to ignore, this article will explore the role popular representations of white and black enslavement played in the construction of the new U.S. republic and U.S. citizenship.

During the 1790s, Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. was a ship captain engaged in sugar and coffee trade in the West Indies. In 1793, his ship was seized by a French privateer and sold at an Admiralty Court auction at Charleston. With France and Britain at war and privateers capturing commercial vessels owned by citizens of an enemy nation, Kingsley decided to change his British nationality to that of a neutral nation. He pledged loyalty to the United States, and continued his maritime trade in the West Indies with an added degree of protection while sailing under a neutral flag. Between 1793 and 1797, while a massive slave rebellion against the French colonial government was underway in Saint-Domingue, the French colony on the Island of Hispaniola, Kingsley traded for coffee in the southern province then under military control of Britain. The United States then became involved in an undeclared naval war against France, however, endangering Kingsley’s neutral trading status. In 1798, he moved to the Danish Island of St. Thomas and pledged loyalty to neutral Denmark.

This chapter provides the socioeconomic framework of New Orleans in the Age of Revolution, and locates the city's free people of color within this framework. The city was characterized by the rising new industries, busy markets, crowded streets, and newly built suburbs. Unlike comparable cities such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia—where the developing industrial and commercial economies were based on free labor—New Orleans was rapidly emerging as a slave society. As such, the city became tied to the Caribbean slave societies through the Gulf of Mexico. Within this socioeconomic framework, the free people of color made a living primarily in the manufacturing, commercial, and service sectors.

This chapter provides the socioeconomic framework of New Orleans in the Age of Revolution, and locates the city's free people of color within this framework. The city was characterized by the rising new industries, busy markets, crowded streets, and newly built suburbs. Unlike comparable cities such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia—where the developing industrial and commercial economies were based on free labor—New Orleans was rapidly emerging as a slave society. As such, the city became tied to the Caribbean slave societies through the Gulf of Mexico. Within this socioeconomic framework, the free people of color made a living primarily in the manufacturing, commercial, and service sectors.

This section identifies the book’s domain and key concerns, responding to the remarkable complexity of the Edward Rushton’s personal, political and aesthetic stance, with a view to a thoroughgoing critical re-evaluation. Rushton’s eventful biography is reconstructed on the basis of available sources, which help delineate the terms of the writer’s political commitment in the Age of Revolution, no less than his intellectual and artistic understanding. The current debate on labouring class poetry offers an appropriate framework to introduce the book’s rationale, i.e. the investigation of the writer’s extreme consistency in the conjunction of the aesthetic and ideological. The writer’s rebellious poetics entailed the consistent advocacy of those in the margins – whose voices are seldom, if ever, heard – and was deployed through experimenting with various poetic forms, whether it be the Gothic ballad that gives voice to a forsaken woman’s ghost, or the ‘anti-pastoral’ set in the Caribbean, or the celebration of the Haitian Revolution in its leader’s own voice. A discussion of the book structure, with its partition into two main sections, dedicated to investigating Rushton’s ‘Local’ and ‘Global Radicalism’, announces the book’s attempt to embrace the full range of Rushton’s personal, political, and aesthetic insight.

The Introduction situates this study historiographically and synthesizes an array of literature relating to the Age of Revolution and to subjecthood and citizenship more generally. It first identifies the historical inaccuracies that result from the recurrent opposition of subject and citizen and from the tendency to view subjects as inferior precursors to citizens. It then explains how identifying as British subjects lay at the heart of individuals’ relationships to one another, to their sovereign, and to the empire. The introduction clarifies the book’s focus on the three decades after the Seven Years’ War and offers an overview of each chapter’s goals and arguments.

The Age of Revolutions altered the map of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. More of these oceans were ‘filled in’ in the European mind, as voyages of discovery and scientific studies of oceans, coastlines, and environments proceeded. But the map of these oceans changed in more important ways too. For people of all kinds, the islands of these oceans served as spaces for rethinking politics, forms of association, and social organization. Islands were key locales for the discourses and debates of the Age of Revolutions and their globalization. They became imaginative spaces for considering the past and the future of human society and for deliberating what constituted enlightenment, progress, and varieties of reform. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, islands in these oceans became sites of counter-revolutionary imperialism. Ultimately, therefore, this chapter illustrates the changing place of islands on the globe and within Britain’s maritime empire.