Revolutions in the Atlantic World, New Edition

A new overview of the contentious period that witnessed revolutions around the Atlantic between 160 and 1830.

Within just a half century, the American, French, Haitian, and Spanish American Revolutions transformed the Atlantic world. This book analyzes these events through a comparative lens, offering insights into the forces behind the many conflicts in the Atlantic world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Delving into the environments in which these revolutions occurred, Wim Klooster debunks the popular myth that the “people” rebelled against a small ruling elite, arguing instead that the revolutions were civil wars in which all classes fought on both sides. Nor was democracy a goal or product of these revolutions, which usually spawned authoritarian polities.

The new edition covers the latest historiographical trends in the study of the Atlantic world. Drawing on fresh research—such as primary documents and extant secondary literature – Klooster ultimately concludes that the Enlightenment was the ideological inspiration for the Age of Revolutions, although not its cause.