Global history is all the rage. So where does that leave that most nationalistic field of historical studies – the examination of national revolutions? To be sure, cross-national approaches to revolutions had a previous vogue in historiography, most notably in the work of R. R. Palmer and Jacques Godechot on the Atlantic revolutions (which rooted eighteenth-century revolutions in a global vogue for democratic ideals), Eric Hobsbawm’s work on the ‘age of revolutions’ (which stressed global transformation by industrialization as well as democratic ideals), and my own work on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century revolutions and rebellions, which drew attention to global trends in population and prices and their impact on early modern states. But these works, all decades old, seemed long surpassed by new and detailed studies of national revolutions that emphasized national political culture, gender issues, and the particularity of events from 1688 in Britain to 1848 in Hungary.

This volume presents an all-star line-up of historians to tackle the question of what a global perspective today can add to our understanding of national revolutions in the eighty years from 1760 to 1840. While this periodization omits the British revolutions of 1640–1689 and the European revolutions of 1848, it makes up for what seem like odd omissions by covering the world in depth. Essays in this volume give attention to political tumults not only in the American (1776) and French (1789) revolutions but also in South America, the Caribbean, west Africa, the Ottoman empire, India, Java, and China.

Two major messages emerge. First, while in the past both national and Atlanticist historians gave short shrift to anti-colonial revolutions, excepting that of the United States, the Latin American and Caribbean revolutions may have been just as important as that in the United States in this period. We forget today, blinded by the rise of the US since the First World War, that in the late 1700s it was Saint Domingue (Haiti), not the US, that was the richest colony in the Atlantic world. Moreover, the Latin American colonies of Spain and Portugal far exceeded the young United States in population and wealth. Mexico alone had 5 million inhabitants in 1800, matching that of the US, and Mexico City was three times the size of Philadelphia.

From the perspective of Europe, while the efforts of Americans to build a republic based on Locke’s ideas of liberty were indeed inspiring, and their defeat of Britain surprising, it was the revolts in Haiti, elsewhere in the Caribbean, and in Latin America that had the more profound economic impacts on Europe’s economy. Similarly, political shifts in the Ottoman empire, in India, and in China, paved the way for changing relationships with Europe, from Ottoman weakness and British conquest in India to the Opium Wars in China. This volume thus reveals how anachronistic it is to focus on America and France as the twin founts of political change in global terms in the eighteenth century. However important were the Declaration of Independence and the Rights of Man, the reality of the global polity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was that Britain was extending its control of India and of Chinese trade, that the Dutch were tightening their direct control of Indonesia, and that the Portuguese were taking direct rule to Brazil, while Portugal and others were intensifying their slaving and trading in Africa.

Second, these essays also bring to the fore the manner in which the struggles over the abolition of slavery intersected with varied slave revolts and slave economies. It becomes clear that ‘freedom’ was a message that not only interested white males of European descent but also became a bargaining chip, incentive, and inspiration for changing black/white relations in a triumphant and tragic manner in Haiti, but in a very partial and frustrated fashion elsewhere in the New World. Freedom also became the object of struggle among Spanish, creoles, mulattoes and negroes throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, at the very time when it was being submerged in Europe’s Asian colonies.

Overall, these essays therefore suggest a very different interpretation of eighteenth-century history than the conventional account rooted in the rise of liberty as embodied in the American and French revolutions. What we see instead, when a truly global perspective is engaged, is the beginning of a struggle between republican and monarchist ideals of government, between preservation of racial slavery and the ideal that all people are born and must remain free, and between ideals of responsible government exercised at home and the imposition of increasingly repressive colonial regimes abroad, but it is a very weak and uncertain beginning indeed. In many global theatres, the ideals of liberty and republican rule brought more violence and disorder than benefit, with monarchy emerging to dominate the nineteenth century everywhere in Europe, as well as in Brazil. The loss of French and British colonies to the ideals of liberty led those colonial powers to avoid the mistake of encouraging those ideals in their Asian colonies. And slavery persisted widely, despite the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery in Britain and in Europe, creating a deep tension between the continued practice of slavery in the New World, together with its trade by Europeans, and the new ideals of liberty and freedom embraced by American and European elites.

The individual essays themselves are quite good, and the introduction by Armitage and Subrahmanyam and the conclusion by Chris Bayly do an excellent job of pulling together diverse strands of argument and showing how the ‘new’ global approach in this volume differs from older ones. Both Maya Jasanoff’s essay on revolutionary exiles from the US and France and Juan Cole’s essay on how Napoleon’s armies played at appearing ‘Muslim’ in sympathy to aid their occupation of Egypt bring to light unexpected relationships. While the book seems written more for scholars than for teaching, it has clear arguments and maps, and thus can be usefully taught even in undergraduate courses to give students a much better introduction to the truly global dimensions of revolutionary events in this period than they might otherwise discover.

This book of course just begins to chart out how a global perspective can inform and alter our perception of national revolutions. But it is an auspicious start for this perspective, and a valuable collection that should be widely read.