Janet Polasky. Revolutions without Borders

R. R. Palmer’s two-volume The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 (1959), written almost sixty years ago, captures the late eighteenth century as an era of social unrest and political possibility, driven by the notion of fundamental human equality. In more abbreviated form, Janet Polasky locates the ideals of this era in the American Revolution, in the Enlightenment faith in reason, and in the rapid spread of news made possible by the translation of pamphlets and the movement of travelers. Indebted to scholarship on the black Atlantic, she extends Palmer’s geographical scope to Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean and, more surprisingly, to Sierra Leone in West Africa. Following the work on affective transformations during this era, Polasky shows that the revolutionary upheaval led women—novelists and poets, as well as elite daughters and wives—to push boundaries within the family. Polasky tells an entangled story of hope at a time when the revolutionary Atlantic was in a state of crisis and when adventurers, soldiers, exiles, and refugees as well as armchair philosophers imagined living in a transformed world outside the borders of nation and beyond the exclusionary limits of race and gender. Her ambitious synthesis raises fresh questions about the unity of the Atlantic world and the utility of the Atlantic revolutionary paradigm.

Ancient history · Atlantic World · Elite · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · State (computer science) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies