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The introduction explains the changing geography of slavery and freedom in North America in the Age of Revolutions, specifically the development of various “spaces of freedom” throughout the continent, and how this affected patterns of slave flight. It further provides a brief overview of the purpose and contents of the book and positions this volume within the academic literature on runaway slaves. It also looks at issues related to what Dale Tomich calls “the second slavery,” manumission, and the abolition of slavery.

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 explores the boundary between the old and new histories that give essential priority to law and to language. It argues that these histories share far more than many of their practitioners will admit, and that Habermas's notion of public sphere can conceptualize a common middle ground. The chapter also examines the wider transformations of consent, persuasion, and legitimacy in the age of revolution in the early republic.

This book brings together the voices and writings of English-speaking women that circulated around the North Atlantic during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From Abigail Adams and Nanye’hi (Nancy Ward) to Mercy Otis Warren and Mary Robinson, it looks at women and their revolutionary dreams and words, thus uncovering the many origins of feminist thought and revising the history of feminism. It describes a new approach to literary study known as transatlanticism, which focuses on the transnational and intercultural networks of literary and cultural movement around the Atlantic world, including Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Drawing mostly on women’s writing that appeared in print, the book examines how women’s lives, ideas, imaginations, hopes, and fears were affected by transatlantic movements. It looks at the factors that shaped modern feminist literature and thought, particularly the ideals and the rhetoric of the American, French, and Haitian revolutions. Finally, it discusses women’s lives and feminist struggles during the so-called Age of Revolutions—a tumultuous and treacherous period for women around the Atlantic world.

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.

The introduction of the book engages in a discussion on the growing historiography of the global age of revolutions and recent debates about the transformation of the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It argues that the global context helps us to understand the transformation of the Ottoman Empire in a more comparative and connected fashion and at the same time the Ottoman experience helps us to see the global context in a more synchronic and less linear way.

Disaffected Parties offers a prehistory for modern political disaffection that underscores literature’s importance as a means of thinking about a diverse array of relationships with politics, in this period and beyond. The Introduction lays out some of the historical frameworks and changing conceptions of politics—including the understandings of disaffection and the expanded conception of political parties—employed in the book, while also looking to the wider questions posed by the disaffected stance and its bearing on the status of the literary. The opening section explores the political valences of disaffection from the mid-seventeenth century down to the present, employing the term’s historical and conceptual proximity to terms including disinterest, dissent, and indifference to reflect on the prospect of a literature of disaffection (defined by its aspiration to absolute withdrawal and disinterest, but also animated by disavowed investments). The Introduction goes on to explain the historical rationale for the book and to outline the book’s approach to literary form.

This book presents itself as a history of how natural rights became human rights, from the Wars of Religion to the Age of Revolutions, and ultimately up to 1948. But it is also and more precisely a genealogy of the rights regimes enshrined during the American and French Revolutions. Reconstructing this genealogy requires reaching back to the sixteenth century, and casting glances farther back still. The purpose of these historical soundings is not to hit rock bottom and locate ground zero of revolutionary rights. It is rather to gain sufficient perspective on the sprawling series of debates between jurists, theologians, philosophers, political reformers, writers, and others pushing rival rights regimes to defend conflicting ideologies. These disputes were not merely academic quarrels, but flared up most during moments of political turmoil, when the very structure of governments was called into question.

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.

Chapter 6 links the Aponte slave rebellion in Cuba, which took place fifty years after the siege of Havana, with the wide-ranging impacts of the British invasion and occupation. After Spain regained Havana, Spain took unprecedented measures to promote transatlantic human trafficking, including the annexation in 1778 of what would become its only sub-Saharan African colony, Equatorial Guinea, as well as the tightening of ties to the Spanish Philippines, which was seen as an essential source of goods for exchange in the slave trade. Its Enlightenment-inspired reforms also included new efforts to promote the military service of Spain’s black subjects in both Cuba and greater Spanish America. In the decades that followed the Seven Years’ War, the men of African descent who had defended Cuba from British attack in 1762 sought the continuation and expansion of their many roles buttressing Spanish colonialism; however, white elites in Havana wanted new departures in Spanish imperial political economy and persuaded policymakers in Madrid to grant them. Their efforts remade the political economy of the island, more severely restricted the traditional privileges of free black soldiers and all people of African descent, and ultimately contributed to the outbreak of the Aponte Rebellion.

This chapter offers a brief sketch of the Ottoman world in the eighteenth century and examines the New Order, a set of reform agendas proposed by the Ottoman imperial elite to bring military and fiscal crisis to an end. Some of these reform agendas threatened segments of society, particularly those who endorsed the political claims of the Janissaries. It argues that neither the New Order nor the opposition were monolithic groups, but large coalitions with branches in the provinces, diverse positions, and various interests.

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.

This chapter explores the shock waves caused by the Haitian Revolution and the massive slave insurrection that took both the Americas and Europe by surprise. Despite the rarity of large-scale revolts after 1794, the Saint Domingue insurrection did have a lasting impact on the slaves. The greatest lesson they retained from Haiti was that the institution of slavery was neither unchangeable nor invincible. Amid the troubled backdrop of the age of revolutions, many attentively followed the legal changes upsetting their owners, like the Spanish Códigno Negro, the French abolition of slavery, gradual emancipation laws in the northern United States, and the ban of the slave trade by Great Britain and the United States. Furthermore, after 1794, protests during which slaves claimed freedom they believed to have been decreed by the king or the government, but hidden by their masters, multiplied.

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.