The Age of Revolutions in

Global Context,
c.1760–1840

Edited by

David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam

The Age of Revolutions in Global Context,
c.1760–1840
Other books by the editors

David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History

(2007)

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries,

1400–1800 (2007) (with Muzaffar Alam)
The Age of Revolutions
in Global Context,
c.1760–1840

Edited by

DAVID ARMITAGE
and
SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM
Selection and editorial matter © David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam,
2010. Individual chapters (in order) © Gary B. Nash; Lynn Hunt;
Maya Jasanoff; Jeremy Adelman; David Geggus; Joseph C. Miller; Juan Cole;
Robert Travers; Peter Carey; Kenneth Pomeranz, 2010.
Afterword © C. A. Bayly, 2010.
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Contents

List of Maps vii

Acknowledgements viii
Notes on the Contributors ix

Introduction:The Age of Revolutions, c.1760–1840 –

Global Causation, Connection, and Comparison xii
David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam

1 Sparks from the Altar of ’76: International Repercussions

and Reconsiderations of the American Revolution 1
Gary B. Nash

2 The French Revolution in Global Context 20

Lynn Hunt

3 Revolutionary Exiles:The American Loyalist and

French Émigré Diasporas 37
Maya Jasanoff

4 Iberian Passages: Continuity and Change in the

South Atlantic 59
Jeremy Adelman

5 The Caribbean in the Age of Revolution 83

David Geggus

6 The Dynamics of History in Africa and the Atlantic

‘Age of Revolutions’ 101
Joseph C. Miller

7 Playing Muslim: Bonaparte’s Army of the Orient

and Euro-Muslim Creolization 125
Juan Cole

8 Imperial Revolutions and Global Repercussions:

South Asia and the World, c.1750–1850 144
Robert Travers
v
vi Contents

9 Revolutionary Europe and the Destruction of Java’s

Old Order, 1808–1830 167
Peter Carey

10 Their Own Path to Crisis? Social Change, State-Building

and the Limits of Qing Expansion, c.1770–1840 189
Kenneth Pomeranz

The Age of Revolutions in Global Context:

An Afterword 209
C. A. Bayly

Notes 218
Further Reading 273
Index 288
List of Maps

1 The world in the Age of Revolutions xx

2 The Americas in the late eighteenth century 67
3 The Caribbean in the Age of Revolutions 90
4 China in the eighteenth century 198

vii
Acknowledgements

This volume emerged in large part from a conference entitled ‘“Age

of Revolutions” or “World Crisis”? Global Causation, Connection,
and Comparison, c.1760–1840’, held at the William Andrews Clark
Memorial Library in Los Angeles on 16 and 17 May 2008. For
making that event possible, we owe special thanks to the Director of
UCLA’s Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies,
Peter Reill, who supported the conception from the start and worked
hard to ensure its realization. The moral and intellectual support of
two of UCLA’s senior historians, Lynn Hunt and Gary Nash, was
crucial as the project took shape.We are also grateful to the Center’s
staff, especially Candis Snoddy and Camie Howard-Rock, for making
the conference as pleasant as it was memorable. And our thanks go to
Björn Wittrock, the Principal of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced
Study in Uppsala, for co-sponsoring the conference. We were fortu-
nate that Max Edling and Marie-Christine Skuncke could represent
SCAS in Los Angeles, not least because Max first planted the seed for
this project with a different collaboration in mind.
At Palgrave Macmillan, Kate Haines has been a notably supportive
editor and Jenni Burnell, Felicity Noble and Cecily Wilson have
propelled every stage of the publishing process. Palgrave’s referees
offered acute comments on the manuscript and Joyce Chaplin kindly
read the Introduction. Lex Berman, Joshua Hill, and Gabriel Paquette
offered much help with the maps. The contributors produced ambi-
tious and original chapters with great enthusiasm and then revised
them to rather strict editorial deadlines. Without their remarkable
commitment and professionalism, this volume would not have been
possible. Finally, we must thank Chris Bayly, who was unable to attend
the conference in Los Angeles, but whose inspiration has been vital to
the project throughout.

viii
Notes on the Contributors

Jeremy Adelman is the Walter Samuel Carpenter III Professor of

History and Director of the Council for International Teaching and
Research at Princeton University. Among his many publications, the
most recent are Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (2006)
and (as co-author) Worlds Together,Worlds Apart: A History of the World
from the Origins of Humankind to the Present, 2nd edn (2008). He is
currently working on a biography of Albert O. Hirschman.

David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at

Harvard University. Among his publications are The Ideological Origins
of the British Empire (2000), The Declaration of Independence: A Global
History (2007) and The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, 2nd edn
(2009), co-edited with Michael J. Braddick. He is currently working
on a history of ideas of civil war from Rome to Iraq.

C. A. Bayly is the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval

History at the University of Cambridge. Among his publications are
Imperial Meridian:The British Empire and the World 1780–1830 (1989),
Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication
in India, 1780–1870 (1996) and The Birth of the Modern World,
1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (2004). He is
currently working on the history of Indian liberalism in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries.

Peter Carey is Fellow Emeritus of Trinity College, Oxford. Among

his publications are (as editor) The British in Java, 1811–1816: A
Javanese Account (1992) and The Power of Prophecy: Prince Dipanagara and
the End of an Old Order in Java, 1785–1855 (2007). He is currently
based in Jakarta as Country Director for the Cambodia Trust, a British
disability charity that has established Indonesia’s first internationally
accredited School of Prosthetics and Orthotics.

Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History

at the University of Michigan. He is author most recently of Sacred
Space and Holy War: The Politics, Culture and History of Shi‘ite Islam
(2002), Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East (2007) and Engaging
the Muslim World (2009). His weblog is ‘Informed Comment’
(www.juancole.com).
ix
x Notes on the Contributors

David Geggus is Professor of History at the University of Florida,

Gainesville. His publications include Slavery, War and Revolution: The
British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793–1798 (1982), Haitian
Revolutionary Studies (2002) and The World of the Haitian Revolution
(2009), co-edited with Norman Fiering.

Lynn Hunt is the Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European

History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author
of Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (1984), The Family
Romance of the French Revolution (1992), Inventing Human Rights (2007)
and various works on the methods of cultural history and historical
epistemology.

Maya Jasanoff is Associate Professor of History at Harvard

University. Among her publications are Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture,
and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850 (2005) and articles in Past and
Present and the William and Mary Quarterly. She is currently complet-
ing a global history of the American loyalist diaspora.

Joseph C. Miller is the T. Cary Johnson, Jr. Professor of History at

the University of Virginia. Among his publications is Way of Death:
Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (1988). He
is currently working on a world history of slaving.

Gary B. Nash is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of

California, Los Angeles, and Director of the National Center for
History in the Schools. Among his recent publications are The
Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the
Struggle to Create America (2005), The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans
in the Age of Revolution (2006) and (with Graham Hodges) Friends of
Liberty: Thomas Jefferson, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, and Agrippa Hull: Three
Patriots,Two Revolutions and a Tragic Betrayal in the New Nation (2008).
The Liberty Bell: An American Icon will be published in 2010.

Kenneth Pomeranz is Chancellor’s Professor of History and

Professor of East Asian Languages at the University of California,
Irvine. His two best known books are The Making of a Hinterland:
State, Society, and Economy in Inland North China, 1853–1937 (1993)
and The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern
World Economy (2000). His current projects include work on environ-
mental history, comparative political economy and the history of
popular religion.
Notes on the Contributors xi

Sanjay Subrahmanyam is Professor and Doshi Chair of Indian

History at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he also
directs the Center for India and South Asia. Among his publications
are The Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India, 1500–1650
(1990), Penumbral Visions: Making Polities in Early Modern South Asia
(2001), Explorations in Connected History, 2 vols (2005) and, most
recently, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400–1800 (2007),
written jointly with Muzaffar Alam.

Robert Travers is Associate Professor of History at Cornell

University. He is the author of Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-
Century India:The British in Bengal (2007).
Introduction:The Age of
Revolutions, c.1760–1840 –
Global Causation, Connection, and
Comparison

David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam

The decades on either side of the turn of the nineteenth century have
long been known as the ‘Age of Revolutions’.The term is one of the
most enduring period markers known to modern historians and has
often been used by other scholars invested in identifying pivotal
moments in the emergence of a putatively modern world.The revo-
lutionary elements traditionally identified as most characteristic of the
period and ripest with promise for the future included the popular
sovereignty, natural rights language, and secessionist independence of
the American Revolution, the anti-monarchical and anti-aristocratic
decapitation of the Old Regime effected in the French Revolution,
and the apparent explosion of productivity and prosperity associated
with the Industrial Revolution.To these key features might be added
the first formal efforts to abolish the slave trade (and, later, slavery
itself), the proliferation of written constitutions as novel instruments
for the distribution of political power, and an upsurge of nationalisms
both within Europe and amid the first stirrings of decolonization in
the Americas. The very heterogeneity of these developments defied
easy causal integration but that did not prevent later historians from
connecting many of them into a single epochal nexus.The combina-
tions differed but the designation varied little, whether as a singular
Age of Revolution or as a plural Age of Revolutions that were
complex in their forms but cumulatively reinforcing in their long-
term, world-historical effects.
The term ‘Age of Revolutions’ originated during the period it
describes; however, its contemporary usages do not map exactly onto
the geography, the chronology, or the morphology of change later
associated with it.‘The “age of revolutions” arrived early in India’, one
historian has recently noted of the 1750s and 1760s: ‘nowhere more
so than in Bengal. Contemporary Britons frequently used the term
xii
Introduction xiii

“revolutions” in describing the East India Company’s rise to military

and political pre-eminence in Eastern India, and Indo-Persian sources
used a similar term, inqilab.’1 Writing in this vein in August 1757, the
East India Company commander Robert Clive told his father that ‘a
revolution has been effected . . . scarcely to be paralleled in history’
after the defeat of the young nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-daula, at the
battle of Plassey.2 Fifteen years later in Patna, the Persian chronicler
Ghulam Husain Khan Tabataba’i Husaini documented ‘the revolu-
tions of Bengal and Azimabad, as far down as the year 1194 of the
Hedjra [1774 CE]’ in his Sair al-Muta’akhkhirin (‘An Overview of
Modern Times’) (c.1783).3 Back in Europe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
had proclaimed in his Émile (1762) that ‘we are approaching the state
of crisis and the century of revolutions’.4 By 1791, after both the
American and French Revolutions, Thomas Paine thought it had
finally arrived:‘It is an age of Revolutions, in which every thing may
be looked for.’5 And in 1815, John Adams assimilated the American
Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Spanish-American revo-
lutions into a single transformative moment: ‘The last twenty-five
years of the last century, and the first fifteen years of this, may be called
the age of revolutions and constitutions.’6
In this book, our chronological definition of the Age of
Revolutions is more expansive still, and covers the roughly eighty
years from the Seven Years War (1756–63) to the beginning of the
Anglo-Chinese Opium War (1839–42). By starting some years before
the American Revolution and ending after the climax of the wars that
shattered the Iberian empires of the Atlantic world, and by framing its
concerns within such global conflicts, the book aims to envisage the
Age of Revolutions in terms of the connections, both long-term and
long-range, experienced by contemporaries. However, it excludes
earlier significant political shifts, such as those produced by ‘the
Persian Napoleon’ Nadir Shah (r. 1736–47) in his expansive conquests
of the 1730s and 1740s, which most historians today see not as the
start of something new but as closing a pattern that harked back to
the great Turkic conqueror Tamerlane in the fourteenth century; it
also chooses not to look ahead to Europe in 1848, to the Taiping
Rebellion of the 1850s and 1860s, or to the Great Indian Rebellion
of 1857–8, which seem to us to foreshadow in important ways other
momentous changes beyond those most definitive of the Age of
Revolutions treated in this volume.
The Age of Revolutions as defined here ranges geographically
widely to encompass almost all the period’s major regions and poli-
ties, from the North Atlantic World, South America, and the
xiv The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

Caribbean, via Africa and the Middle East, to South and South-east
Asia and China.While the scope of the book has been designed to be
extensive in space, it is quite intensive in time, in order to map the
dimensions of change – and, indeed, of stability and the resistance to
change – around the world more precisely than would be possible on
a much broader timescale. It is also what might be called a ‘transitive’
global history: that is, a history that takes an object – in this case, the
various changes subsumed under the flexible category of ‘revolution’
– and places it in global perspective. It does not attempt to be an
‘intransitive’ global history, an account of globalization or globality
itself in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, though it
contains much material that might contribute to a world history
focused on the Age of Revolutions.
The Age of Revolutions in Global Context brings together historical
specialists in most of the major areas of the world to examine the rele-
vance and implications of models of an ‘Age of Revolutions’ or a
‘World Crisis’ to the regions they know best. On the basis of their
contributions, it should be possible to begin crafting an account of the
chains of causation, modes of connection, and means of comparison
that might allow the decades on either side of the turn of the nine-
teenth century to be seen as a whole and on a global scale. The
various authors have chosen different modes in which to tackle these
dimensions of explanation as they apply to their own fields. Some
offer integrated narratives that stress transregional and global connec-
tions. Others, in fields where the current state of research does not
permit such a synthesis, emphasize instead historiographical prospects
and possibilities. And, while some look outward from their particular
regions to the wider world beyond them, others reverse the perspec-
tive to examine the convergence of global forces in specific regions.
A fully integrated account will only be possible when all the histori-
ographies touched by our subject have reached similar levels of devel-
opment, both empirical and methodological. For the moment, a
diversity of approaches is still needed.We have tried to represent that
variety in the chapters, and in the accompanying guides to further
reading, that follow.
To better define the book’s object, it is worth beginning by asking:
what were the meanings of ‘revolution’ in the Age of Revolutions?
The period was one in which traditional ideas of ‘revolution’ still
coexisted with newly defined conceptions generated out of the two
political upheavals that have usually been seen as key to its character,
the American, in the 1770s, and the French, in the late 1780s and early
1790s. Other political transformations that were seen in terms of
Introduction xv

revolutionary changes were in Haiti and Spanish America. However,

it is evident that even the American and French Revolutions were so
vastly different in character that only a capacious concept of ‘revolu-
tion’ could contain them both.The first was an instance of a regional
rebellion of some scale led largely by a slave-owning creole elite,
resulting in the secession of part of the territory of an empire while
leaving most of the rest of that empire along with the imperial centre
itself intact in terms of its dynastic logic and institutions of rule: as
Gary Nash shows in his contribution to this volume, its revolutionary
promises were imperfectly fulfilled, especially for the enslaved popu-
lation of the infant United States and their abolitionist sympathizers
in Europe.7 The French Revolution was a more thoroughgoing
instance of change being effected at an imperial centre, even if that
change was eventually reversed in part, first by Bonaparte, and then by
a variety of monarchical regimes in the nineteenth century. The key
feature that these two somewhat disparate processes had in common
was the imagining and construction of a type of notionally
‘acephalous’, non-monarchical polity for the first time in the North
Atlantic world since the experiments at the end of the English Civil
War in 1649, with the formation of the short-lived English
Commonwealth. To many people in about 1800, the political
language of ‘revolution’ thus came to imply at the very least the over-
throw of monarchy.
But clearly this had not always been the case, and one needs to be
careful in employing a term of this complexity. As the conceptual
historian Reinhart Koselleck has reminded us, with a warning against
expanding the term revolution ‘to include every last element on our
globe’, ‘our concept of “revolution” cannot be defined save as a flex-
ible general concept [Allgemeinbegriff], which may find a general, a
priori, consensus everywhere but whose precise meaning is subject to
considerable variations from one country to another and one politi-
cal field to another’.8 To come to grips with what ‘revolution’ usually
meant, it is worth turning for a moment to early modern thinkers in
Western Europe before the American and French Revolutions. In
1661, the ageing French intellectual Jean Chapelain addressed a letter
to his younger acquaintance, the physician and traveller François
Bernier, then in the Mughal Empire ruled over by Aurangzeb. It was
essential, he wrote, that the traveller should inform himself ‘of the
history and the revolutions of that kingdom [l’histoire et les révolutions
de ce royaume], not merely since Tamerlane and his successors, but ab
ovo and since Alexander’.9 Chapelain apparently did not mean the
word ‘revolution’ to represent just any kind of political change. Rather
xvi The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

he meant the word to signify political changes accompanied by mili-

tary struggles and civil wars, even if they did not call into question the
monarchical institution itself. For this reason, Bernier was able to treat
the struggle between the four sons of the emperor Shahjahan in the
1650s under the title Histoire de la dernière révolution des États du Grand
Mogol (1670).10
In a similar vein, roughly a century later, the French priest Louis
Bazin would write from Iran of the confusion that attended the death
of Nadir Shah in a public letter with a title that spoke of ‘the revolu-
tions that followed the death of Thamas-Kouli Khan [Nadir Shah]’ (les
révolutions qui suivirent la mort de Thamas-Kouli Khan).11 In the two
instances, the usage was further facilitated by a convergence between
Indo-Persian and European political terminology, for in the former too
the idea that political change could be produced as a form of ‘revolu-
tion’ (inqilab) was common enough. It would be in this sense that both
Robert Clive and Ghulam Husain’s translator, Haji Mustafa, used the
term ‘revolution’ of events in Bengal in the 1760s and 1770s. Between
that time and the years in which Paine wrote his celebrated missive to
the Abbé Raynal on the subject of the American Revolution in 1782
and then celebrated the ‘Age of Revolutions’ in 1791, it is possible
that a partial shift took place in the meaning of the term, placing it
less in the sphere of cyclical movement and more within a definite
teleology, or sense of historical irreversibility. But it seems that it was
still the older usage that informed a text such as Jucherau de Saint-
Denys’s Révolutions de Constantinople en 1807 et 1808 (1818), regard-
ing the tumultuous replacement of the Ottoman sultan Selim III by
Mustafa IV, and then the latter’s rapid replacement by Mahmud II.12

***

With this variety of overlapping, backward-looking and forward-

tending, conceptions of revolution in mind, we can see some of the
limitations of the two classic surveys of the Age of Revolutions from
the late twentieth century. Fifty years ago, R. R. Palmer’s monumental
two-volume study The Age of the Democratic Revolution (1959–64)
portrayed a series of assaults on aristocracy in the name of democracy
from the Appalachians almost to the Urals. Yet for the American
Palmer, as for his French collaborator Jacques Godechot, this cosmo-
politan movement of political liberation took place within a unitary
Western Civilization whose Mediterranean was the Atlantic Ocean.13
In this regard, his conception was recognizably a product of the Cold
War. It was also congruent with the contemporaneous assessment made
Introduction xvii

in 1957 by the American modernization theorists Max Millikan and W.

W. Rostow ‘that we are in the midst of a great world revolution’ in
human aspirations, economic development, and social integration.14
The promise of the Age of the Democratic Revolution might have
been similarly universal and teleological but its immediate historical
effects were more tightly bounded. Palmer’s study halted in 1799 on
the threshold of the nineteenth century, just ahead of the Haitian
Revolution of 1804 and decades before the Latin American revolu-
tions had run their course.15 On Palmer’s account, the Caribbean and
South America had to wait for liberation along with much of the rest
of the world: ‘The eighteenth century saw the Revolution of the
Western world; the twentieth century, the Revolution of the non-
Western.’16 The democratic revolution was thus a gift from the North
Atlantic world to other peoples who had apparently contributed
nothing to its original emancipatory potential. The late eighteenth-
century ‘world revolution of the West’, as Palmer rather oxymoroni-
cally called it, spread outward from the mostly metropolitan centres of
the Atlantic world to the rest of the globe over the next century and
a half.‘All revolutions since 1800, in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and
Africa’, Palmer concluded,‘have learned from the eighteenth-century
Revolution of Western Civilization.’17
The other great synthetic survey of the period, Eric Hobsbawm’s
The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (1962), bracketed out the American
Revolution and described instead the combined effects of the French
Revolution and the British Industrial Revolution as ‘the twin crater
of a . . . regional volcano’ located in north-western Europe. As
described by Hobsbawm, its initial eruption was regional but the
consequences were global: ‘since the world revolution spread
outwards from the double crater of England and France it initially
took the form of a European expansion in and conquest of the rest of
the world’.This was a triumph of industrial capitalism and bourgeois
liberalism whose effects would decisively shape the world’s history
right up to the moment at which Hobsbawm wrote. Industry had
stoked empire but, as Hobsbawm argued, empire exported its own
gravediggers. By the early 1960s, ‘the worldwide revolt against the
west’, inspired in part by ‘the revolutionary socialist and communist
ideology born out of reaction against the dual revolution’, was in full
swing. For Hobsbawm, at least, what the West had taught the rest was
how to roll back the European hegemony that had been the long-
term legacy of the revolutionary era.18 However, as Robert Travers
argues in his contribution to this volume, Hobsbawm’s narrative of
Europeans’ global hegemony in the late eighteenth century ‘appears
xviii The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

to have been conjured up by a number of historical sleights of hand’.

It compressed into a few decades processes of political, military, and
commercial insinuation into the world beyond Europe that had taken
a century or more. It assimilated indigenous scholarship and political
reflection to European categories rather than the specific traditions
from which they sprang. And it overestimated the technological
differences between Europeans and their allies and adversaries, espe-
cially in South Asia.19
In retrospect, for all their grand ambitions and real historical
achievements, both Palmer’s and Hobsbawm’s visions of the revolu-
tionary era now appear strikingly Eurotropic, if not quite Eurocentric,
because rather narrowly focused in their conceptions of just what was
revolutionary about the Age of Revolutions: the expansion of
‘democracy’ for Palmer, the diffusion of industry, ideology, and empire
for Hobsbawm. Both gestured towards a global setting for the epochal
transformations they traced, but neither attempted an integrated
account of developments outside the North Atlantic world and each
gave primacy to Europe as the matrix of revolution. Insofar as both
the American and French Revolutions became enmeshed in the
geopolitics of Franco-British imperial rivalry in the half-century after
the Seven Years War, they could not but have repercussions for the
Caribbean, the Middle East, and South Asia, as well as for Australasia
and the Pacific basin, as Hobsbawm, at least, recognized.
In many respects, the origins of narratives like Palmer’s and
Hobsbawm’s can be traced back to accounts of world history gener-
ated in Europe during the Age of Revolutions itself, culminating in
the lectures on the subject that G. W. F. Hegel delivered at the
University of Berlin between 1822 and 1830, in which he notoriously
concluded that ‘history is in fact out of the question’ in large parts of
the world, specifically Africa.20 Such narratives remain tenacious but
they are not ineradicable.As Joseph Miller argues in his chapter in this
volume, the era experienced by northern European monarchies and
their colonial extensions as an ‘Age of (Political) Revolutions’ was but
one phase in a longer cycle of militarization and commercialization in
the greater Atlantic world that becomes visible when the dynamics of
African, rather than Euro-American, history are used to define and
calibrate the dimensions of transformation.21 World history seen from
Africa – rather than African history viewed from Europe, and within
European categories – shows longer and more complex rhythms of
transformation than reigning cataclysmic models of revolution have
generally allowed. In a similar fashion, David Geggus shows in his
chapter that the pace of change in the Caribbean was not synchronous
Introduction xix

with that in Europe, North America, or Spanish and Portuguese

America, and indeed that ‘the changes the period witnessed [in the
Caribbean] were extremely uneven and contradictory’ in the effects of
anticolonial revolt, slave emancipation, and definitions of freedom.22
Only recently have historians begun to seek such novel ways to
analyse the developments of this period on a global, rather than
simply regional, scale. In particular, the juxtaposition of the rise of
European powers to pre-eminence within Eurasia with the fiscal-
military upheavals in the great agrarian empires of Asia has suggested
a new picture of an era of ‘convergent revolutions’. Causation as well
as connection have now returned to the agenda of historians treating
this era. Developments within and beyond Europe are being brought
into a single frame, not to show the diffusion of change from one
(usually Euro-Atlantic) region to another, but rather to show that
similar developments were taking place across the world: for example,
empire-making and empire-breaking; a thickening of commercial ties
leading to greater interpenetration of empires and of collaborations as
well as collisions among their agents; a ramping-up of pressures to
extract profit from both labour and commodities independent of any
supposed industrial take-off in north-western Europe; and an expan-
sion of plantation agriculture on islands and in littoral regions from
the Americas and Africa to the Indian Ocean and Asia.These various
but interconnected phenomena occurred within a fundamental shift
in the relations between the major European powers and the rest of
the world to create a ‘World Crisis’ of truly global proportions. As C.
A. Bayly has recently put it,‘It is the global interconnectedness of the
economic and political turbulences of this era which is so striking.’
John Darwin has concurred: ‘the really astonishing feature of this
revolutionary age was the geopolitical earthquakes that occurred not
just in Eurasia but all over the world’.23 On Bayly’s account this World
Crisis had fiscal, ideological, and political dimensions that together
accelerated ‘the growth of uniformity between societies and the
growth of complexity within them’ around the world. Darwin modi-
fies this slightly by arguing that ‘The Eurasian Revolution was in fact
three revolutions: in geopolitics, in culture and in economics.’24
Such a sweeping, nearly all-encompassing, vision is one symptom
of a turn away from pointillisme among historians and a return to
broad-brush painting. We say ‘return’ because the model for a world
crisis in the revolutionary era is surely the so-called general crisis of
the seventeenth century first posited more than half a century ago,
also by Eric Hobsbawm.25 Like Hobsbawm’s later conception of an
Age of Revolution, this periodization marked a stage in Europe’s
xx The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

Irish
Rebellion
1798
NORTH
AMERICA France
American 1789–94
Revolution
1776 SPAIN
Atlantic 1806
Ocean
MEXICO
1821
Haitian
Revolution
(1790s)

VENEZUELA
Pacific 1830
Ocean PERU
1821 SOUTH
AMERICA
BOLIVIA
1825

ARGENTINA
1810

Map 1 The world in the Age of Revolutions (adapted from C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern
World, 1780-1914, Oxford, 2004, pp. 84-5).
 Introduction xxi

Pugachev’s
Revolt
1773–4
SERBIA
1804 Eight
Trigrams sect
Durrani
Empire White Lotus
Qajar Sikh Rebellion 1796
French Iran uprising
occupation 1710–1800 BURMA
1798 1760
Pacific
Wahhabi Ocean
movement VIETNAM
1740–1820 THAILAND
AFRICA 1770 1802

DUTCH
EAST INDIES
(British 1810–15)
Indian
Ocean AUSTRALIA
NEW
ZEALAND
xxii The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

emergence into modernity. ‘As transition itself has come to seem a

more elusive phenomenon’, one recent anatomist of the earlier debate
on the general crisis has noted, ‘the usefulness of crisis as an explana-
tion for it has tended to evaporate.’26 This has not discouraged histo-
rians’ efforts to analyse various forms of instability – most conspicuous
among them, popular revolts, warfare and subsistence crises – within
a common frame. However, the relative contingency and paucity of
truly worldwide connections in the seventeenth century – compared
to the period under examination in this volume, at least – has made
global descriptions, let alone explanations, of the general crisis
implausible. Even the most expansive analyses have concluded that
seventeenth-century disorders from the Spanish Monarchy to the
Ming Empire were parallel rather than convergent, with climate
change the only possible independent variable that could have oper-
ated on a global scale to link them.27
The model of crisis has become somewhat moot for interpreta-
tions of the seventeenth century.28 However, it now seems to have
migrated to the late eighteenth century, a period when thickening
interregional connections could render changes that were apparently
simultaneous genuinely synchronous. European powers – the French,
British, Spanish, and Dutch especially – had long possessed the capac-
ity to project themselves politically, militarily, and commercially on a
truly global scale. Since the opening decades of the eighteenth
century, they had been doing so with increasing regularity and feroc-
ity in a cycle of world wars that would continue almost unabated until
1815: as both Jeremy Adelman and David Geggus imply in their chap-
ters in this volume, the military and geopolitical origins of this key
aspect of the Age of Revolutions can be found in the War of the
Spanish Succession (1701–14), the first of the series of world wars that
cast the interactions of European powers on a global screen for more
than a century.29
This was in large part because the major political units of the era
(and for long beyond) were not states, national or otherwise, but
empires. A common theme of many of the volume’s chapters is that
this was ‘an age of imperial revolutions’.30 In the world beyond
Europe, the backwash of war, revolution, and imperial reorganization
collided with endogenous forces to cause parallel transformations in
the Middle East, South Asia, and beyond. European and neo-
European polities not only consolidated but also expanded their
power through conquest, commerce, and co-optation in Northern
and Southern Africa, in South and South-east Asia, and, for the first
time, into the Pacific during the decades after 1760. It was also in this
Introduction xxiii

period that new regions like the North Pacific were drawn irre-
versibly into larger circuits of commercial exchange for the first time,
joining the polities and economies ranged at the fringes of the China
Seas, and new commercial agents, such as the newly independent
Americans, entered into global trade demanding freedom of access to
commodities, entrepôts, and markets formally ring-fenced by imperial
powers and their proxy companies.31

***

The conception of a ‘World Crisis’ in the period c.1760–1840 has

rapidly gained the status of a testable thesis capable of standing along-
side more durable conceptions of an age of Atlantic or democratic
revolutions. Proponents of the new paradigm have deliberately
absorbed and built upon the earlier literature on revolutions in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet what still remains a
fundamentally synthetic account of these global upheavals has not
been systematically tested against specific regional historiographies.
Nor have many of the existing traditions of revolutionary historiogra-
phy been placed into a supraregional, comparative, or global context.
The precise balance between a stress on connection and one on
comparison is often quite hard to calibrate.32 Further, connection
itself is often expressed precisely in terms of comparison, even during
the revolutionary era itself. For example, one of the most significant
effects of the American and more particularly the French Revolutions
was to create the sentiment in elites elsewhere that they had somehow
failed or fallen behind if they had not been able to emulate a prop-
erly revolutionary trajectory. Phrases such as ‘our country is sleeping’
became common, for example, in the writings of Hungarian aristo-
crats of the 1810s and 1820s. Even before this, and as early as 1791,
the Hungarian guardsman István Batsányi wrote the following poem
‘On the Changes in France’:

O you still in the slave’s collar, that yoke

which drags you down to the grave!
And you too! Holy consecrated kings, who
– though the very earth demands your blood – still
slay your hapless subjects: turn your eyes to Paris!
Let France set out the fate of both king and shackled slave.33

Three decades later, two Central European aristocratic travellers were

to express similar sentiments of inferiority or backwardness, but this
xxiv The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

time with respect to England. One of them wrote of how, while in

England, he felt ‘like a small-town tradesman in his Sunday suit, ludi-
crously stiff and unable to move’, and also noted the enormous indus-
trial vigour he found everywhere in the early 1820s, ‘with one glass
factory, coal mine and ironworks next to the other [and] the entire
area . . . covered with fire and smoke like the scenery of the last judg-
ment. . . . The steam-engines are used everywhere, and they are
exquisite.’34 A gap was opening up, in terms of both realities and
perceptions, between living standards and modes of living in England
and Continental Western Europe on the one hand, and many other
parts of the world on the other hand.This ‘great divergence’ – to use
Kenneth Pomeranz’s well known formulation35 – was not merely a
contrast between India and China on the one hand and Western
Europe on the other, but between the far closer worlds of Western and
Eastern/Central Europe where the voices we have cited emanate.
What causal or other links were there between these divergences,
great or otherwise, and the political revolutions of the period? The
celebrated admission by Friedrich Engels of a striking lack of fit
between France’s political trajectory and England’s economic one,
leading to the invention of a sort of hybrid ideal-type in terms of
political economy, may be a reasonable starting-point in relation to
this issue, not least because it was clearly an inspiration behind
Hobsbawm’s conception of a dual, economic-cum-political, ‘world
revolution spread[ing] outward from the double crater of England and
France’.36 Besides, and further complicating matters, is the fact that
the notion of the ‘Industrial Revolution’ is not a category that would
have been comprehensible to actors at the time but a later imposition
that itself remains the object of much debate among economic histo-
rians.37 If such a ‘revolution’ did occur, when can it be located? If we
attempt to locate it in the period after 1760, how does one account
for the surprisingly low rates of growth of per capita income in
England itself until about 1800? Should this process not then be seen
as a regional and local, rather than a national, one, and if so, should we
not uncouple it from the questions of the characterization of national
and imperial political regimes?38
Three distinct lines of approach can be discerned with regard to the
appropriate manner in which economic and political questions might
be linked causally.The first, the origins of which may be found in the
work of Thomas Malthus as early as 1820, would argue that the long-
term political outcomes of the Age of Revolutions on a world scale
derived from economic and technological changes, and that the
triumph of Britain over France and the ascendancy of the Pax
Introduction xxv

Britannica were (as Malthus put it) ‘powerfully assisted by our steam-
engines’.39 A second view is one we may associate with the doyen of
modern French economic historians, François Crouzet, who famously
argued that if ‘war was neither a stimulus to, nor a powerful retardative
factor of British growth’, the political triumph of England could not
simply be attributed to her ‘advanced’ economic status either. If we
interpret Crouzet’s reasoning correctly, and choose to generalize it, it
would seem to lead us in a direction where long-term economic and
political outcomes in the Age of Revolutions might be seen as rela-
tively autonomous.The economy did not drive the polity, but nor was
‘opulence the reward of successful aggression’.40 A third view can also
be identified, and would subordinate both political and economic
questions to the determining influence of cultural factors, in particu-
lar religion.This view has been a particular favourite with ‘institution-
ally’ inclined economic historians of the last generation, who have
argued, for example, that the very different outcomes in the face of
similar problems faced by the Ottomans and the French Bourbons can
be understood in relation to the determining influence of culture.41
The chapters in this volume have not been forced into any single
narrow framework of interpretation but tend broadly to follow the
second of these three views. They are thus at some remove from a
certain number of grand sociological models of revolution, of which
one of the most recent is that of Jack Goldstone from the early
1990s.42 Goldstone tended to link early modern rebellions and revo-
lutions (including the French Revolution) to two types of causal
reasoning. One of these tied the rhythms of old regime demographic
expansion to the pressure on resources and thus on the fiscal viability
of states.This was an internal process, peculiar to each of the societies
that were analysed by him in a comparative framing.They might thus
lead to divergences but also to ‘strange parallels’, as another global
historian has put the matter.43 The second form of reasoning was
more connective and conjunctural, and linked these societies together
using such mechanisms as the flow of silver (and bullion more gener-
ally) and the attendant monetary crises they may have provoked.
Taken together, Goldstone argued, these two forms of reasoning
could be used to show why mere rebellions occurred in some soci-
eties and veritable revolutions in others, while still others managed to
prevent resistance or instability from occurring. Ideology for him was
a mere facilitating factor, though it could also at times act as a
constraint on the production of revolution. In contrast, the chapters
in this volume generally stress the field of the ‘political’, but not in any
narrow sense: the political for them is an opening into a field of inter-
xxvi The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

disciplinary exploration. If some of them focus on political institu-

tions in places as far apart as China, Spanish America, and Indonesia,
still others focus on the realm of political ideas, while a third group
detail the actions of political agents whether within a national or in a
transnational or transimperial context.This emphasis on the ‘political’
is, it seems to us, really an underlining of the contingent nature of
processes in the period under consideration.44
A global approach to the Age of Revolutions clearly demonstrates
that the dimensions even of political change in the period under study
were markedly heterogeneous. In some parts of the world, formal
political structures came crashing down, often with much shedding of
blood and significant displacement of people (as Maya Jasanoff shows
in her chapter on the loyalist diaspora after the American Revolution
and the flight of the émigrés from Revolutionary France);45 while in
others, the same state-actors or their direct descendants remained
firmly in place. One area subject to conquest from without in this
period, Egypt during Napoleon’s French invasion, experienced
creolization rather than rupture in an encounter that produced ‘more
irony than binaries’, as Juan Cole argues in his chapter.46 Another
locale, Java, subject first to Dutch then to British colonial rule in the
period, underwent a much more wrenching transition in which
Europe’s revolutionary languages (such as discourses of antifeudalism)
and practices proved entirely inassimilable, as Peter Carey shows in his
chapter.47
If political revolutions produced dramatic changes in regimes in
many parts of Western Europe, the Mediterranean, South Asia, and a
great swathe of the Atlantic world, vast areas such as Qing China,
Tokugawa Japan, Tsarist Russia, and even Habsburg Central Europe
were less directly affected, as, for example, Kenneth Pomeranz’s chapter
on China proposes.48 Along similar lines, a recent study of compara-
tive experiences in East and South-east Asia in this period stresses the
notion of ‘crisis’ rather than ‘revolution’, noting the existence of demo-
graphic expansion, floods, and rebellions at the time of the Qianlong
and Jiaqing emperors, and ‘similar phenomena’ in Japan in the 1780s at
the time of the Tenmei Famine (1782–7) and the death of Tokugawa
Ieharu in 1786. Changes in maritime trade in the region, driven by
piracy, commercial interloping, and the competition between
European trading companies, among other factors, ensured that ‘the
turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century was a period of
global transition and changing overseas entanglements to which the
regimes of China, Japan, and Java were forced to respond’.49
Introduction xxvii

***

Any global account of the period must account for stability as well as
turbulence in the face of such challenges.The Ottoman Empire (not
otherwise treated at length below) offers one striking illustration of
the dynamics of resilience in the revolutionary era. On 6 April 1789,
just three weeks before the so-called Réveillon Riot that shook Paris
and led – in the charged words of one aristocratic contemporary
writer – to a situation where ‘blood was flowing in the Faubourg
Saint-Antoine in Paris, [with] five or six thousand workers, stirred up
by a diabolical cabal that aimed to destroy the [Necker] ministry and
prevent the Estates from meeting’, the Ottoman Sultan Selim III had
ascended the throne some 1,400 miles to the south-east in Istanbul.50
The situation he confronted was a rather delicate one, but not entirely
dissimilar to that facing the ill-fated Louis XVI.A significant fiscal gap
between imperial receipts and expenditures had opened up in the
course of the eighteenth century, growing more acute in its second
half.The same broad period saw the emergence of regional magnates,
or a‘yan, who became indispensable intermediaries and power-
brokers, and impeded any simple process of fiscal reconsolidation or
centralization.51 Military pressure was mounting inexorably from the
exterior, in particular from the Russia of Catherine II, specifically in
the Black Sea region. In the late 1780s, Russian forces had captured a
number of forts on the Dniester and a Russo-Austrian alliance
seemed now to threaten not merely the Crimea and the Balkans but
even the very Rumelian and Anatolian heartland of the empire itself.
The Ottoman state, long considered to be the ‘Sick Man of Europe’,
seemed once more to be in a state of terminal illness, not simply in
military but in broadly political terms.The early years of Selim’s rule
saw further military setbacks at Fokshani and Rimnik, and the loss of
Belgrade.
However, we know that the worst eventually did not come to pass
for the Ottomans, and that they managed to survive in some form as
late as the First World War. Deft diplomatic manoeuvrings and sepa-
rate treaties in 1791 and 1792 with the Habsburgs and Russians
enabled them to hold on to some of the older frontiers at the Danube
and Dnieper, and also to retain control over Bosnia and Serbia. In the
eighteen difficult years of the Sultan’s rule, until his deposition in
1807 in favour of his cousin Mustafa IV, it was even possible for Selim
III to attempt some limited reform, notably in terms of the so-called
Nizam-i Cedid corps of the army, which has been termed ‘the
example, the lesson, the model, and the nucleus for the military
xxviii The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

reforms that were to follow’ later in the nineteenth century.52

Further, in all of this, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the Sultan
himself (usually portrayed as something of a weakling if not a roi
fainéant) was an interesting mix in terms of his disposition and tastes.
Among his friends and fellow members of the Mevlevi order of Sufis
was the brilliant and somewhat iconoclastic poet Sheyh Galib
(1757–99), no friend of the hidebound old imperial bureaucracy and
its scribal elite. Galib even wrote somewhat irreverently of the royal
house, as follows.

The sagas of kings are but a painted rose

nothing more
on a fragile Chinese cup,
made for the ruler’s hand
not my own.53

How did the Ottomans as a dynasty and a broad political regime

survive the difficult years from 1760 to 1840, which laid low so many
of their contemporary dynasties and ruling dispensations? There is
clearly no simple answer to this question but there are some obvious
elements of a response that we know.Various ingenious arguments can
no doubt be found to explain the absence of a revolution in the
Ottoman Empire at the time.We would, however, stress political argu-
ments both from the realm of institutions and from that of ideas.The
principal reason for Ottoman stability, we would argue, was scale and
flexibility, an advantage that France – in view of the reversal of its
imperial plans in both India and the Atlantic by 1763 – simply did not
possess. The Ottomans were thus able to deploy even the rather
decentralized state apparatus at their disposal to deal with crises in the
Balkans as well as face the challenges of the Wahhabis, who took and
held the holy cities of Mecca and Medina for nearly a decade from
1805 to 1813.The eventual destruction of Ottoman power was only
possible after the scale and extent of the Ottoman state had been
progressively whittled down over the course of the nineteenth
century and during the First World War.
A second argument stems from the realm of ideas. Ottoman polit-
ical thought in the years from 1760 to 1840, like that of Qing intel-
lectuals in the same period, refused for the most part to contemplate
the idea of a kingless polity. Even in India at the time, one of the few
resources that were available to reflect on this question derived from
the exegetical tradition on the epic Ramayana, where (in the so-called
ayodhya kanda) one finds a reflection on the disastrous consequences
Introduction xxix

of arajaka, or a kingless state.54 The only viable solution, and one that
was followed to the letter in Istanbul in 1807–8, was to replace a less
convenient Sultan with a preferable one, while holding firm to the
logic of dynasty. Even in 1840, then, at the very end of the period
studied by the chapters in this volume, the central political proposi-
tion of the American and French Revolutions – namely the replace-
ment of monarchical government with some other, ‘popular’ form –
remained broadly unacceptable in the greater part of the world.
The Ottoman state, like the Mughals further east, was the object of
the expansionary ambitions of a European power of the time –
namely, Revolutionary France (rather than – as with the Mughals –
the English East India Company). But they were also beneficiaries of
the Anglo-French rivalry that cut short Bonaparte’s expedition to the
eastern Mediterranean, whereas the Mughals were never able in the
final analysis to play off one European power against another after
1740. As a dynasty that had ruled in a more or less coherent manner
from the 1320s, the Ottomans were also far more strongly rooted in
terms of cultural capital than many others that did not have the
advantage of almost five centuries of a royal past.Their ‘saga of kings’
was finally made not only for the ruler’s hand but was a shared cultural
resource for many of the elites in the eastern Mediterranean. In any
event, to explain the fate of the Ottomans over these years, we must
have recourse to at least three modes of historical reasoning, having to
do with connection, comparison, and causation. If the history of the
Ottomans is tightly connected with that of France, and to an extent
that of imperial Britain, it is through comparison between the
outcomes there as distinct from, say, Mughal India or Qing China that
we may gain a firmer grasp of the multiple logics of transformation in
this period.

***

That we can pose the problem of explanation in this way reflects the
fact that the Age of Revolutions was a period in which the local and
the global were rearticulated in radical ways. Neither the American
Revolution nor the French Revolution was a local affair; both had
global or at least pan-regional repercussions and receptions. This
much the traditional historiography, such as that represented by
Palmer and Hobsbawm, had always been willing to admit. But, as we
have seen, the broad tendency of that historiography was inevitably
diffusionist in character. This has meant that a typical sequence of
causal reasoning might run as follows. The French Revolution
xxx The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

occurred on account of purely internal causal mechanisms within the

‘hexagon’ of metropolitan France, whether these were fiscal, social, or
cultural. Then the story might continue that this Revolution and its
aftermath next produced an aggressively expansionist and militaristic
wave that led to a variety of wars on the European continent and
beyond, including eventually the toppling of the Bourbon ruler of
Spain, Charles IV, and his replacement in 1808 by Joseph Bonaparte.
The eventual repercussions of this process would then include the
rebellion of the Spanish American colonies from about 1809 and their
eventual independence after the Bourbon restoration, in which the
revolutionary language learnt from the American and French exam-
ples would play a crucial role.55
Yet, as Lynn Hunt correctly comments in her contribution to this
volume, the possibility that the French Revolution itself might be
placed in a global context of causal movements, rather than seen as an
exogenous independent variable causing changes on a global scale, has
rarely been considered.56 Indeed, insofar as historians have set the
French Revolution in any international context, it has been either
within the framework of a traditional diplomatic history or as an
account of the Revolution’s repercussions beyond France itself.57 This
is somewhat puzzling, because the available evidence of some form of
global causal context for the late eighteenth-century revolutions in
both America and France has been strong enough for some time.The
fiscal problems of the French treasury have often been traced to the
substantial debts incurred by the end of the global conflict which was
the Seven Years War, and which were never entirely recouped there-
after, as interest payments mounted. The loss of substantial overseas
territories and the imperial retreat in which France found itself in the
years from 1763 to 1789 surely reduced the margin for manoeuvre
that the Bourbon state possessed in relation to its competitor across the
channel. In contrast, the problems of the House of Hanover from the
mid-eighteenth century can be traced to an embarrassment of overseas
riches rather than a lack thereof: one may even discern a certain care-
lessness in the management of the American continental colonies from
the period (between 1757 and 1765) when the fiscal riches of Bengal
become available with a disconcerting degree of ease.58
While a truly connected history of these rebellions and revolu-
tionary movements is yet to be achieved, we may legitimately ask
ourselves whether the flow of causal reasoning from Europe to the
overseas colonial territories might not at times be usefully reversed.
Indeed, such a reversal of perspectives suggests one of the major inter-
pretive rewards of the approach taken in this volume. Diffusionist
Introduction xxxi

models of revolutionary change, like Palmer’s and Hobsbawm’s,

occluded the various forms of connection and comparison that
Travers calls the ‘different forms of global early modernity’, which did
not tend in a single direction or exhibit parallel dynamics.59 Those
earlier models could not accommodate multiple centres of change,
nor could they properly account for the fact that the era was one of
counter-revolutions as well as revolutions, of local disturbances (like
those in China that Pomeranz has mapped in this volume) that did
not lead even to regional transformations, and of more diffuse
processes of cultural and political hybridity, such as those Juan Cole
and Peter Carey examine in their chapters on Egypt and Java. The
very heterogeneity of change and the forms of resistance to it are
fundamental features of the Age of Revolutions. That they are now
visible to historians is not the least of the benefits of placing the Age
of Revolutions in a global context.
This volume thus continues to stress the virtues of comparison
between the fates of different polities in the Age of Revolutions, but
insists that it must fruitfully be combined with forms of reasoning that
stress the importance of connection.60 There are of course at least two
possible ways of conceptualizing such connected histories of revolu-
tion.A first would suggest that connections did exist and were known
to past actors, but have for some reason been forgotten or laid aside.
The task of the historian would then be to rediscover these lost traces.
A second view would instead posit that historians might act as elec-
tricians, connecting circuits by acts of imaginative reconstitution
rather than simple restitution. Here, the advantages of conceiving of
these processes on a global scale become manifest rather quickly. Even
if a certain number of individual cases – notably those of Russia,
Japan, and mainland South-east Asia – have been set aside here for
reasons of economy, it should be clear that they too could very easily
be brought into the analysis, through either a primary emphasis on
connection or one on comparison. The fate of the French polity
obviously depended, for example, on the disastrous failure of
Bonaparte’s campaign in Russia, to such an extent that it is impossi-
ble to conceive of French history in the years from 1800 to 1820
independently of Russian history.61
As we move forward from the period examined in this book – the
1760s to the 1840s – to the latter half of the nineteenth century, the
deeper impact of the revolutions (as well as the non-revolutions) of
these years becomes plainer. However, this impact is not in terms of
the production of a simple dichotomy, another great divergence as it
were between societies that had undergone revolution and those that
xxxii The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

had not. Rather, influences continued to be exchanged and transmit-

ted between post-revolutionary societies and others that remained
within the framework of agrarian and sea-borne imperial polities.
Rousseau and Voltaire were read in late nineteenth-century Bengal,
while ideas from America provided at least a part of the spur for the
Taiping Rebellion that rocked the late Qing polity. It is in this sense
that the history of the Age of Revolutions must be understood in
global context, both in its own time and in terms of the mark it left
in the longer term.
To conclude, a common enough perception of the Age of
Revolutions is that it freed the genie of revolutionary republicanism
from its imprisoning bottle, to which it could never be returned. On
this view, then, an uncomplicated line can be drawn – for better or
for worse – from the French Revolution of 1789 to the Bolshevik
Revolution of 1917, and that was not only because (as François Furet
once put it) ‘the Bolsheviks always had their minds fixed on the
example of the French Revolution’.62 In reality, however, the decades
from 1840 to the early twentieth century saw very few successful
revolutions, with the concrete results of even 1848 being quite limited
and short-lived. Neither the Indian Rebellion of the 1850s nor the
Taiping and Boxer Rebellions succeeded in their objectives, and in
any event these objectives were in many instances less than revolu-
tionary by any definition. The revolutionary tradition thus had in
large measure to be reinvented for use after 1900, whether in Iran,
Armenia, or Mexico, for example. To be sure, it may be argued, the
revolutions and even the later anticolonial political movements of the
twentieth century had the memory and traditions of the Age of
Revolutions available to them as a resource, but they also had been
overgrown in the intervening years by layers of myth and confusion
that would prove difficult to scrape away.Among these was the perva-
sive view that these were essentially revolutions that had to be under-
stood and analysed in a national (and nationalistic) framework. It is to
the task of reinterpreting them that this volume contributes by
viewing the Age of Revolutions as a complex, broad, interconnected,
and even global phenomenon.
1
Sparks from the Altar of ’76:
International Repercussions and
Reconsiderations of the American
Revolution

