Christopher Hodson

Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History

Wim Klooster’s Revolutions in the Atlantic World is a book whose time has come. For in spite of the overwhelming popularity of Atlantic history in all of its guises, no historian had, until the publication of Klooster’s tightly constructed volume, attempted to assess the American, French, Haitian, and Latin American revolutions at once. The book thus offers important conceptual revisions and geographical extensions to classics like R.R. Palmer’s The Age of the Democratic Revolution (1959 64), Lester Langley’s The Americas in the Age of Revolution (1996), and Peggy Liss’s Atlantic Empires (1983), none of which captured the full, multi-hemispheric sweep of these interconnected uprisings. Written, it seems, with non-specialists and students in mind, Klooster’s book will doubtless find its way onto many bookshelves and syllabi which, however, is not to suggest that it will remain the last word on Atlantic revolutions. Klooster begins not with Atlantic revolutionaries or the old regimes that opposed them, but with a harrowing portrait of the destruction of Lisbon, Portugal, by a massive earthquake on 1 November 1755. A good starting point, for it hints not only at the great moment of imperial reconstruction and reform that helped trigger an unanticipated flurry of revolutions, but at the author’s intent to devastate some persistent myths about its origins and outcomes. His main target is Palmer, whose ‘‘triumphal march of democracy . . . is no appropriate prism’’ (2) through which to examine events of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Insisting that commitment to democratic rule was ‘‘hardly more than a temporary by-product of some insurrections’’ (2), Klooster lays out a better set of linkages among the book’s diverse revolutions. The Americas, the Caribbean, and France, he argues, were embedded in a single, complex system of international relationships. Although that system did not foreordain revolution, it created the cascade of economic, political, and social tensions that ruptured ties between metropolis and colony while fostering multiple civil wars between ‘‘previously voiceless popular classes’’ and profit-minded elites (2). Where Palmer’s cold war-era revolutions pointed to an equitable, decidedly not-communist future, Klooster’s thrash about in a knotty imperial past. The book then hustles the reader through each of the revolutions, moving in chronological order. The chapter on the American Revolution hits all of the major events of the rupture with the British, spending little time on persistent historiographical debates (classical republicanism versus Lockean liberalism, and the like) in favor of solid sections on the revolutionaries’ often brutal confrontations with Native Americans in the west, free and enslaved Africans, and loyalists. Klooster situates the French Revolution within the same history of imperial wars and debts as its American counterpart, but Atlantic Studies Vol. 8, No. 1, March 2011, 125 127