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

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.

• Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
• Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830
• The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760-1840
• Atlantic History: Concept and Contours
• The Americas: A Hemispheric History (Modern Library Chronicles)
• Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History
• Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution
• Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution: With a New Preface, 20th Anniversary Edition (Studies on the History of Society and Culture, No. 1)
• City of My Dreams (Stockholm Series, Vol. 1)
• The Revolutionary Atlantic: Republican Visions, 1760-1830: A Documentary History