Gary B. Nash

A half-century has passed since the first volume of R. R. Palmer’s Age

of the Democratic Revolution (1959, followed by a second in 1964)
offered a stunning treatment of the geographic reach of the American
Revolution. More than any other historian of his generation, Palmer
initiated the move towards an Atlantic-wide consideration of political
ideology and political practice in the second half of the eighteenth
century. In Palmer’s view the American Revolution, suffused with
enlightened ideological energy, ‘dethroned England and set up
America as a model for those seeking a better world’. In particular, he
explained how Europeans cast their eyes in wonderment upon the
state constitutions cobbled together during the long war with Great
Britain, seeing these expressions of fundamental law as ‘the liberal
ideas of the Enlightenment . . . put into practice’ and ‘made the actual
fabric of public life among real people, in this world, now’.1 Palmer
showed how key elements of American Revolutionary ideology
spread – very unevenly to be sure – across the breadth of Europe and,
eventually, in paler forms, to Latin America in the first half of the
nineteenth century.Among the key elements of ‘the new order of the
ages’ were freedom of religion, popular sovereignty, the rights of man
as unalienable and universal, and that all government should flow
from written constitutions constructed by the people themselves.2
The American Revolution, with the lofty goals of its early years for
recreating government and society, set off a wave of radical, even
utopian, thinking wherever the waters of the Atlantic tumbled ashore.
Though he never quoted it, Thomas Paine’s prediction in his
1
2 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

thunderous Common Sense, published half a year before the Declaration

of Independence, expressed the heart of Palmer’s almost reverential
consideration of America’s mission in the world as the founders of
liberal democracy: ‘The cause of America is in a great measure the
cause of all mankind. . . . ’Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an
age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or
less affected, even to the end of time, by the proceedings now.’3
In recent decades, the ascent of Atlantic history, and more broadly
global history, has brought certain advances in our understanding of
the international impact of the American Revolution. David
Armitage’s The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007)
shows how the American scripture drafted by Thomas Jefferson has
inspired people around the world to mount revolts against colonial
masters and fashion blood-drenched movements of national liberation
and self-determination.4 But these movements, central to the break-
up of empires, have usually not been accompanied by concurrent
rights movements stressing individual freedom, the end of slavery and
other forms of bound labour, the enlargement of the franchise, the
democratization of law-making and political practice, the advent of
public education, the expansion of woman’s rights, or the redistribu-
tion of wealth – all of which were part of the radical agenda of
American revolutionists. Similarly, P. J. Marshall’s The Making and
Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America c.1750–1783 (2005)
rightly argues that the loss of the American colonies did not diminish
Great Britain’s commitment to empire or even change its strategies
for managing its ever-expanding overseas appendages.5 The notion of
empire itself and the pursuit of dominance of lands and peoples
outside of Europe continued and even accelerated. Nor in their new
empire in India were the names of Paine, Franklin, Mason, Jefferson,
or Madison raised in the name of popular sovereignty, religious toler-
ation, or any other plank in the platform of revolutionary reform in
North America. In another case, an expansive study, attempting to
combine the American Revolution with Latin American independ-
ence movements, reads similarly. In Lester Langley’s The Americas in the
Age of Revolution (1996) social upheaval in the years from 1810 to
1850 was the work of indigenous and exploited people who did not
speak the language of universal and unalienable rights but, as John
Coatsworth has put it, came from ‘diverse strata of the rural popula-
tion, each with its own needs and goals’ and each unfolding ‘in partic-
ular institutional settings’.6 The American War for Independence, in
sum, considered as an overthrow of colonial masters, would have
much more influence – though haltingly – than the American
Sparks from the Altar of ’76 3

Revolution, an internal struggle to remake America along very differ-

ent lines than had previously existed. Moreover, where the American
Revolutionary universalistic and reformist goals had the quickest and
greatest reach was in the parts of Europe that Palmer studied half a
century ago.
Thus, we need to be cautious about overstating the aftershocks of
the American Revolution, particularly about its internal struggles to
restitch the social fabric of its peoples – a process which itself
proceeded spasmodically and incompletely. For all the work on the
Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, occurring only several hundred
miles from the new United States, the summary judgement is that the
enormous upheaval of slaves owed far more to the French Revolution
and to the slaves themselves (sometimes operating out of African
values and African methods of attacking their enemies) than to the
American Revolution. And the Haitian revolutionaries received
support from only slender elements of American society, in particular
from abolition-minded northerners who hoped black rebellion
would aid the dismantling of racial slavery in the new American
republic. In fact, even after becoming a free black republic in 1804,
Haiti could not gain recognition from the American government
until the 1860s.7 A recent study of the American Revolution and the
British Caribbean concludes with a null thesis – that white planters
resisted the American Revolutionary ideas about natural rights, as well
they might, since they lived in a sea of exploited and enslaved agri-
cultural labourers. More surprising is that the massive slave rebellion
in North America occasioned by the British offer of freedom to slaves
(and indentured white servants) escaping their masters inspired little
rebellion among the several million Caribbean slaves. Even the
Jamaica slave rebellion of 1776 sprang not from ideological fever but
from hunger that spread when the provisions from North America –
fish and grain – were halted by the war.8 The major slave revolts came
later without much reference to American revolutionary ideas – in
Barbados in 1816, Demerara in 1823, and Jamaica in 1831–2.9
That the American Revolution did not fulfil Thomas Paine’s hopes
outside of Europe seems to be the implicit conclusion of historians
who have constructed arguments of a world crisis and ‘converging
revolutions’ from 1760 to 1820. For example, C. A. Bayly’s The Birth
of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (2004), which incorporates Asia,
Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America into his study of world
empires from the late eighteenth century to the First World War,
shrivels the American Revolution into insignificance. Jefferson,
Madison, Paine, and other revolutionary political theoreticians make
4 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

cameo appearances; the revolutionary era constitution-making that

figured so importantly in Palmer’s thesis warrants no mention at all;
levelling tendencies and communitarian leanings are associated with
the French Revolution but not the American Revolution; and aboli-
tionism merits only brief mention.10
Except for his neglect of abolitionism, which at least some impor-
tant American revolutionary leaders promoted fervently, Bayly may be
justified in giving a back seat to the American Revolution in a globe-
encircling metahistory. In terms of the rise and fall and transformation
of European empires in the modern age, the best study of the Seven
Years War argues cogently that this prolonged global conflict of the
major European powers was ‘far more significant than the War of
American Independence’ (not to be conflated with the American
Revolution).11
One reason why the American Revolution did not reverberate
much beyond the parts of Europe where Palmer’s work provided rich
detail, is that the Americans themselves did not wish to export their
revolution insofar as it spoke of universal and unalienable rights of
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, particularly to slave-holding
regimes, where it was feared that the spark of rebellion might return
to enflame the fast-growing slave society in the American South. In
fact, the spark travelled in the opposite direction after 1790. It was
black rebellion in Haiti, which neither the Directory nor Napoleon
could contain, that inspired black insurrectionists in the United States,
and it was the loss of Haiti that made Louisiana so dispensable to
France and so cheap for the United States to purchase. Black
Americans aspiring for the universal rights promised in the
Declaration of Independence, as they and abolitionists understood it,
had a long struggle ahead of them, and that struggle was made all the
more difficult by the departure of some of the most talented, ideo-
logically charged black men of the revolutionary generation, who
flocked to the British to gain their freedom and then became part of
the reverse diaspora carrying them after the war to Nova Scotia, Sierra
Leone, Liberia, and even Australia.12
Another reason for the muted resonance of the American
Revolution in the broad Atlantic world and beyond is that at the time
the most ardent enthusiasts of the Americans’‘glorious cause’ became
sorely disillusioned at the sight of the new American republic beating
a retreat from antislavery inclinations that had been a part of the New
World forward-looking agenda. Yet, as we will see, the American
Revolution allowed already well-formed antislavery sentiment to
blossom into an antislavery programme of action.13 Had the
Sparks from the Altar of ’76 5

Founding Fathers grasped the nettle of slavery at a time when a

number of factors were converging to make this seem possible, as it
did to many leaders even in Virginia, the worldwide effects of the
American Revolution would have been enormously different.14 This
chapter follows the travails of several Founding Fathers, urged on by
European Friends of Liberty, in wrestling with the cancer of slavery
that they knew must be cut from the American body politic if the
revolution was to be true to its founding principles and was to usher
in a new age of universal freedom.

