For Britons, the Atlantic world has frequently provided an imaginative canvas upon which to project schemes for remaking state, society, and empire. It is no coincidence, Michael Meranze and Saree Makdisi contend in their introduction to Imagining the British Atlantic after the American Revolution, an admirably interdisciplinary collection of essays, that Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge proposed to locate a utopian “pantisocracy” along Pennsylvania's Susquehanna River in the 1790s. Yet, the editors insist, the transatlantic connections that individuals envisioned often contrasted with actual experiences of “dispersion” or “fragmentation” (8), in which overlapping processes of revolution and reaction brought local and particular pressures to the fore.

This volume is one of a number of edited collections to reevaluate Atlantic history after a generation of scholars have answered the call to arms that reinvigorated the field in the 1990s. In their introduction, Meranze and Makdisi summarize key developments in this vein, as well as the ever-growing scholarship on the Age of Revolutions. Its focus on “fragments,” however, challenges each of these overarching concepts. If “[the] Revolutionary British Atlantic became many times and many spaces” (8), does the diffuse oceanic frame still have any analytical value? Meranze and Makdisi argue persuasively that it does, albeit not as a “master figure” (9) driving historical change. Instead, the Atlantic they describe stands in for dialectical forces of order and chaos during a period of profound disruption; the distances, both intellectual and geographic, involved in travel and communication across the Atlantic Ocean produced ambiguities capacious enough to capture the consonances and dissonances between real and imagined, fractured and whole, that have made the revolutionary moment so difficult to explain.

Then again, this emphasis on disintegration may also speak for the failure of the new Atlantic history to live up to its own lofty ambitions. Uniformly excellent, erudite, and engaging, the essays in this collection themselves return to some of the concepts earlier Atlanticists sought to problematize. For instance, several chapters hinge on the creation of nation-states. As such, the book might more accurately have been framed around themes of empire, enlightenment, and cosmopolitanism as these adapted to a world increasingly dominated by revolutionary (and counterrevolutionary) nationalism.

The majority of the essays in the volume describe revolutionary subjectivities. Aris Sarafianos analyzes a set of Jan Van Rymsdyk's anatomical paintings sent from London to the new Pennsylvania Hospital. These tied Philadelphia into transatlantic networks of medical scholarship and pioneered new aesthetic modes, fostering cosmopolitan conversation even as revolutionary politics redefined such exchange. Similarly, Andrew Cayton uses Mary Wollsonecraft's affairs with Gilbert Imlay (an American) and William Godwin to frame a masterful essay on the growing divergence between the language, literature, and gendered experience of people living in Britain and its former North American colonies.

Religion also finds a place in the collection. Sarah Crabtree's contribution elegantly brings the history of anti-Quaker politics into transnational focus. As Crabtree reveals, the particular “tribalism” (63) of this sect attracted criticism from revolutionary nationalists and reactionary reformers alike. Despite earlier anti-Quaker outbursts, new modes of national belonging proved far less tolerant of pacifist dissent than had imperial understandings of authority. In contrast, Catholic reformers, as Catherine O'Donnell shows, hoped to exploit new sympathy for their religious beliefs in the wake of revolutionary persecution. In both Britain and the United States, Catholic leaders restructured church establishments in ways that simultaneously hewed closely to the will of Rome and emphasized the patriotic loyalties of individual churchgoers.

Political caution provides another unifying theme. Iain McCalman reveals that stage designer Jacques de Loutherbourg kept private his more radical political and philosophical investments as he channeled his mystical interests into “a coded and aesthetic revolution” (186) that helped to lay the groundwork for romanticism. Anthony Galluzo reads the confused and complicated form of Hugh Henry Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry (1792–1815) as the product of its author's evolving political consciousness. Over the course of its two parts, an attempt to create a truly republican novel organized around a chorus of narrative voices gives way to a univocal analysis of Pennsylvania law.

These chapters focus nearly exclusively on Britain and the United States. Surely, imagining the British Atlantic after the American Revolution involved renewed focus on Canada, the Caribbean, Ireland, and slave forts in Ghana, among other outposts of British rule. These places are not entirely absent from the essays collected here. Nevertheless, Philadelphia and London loom large, as do wealthy, educated, and white artists and intellectuals. Two essays examine West Indian slavery, in many ways the paradigmatic focus of Atlantic historiography, refracted through centers of British and U.S. power. For Susanna Rowson, Jenna Gibbs argues convincingly, the political context of 1790s Philadelphia, awash with émigrés from Saint-Domingue, encouraged the playwright to envelop a critique of slavery within a dramatic assertion of women's rights in the context of Barbary captivity. Edward G. Gray argues that the mutineers who seized the H. M. S. Bounty imposed a system of bound labor, roughly approximating slavery, on the Polynesian men and women with whom they settled Pitcairn Island. In the end, almost all involved met a violent end. Despite efforts in the British and American press to portray Pitcairn as a utopian community, new imperial ventures in the Pacific could not escape the legacies of violence and dispossession so central to Britain's Atlantic past.

The fragmented and subjective experiences described in this volume suggest that political revolutions accelerated a number of developments that were bringing an early modern British Atlantic world to an end. While revolutionary turmoil, as the introduction argues, did indeed rearticulate and at times extend premodern ideas, it is less clear that this period produced outcomes as varied and inscrutable as the editors suggest. In his contribution, Randall McGowen argues that the penitentiary developed broad political appeal in Britain because it could be seen either to severely punish offenders or to offer a humane alternative to transportation and capital punishment. As the dynamics of power shifted, in ways both imagined and very real, states and empires adapted to new circumstances. Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that the prison stands as one of the most enduring legacies of this period of revolutionary reform.