***

Dr Richard Price, London’s dissenting minister, tribune of religious

toleration, and friend of Benjamin Franklin, yielded to no Englishman
in his support of the American revolutionists’ struggle for independ-
ence. For this disloyalty, by his own account, he was subjected ‘to
much abuse and some danger’.And hardly any writer of the post-war
period was more fervent in believing that the American Revolution
‘in favour of universal liberty’ had opened ‘a new prospect in human
affairs’ and ushered in ‘a new aera in the history of mankind’ by
‘disseminating just sentiments of the rights of mankind and the nature
of legitimate government, by exciting a spirit of resistance to tyranny
. . . and by occasioning the establishment in America of forms of
government more equitable and more liberal than any that the world
has yet known’. Writing in 1784 – when the ink was hardly dry on
the Peace of Paris treaty that ended the American war for independ-
ence – in his Observations of the Importance of the American Revolution
and the Means of Making It a Benefit to the World, Price exulted that the
Americans, in their ‘sequestered continent’, were now providing ‘a
place of refuge for opprest men in every region of the world’ and
‘laying the foundation . . . of an empire which may be the seat of
liberty, science and virtue and from whence there is reason to hope
these sacred blessings will spread till they become universal and the
time arrives when kings and priests shall have no more power to
oppress and that ignominious slavery which has hitherto debased the
world exterminated.’15
Yet Price saw an ominous cloud hovering over North America that
compromised and would surely doom the American revolutionaries’
gift to humankind. With one-fifth of its population still in chains at
the end of the war, the Americans were living out an atrocious
contradiction. ‘Till they have [abolished slavery]’, lamented Price, ‘it
will not appear they deserve the liberty for which they have been
6 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

contending. For it is self-evident that if there are any men whom they
have a right to hold in slavery, there may be others who have had a
right to hold them in slavery. . . . Nothing can excuse the United
States if it [the abolition of slavery] is not done with as much speed,
and at the same time with as much effect, as their particular circum-
stances and situation will allow.’16
Price’s abolitionism had been influenced by John Lind, whose
Three Letters to Dr Price in 1776 challenged Price’s defence of the
American revolutionaries. An internationalist at heart and adviser to
King Stanislaus, the reform-minded Polish monarch, Lind collabo-
rated with the young philosopher Jeremy Bentham on the Ministry-
sponsored An Answer to the Declaration of the American Congress (1776),
replying to the Declaration of Independence. Lind and Bentham
laced their pamphlet with sardonic comments about American
hypocrisy in proclaiming universal freedom while keeping half a
million Africans in chains. Referring to Lord Dunmore’s proclama-
tion of November 1775, which offered freedom to all slaves and
indentured servants who escaped their masters and reached British
lines, Lind trumpeted that ‘It is their boast that they have taken up
arms in support of these their own self-evident truths – “that all men
are equal” – “that all men are endowed with the unalienable rights of
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. Is it for them to complain of
the offer of freedom held out to these wretched beings? of the offer of
reinstating them in that equality, which, in this very paper, is declared
to be the gift of God to all; in those unalienable rights, with which, in this
very paper, God is declared to have endowed all mankind?’17
Price’s comments remind us of how many of his contemporaries
acknowledged the American Revolution as an audacious, breathtak-
ing explosion of freedom unknown, as Thomas Paine put it, since the
days of Noah’s ark. His comments also remind us that the American
Revolution was also a major disappointment, most tragically to the
enslaved African Americans who hoped the moment of their deliver-
ance was at hand, but also to the Continental Friends of Liberty who
believed the Founding Fathers had betrayed the Enlightenment prin-
ciples from which their revolution derived its ideological justifica-
tions. ‘In Britain’, wrote Richard Price, ‘a negro becomes a freeman
the moment he sets his foot on British ground.’18 Why not in the new
centre of Enlightenment ideas and enlightened programmes?
Price’s comments on slavery in the new United States, though brief
and appearing at the end of his Observations, provided fodder for
abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic, who jumped to put copies
into the hands of American leaders. After receiving a number of
Sparks from the Altar of ’76 7

Price’s Observations, Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee, delegate to the

Continental Congress, distributed copies among other delegates to
the national legislature and put one in Washington’s hands. Price had
already packed off copies to Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Rush,
and John Jay, Chief Justice of the newly formed Supreme Court. To
the latter, he later delivered the acid comment that if it was true that
his comments had offended South Carolina leaders and that they
spoke for most Americans, then it appeared ‘that the people who have
struggled so bravely against being enslaved themselves are ready
enough to enslave others. . . . The friends of liberty and virtue in
Europe will be sadly disappointed and mortified’ if the American
Revolution ‘will prove only an introduction to a new scene of aristo-
cratical tyranny and human debasement.’19
Appearing almost simultaneously was Thomas Day’s philippic
mocking American pretensions to be tribunes of liberty. Like Price,
Day had supported the American’s ‘glorious cause’ but found nothing
glorious about their perpetuation of slavery.‘If there be an object truly
ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of
independency with one hand, and with the other brandishing a whip
over his affrighted slaves. . . .YES, GENTLEMEN,AS YOU ARE NO
LONGER Englishmen, I hope you will please to be men; and, as
such, admit the whole human species to a participation of your
unalienable rights.’20
Working loosely with English abolitionists such as Granville Sharp,
Thomas Day, and John Cartwright, Price became one of the cross-
English Channel reformers who pushed the American self-liberators
hard in the crucial years just after the American Revolution to
complete the freedom project upon which they had embarked. In
particular, they zeroed in on Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin, the
internationally famous trio that was best positioned to trade on the
moral capital they had accumulated in the course of founding their
nation. In this effort, the French and English reformers only loosely
coordinated their efforts; but they were keenly aware of the common
cause they were pushing and indeed were better coordinated than
most historians have allowed.
With Franklin, the cross-channel ideologues had some success.
Franklin the Philadelphia slave-owner of the 1740s and 1750s had
responded step by step to the passionate teachings of John Woolman
and Anthony Benezet, who were making the immorality of slavery a
topic of general concern on both sides of the Atlantic.21 In England
from 1757 to 1762, Franklin’s antislavery sentiment grew, partly as a
result of the flight of King, his son William Franklin’s slave, who had
8 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

taken up service as a free man in the household of a gentlewoman

outside London. Franklin was also nudged towards an antislavery
position by the unconscious black agency of another Franklin family
slave, a male child named Othello, who, according to reports from
Franklin’s wife, was making excellent progress in a new school for
Philadelphia blacks, thus disproving notions of inherent African infe-
riority. When Franklin returned to London in 1764, he began to
express himself publicly against slavery, most famously in 1772, by
which time he was in touch with early English abolitionists such as
Thomas Day and Richard Price.22
Though the war interrupted all discourse with English friends,
Franklin became more ardently antislavery when he became an
American in Paris from 1778 to 1785. While in the thick of diplo-
matic negotiations – first to bring France into an alliance with the
Americans in the war for independence and then in the extended
negotiations in Paris over a treaty of peace with Great Britain – it was
convenient and even prudent to remain on the sidelines of the
growing transatlantic debate over slavery.Yet Franklin was learning to
buckle on his armour amidst the company of the Enlightenment
figures with whom he so happily mingled – the reformer-lawyer de
Beaumont, the jurist Malesherbes, the economist Turgot, and, espe-
cially, the Abbé Raynal,Voltaire, and Condorcet. Franklin was partic-
ularly taken with Condorcet’s Reflections on Negro Slavery, published in
1781 when Franklin was at the height of his salon popularity. He
bonded with the passionate Condorcet, a man half his age, more than
with any other titan of the Enlightenment.23 Where John Adams
looked down his nose at the philosophes, thinking them naive roman-
tic revolutionaries and not moving an inch towards forthright aboli-
tionism, Franklin took the French intellectuals seriously and veered
towards using his political capital in the interest of antislavery
efforts.24
In the summer of 1782, when the peace negotiations with England
were fully in play, Franklin took a semi-public stance in quietly circu-
lating ‘A Thought Concerning the Sugar Islands’. In it, he railed
against ‘the Wars made in Africa for Prisoners to raise Sugar in
America, the Numbers slain in those Wars, the Number that being
crowded in Ships perish in the Transportation, & the Numbers that
die under the Severities of Slavery’. Given all this cruelty and
violence, a devotee of sweetness ‘could scarce look on a Morsel of
Sugar without conceiving it spotted with Human Blood’ if not ‘thor-
oughly died red’. Franklin circulated the brief essay among Benjamin
Vaughan, David Hartley, and Richard Oswald, all but making his anti-
Sparks from the Altar of ’76 9

slavery position public. Indeed, he intended his remarks to be shown

to the British government, for Oswald was a key English peace
commissioner, Vaughan was Franklin’s old friend and English
publisher of his work, and Hartley was a Member of Parliament long
involved in the peace talks.Though the essay was not published until
just before his death, Franklin by this time was not chary of speaking
firmly about the execrable system of coerced labour.25
A year later, Franklin again enlisted for duty in the ranks of the
antislavery soldiers. In a letter that he probably received in July 1783,
Anthony Benezet implored him to speak to the king of France about
the continuing Atlantic slave trade and press the argument that ‘what
an honour it would be to him [the king] & his country if he would
take the lead in putting an end to that unreasonable, inhuman &
dreadful traffick’.26 No evidence remains that Franklin made such an
intercession with the French king, but by now he surely understood
how important his support was for the friends of the enslaved. By the
time he returned to Philadelphia in September 1785, Benezet was
dead, though it may not have been lost on Franklin that at the funeral,
the largest known in Philadelphia until then, one of the speakers
vowed that ‘I would rather be Anthony Benezet in that coffin than
George Washington, with all his fame.’27
The Philadelphia to which Franklin returned had been trans-
formed not only by the return of peace and the painful adjustments
to a still roiled post-war economy but by the emergence of North
America’s largest free black community.28 Out of the shadows to lead
the emerging free black community were spirited and determined
figures such as Richard Allen and Absalom Jones. Both had recently
purchased their own freedom and stepped forward, their lowly posi-
tions and lack of any formal education notwithstanding, to create a
Free African Society, which pushed for the right of blacks to control
their own burial ground and to sow the seeds for the creation of inde-
pendent black churches and schools. Franklin never acknowledged in
his correspondence his reaction to black accomplishment and
activism, but it is reasonable to assume that he knew of the opinion
of his friend Benjamin Rush, ablaze with zeal for the cause of black
Philadelphians, that ‘such is their integrity and quiet deportment that
they [black Philadelphians] are universally preferred to white people
of similar occupations’.29
Amidst such signs of black success, so at odds with Jefferson’s
musings about black inferiority, Franklin, now an old and pain-racked
man, aligned himself with that to which he had contributed only halt-
ingly. By his eighty-first birthday, in the year the Constitutional
10 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

Convention met in Philadelphia, he was speaking against slavery with

an open heart. After accepting the ceremonial presidency of the
Pennsylvania Abolition Society on 23 April 1787, just a few weeks
before the arrival of delegates to the Constitutional Convention, the
Old Revolutionist signed a public antislavery exhortation that
declared that ‘the Creator of the world’ had made ‘of one flesh, all the
children of men’.30
Just before Franklin died on 17 April 1790, he signed his last public
documents, a strongly worded ‘Address to the Public’ from the reor-
ganized Pennsylvania Abolition Society and a petition to Congress to
cut the cancer of slavery out of the American body politic. Then he
had his last say on slavery: a biting parody aimed at a Georgia
congressman who had attacked the Quakers for introducing a peti-
tion before the first federal congress for ending the slave trade.31 In
the end, Franklin heeded one of Poor Richard’s pieces of advice:
‘Search others for their virtues, thy self for thy vices.’32 In his sojourn
from slave-holder to critic of slavery, he had been moved deeply by
the transatlantic friends of universal liberty with whom he had
mingled in Philadelphia, London, and Paris.
While English and French antislavery activists could take satisfac-
tion with Franklin’s conversion to abolitionism, the chances for
success in the new United States rested more with those who were
younger, and particularly those who were Virginians. With
Washington, the prospects of gaining an indispensable ally, at least for
a short time, seemed bright.Washington had been troubled ever since
seeing black soldiers fighting valiantly for the American cause in the
battles of Newport, Monmouth Courthouse, and, most memorably,
Yorktown, where the Rhode Island Black Regiment had removed
any lingering doubts that black men under arms would fight tena-
ciously.As the war drew to an end,Washington contemplated whether
he might be the key figure in securing the unalienable rights of man.
Pushing him hard was the dashing young Marquis de Lafayette,
who amidst the din of war had become far more to Washington than
a comrade-in-arms. From the time Washington sent the nineteen-
year-old Lafayette into battle at Brandywine in September 1777, they
became surrogate father and son.33 Lafayette had not come to the
rebelling American colonies with antislavery sentiments or even
much acquaintance with the philosophes of his day.34 Then, what we
might term an unprogrammatic black agency came into play.
Lafayette’s transformation into a stalwart abolitionist owed much to
his battlefield experiences with African Americans, most poignantly
with James Armistead, the Virginia slave who served at his side and
Sparks from the Altar of ’76 11

played a crucial role in the victory at Yorktown after infiltrating the

British lines posing as a runaway slave and returning with crucial
knowledge of the British deployments. Even before he left to return
to France before the end of the war, Lafayette had become convinced
that the flight of slaves by shoals to the British to gain their freedom
showed that a revolution that left the edifice of slavery in place was a
deeply flawed ‘glorious cause’.
After returning to France following the epic victory at Yorktown
in October 1781, the French nobleman acted on what apparently
were earlier talks with Washington about rooting slavery out of
America. When word reached Lafayette in Cadiz, Spain, that
American and British negotiators had signed a preliminary treaty of
peace on 20 January 1783, he dispatched a letter of congratulations to
‘our beloved matchless Washington’. Lafayette proposed that the
nation’s conquering hero join him in a grand experiment to free their
slaves. Lafayette would purchase an estate on the coast of French
Guiana, and there their slaves would be settled in preparation for
freedom. ‘Such an example as yours might render it a general prac-
tice’, wrote Lafayette, and he even imagined that ‘if we succeed in
America’, he would devote himself to spreading the experiment to
the West Indies. ‘If it be a wild scheme’, Lafayette concluded, ‘I had
rather be mad that way than to be thought wise on the other tack.’35
Washington did not dismiss the idea. He knew he might be the
exemplar whom others would follow. ‘I shall be happy to join you in
so laudable a work’, he wrote to Lafayette, and would welcome seeing
his adoptive son to discuss the details ‘of the business’.36 Lafayette
indeed came to Mount Vernon the next summer – in August 1784 –
where the two compatriots discussed the experiment over a period of
eleven days. William Gordon, the antislavery Boston minister who
would write one of the first histories of the American Revolution,
recalled after visiting Mount Vernon when Lafayette was there that
Washington ‘wished to get rid of his Negroes, and the Marquis wisht
that an end might be put to the slavery of all of them’.37 Gordon also
played on Washington’s enormous clout, urging that, teamed with
Lafayette,‘your joint counsels and influence’ might accomplish eman-
cipation, ‘and thereby give the finishing stroke and the last polish to
your political characters’.38
In the end, Washington withdrew from the project, though one
planter, Joseph Mayo, had freed more than 150 slaves in the hope of
encouraging other Virginia planters.39 Yet slave-holding gnawed at
Washington, all the more intensely as he became the nation’s first
president in 1790. If Henry Wiencek is correct,Washington drafted a
12 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

public statement in which he would announce as he assumed the

presidency that he was freeing some of his slaves and preparing others
for eventual emancipation. Had this occurred, it would have estab-
lished the precedent that the man elected to the highest office in the
new republic should disavow slavery before taking office. The ripple
effect was incalculable.40
Washington drew back from this breathtaking action, but early in
his second presidential term, he told his private secretary,Tobias Lear,
of his hope ‘to liberate a certain species of property which I possess,
very repugnantly to my own feelings’. Wiencek explains that
Washington had ‘experienced a moral epiphany’ and did not, in the
early 1790s, believe that the obstacles to emancipation set forth by
Lower South politicians were ‘insuperable to him at all’.41
Disappointed at Washington’s retreat from the grand experiment,
Lafayette wrote to Washington with uncommon bitterness: ‘I would
never have drawn my sword in the cause of America, if I could have
conceived that thereby I was founding a land of slavery.’42 Washington
would remain troubled by slavery; but his usefulness to the abolition-
ists on both sides of the Atlantic from this point forward was limited.
It bears remembering, however, that Lafayette’s scheme remained in
Washington’s mind, finally bearing fruit when the first American pres-
ident’s will revealed after his death in 1799 that he had provided for
the freedom of his slaves.The will was published in many newspapers
and his words – ‘All my Negroes are to be free’ – were featured in
eulogies up and down the eastern seaboard.43
Of all the Americans that European abolitionists wished to enlist in
the cause, Jefferson was undoubtedly the most important, both
because of his enormous reputation on both sides of the Atlantic and
because, as one of Virginia’s major slave-owners (and the largest in
Albemarle County), the precedent he would set if he were to take a
lead in purging himself of slave-holding would almost certainly have
global repercussions.As William Lloyd Garrison would say many years
later,‘What an all-conquering influence must have attended his illus-
trious example’ if he had seized the moment.44
Once in Paris in late 1784, Jefferson embraced French reformers.
Renewing their relationship established late in the American
Revolution, Lafayette became one of Jefferson’s closest and most
important friends in Paris.45 At Lafayette’s home and in his social
circle, Jefferson communed with other French intellectuals, fellow
leaders of the Enlightenment, including Chastellux, Condorcet,
Buffon, La Rochefoucauld, Volney, Raynal, and the Abbé Gregoire.
Most important among them were the Abbé Raynal, fierce
Sparks from the Altar of ’76 13

campaigner against slavery, and the Marquis de Condorcet. Born in

the same year as Condorcet, Jefferson was especially close to the man
who stood as informal heir to Voltaire and was revising the monu-
mental Encyclopédie. Dubbed the ‘snowy volcano’ for his calm exterior
but passionate views, Condorcet topped his reform agenda with the
abolition of slavery and the conferring of equal rights on women. As
early as 1776 he had called slavery a ‘horrible violation of human
rights’, and in 1781 he had written a widely circulated treatise that
labelled slavery as a criminal act. Jefferson translated Condorcet’s essay
himself, rendering one sentence as even if ‘the human race unani-
mously voted approval [of slavery], the crime would remain a
crime’.46
Meanwhile, Jefferson learned of the efforts of the English aboli-
tionists Granville Sharp and William Wilberforce, who were seeking
the end of the slave trade and the amelioration, if not the extinction,
of slavery. The fiercely determined Sharp was also concerned about
the fate of the black poor in England, some of whom were African
American veterans of the British army in America who had fallen on
hard times in the English capital. Sharp helped to implement a plan
in 1786, with which Afro-Britons concurred, by which they would
settle in an area to be called Sierra Leone on Africa’s west coast.That
the English had no title to this land bothered nobody except the
Mende people who lived there. Later, Sharp’s scheme to populate
Sierra Leone embraced over one thousand Black Loyalists then living
unhappily in Nova Scotia.47
The influence of French and English abolitionists on Jefferson
during his first several years in Paris was palpable. Prizing his inclu-
sion among the intelligentsia, relishing their admiration of his Notes
on the State of Virginia, and far away from his Virginia plantations, he
found no discomfort in aligning himself with a circle of cosmopoli-
tan intellectuals who were decidedly antislavery and prepared to do
something about it. None of his French friends seem to have chal-
lenged him about the black inferiority he had alleged in the Notes;
they were simply inclined to believe that the degradation of blacks
could be lifted along with the chains of slavery.
It speaks to Jefferson’s inner turmoil that while he was telling
American friends that the time was not ripe for floating an emanci-
pation scheme, he was eager to redeem the Americans’ reputation in
Europe by telling European friends that the time was right for this. In
response to Richard Price’s finger-wagging letter of July 1785,
Jefferson replied that in the northern states ‘you may find here and
there an opponent to your doctrine [of ending slavery] as you may
14 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

find here and there a robber and a murderer, but in no greater

number’. Southward of the Chesapeake, he continued, most would
oppose all emancipationist schemes, but in Virginia, ‘from the mouth
to the head of the Chesapeake with some degree of certainty, . . . the
bulk of the people will approve it in theory, and it will find a
respectable minority ready to adopt it in practice, a minority which
for weight and worth of character preponderates against the greater
number who have not the courage to divest their families of a prop-
erty which however keeps their consciences inquiet’. Marylanders, he
explained, were not as ready ‘to begin the redress of this enormity’,
but here too the ‘spectacle of justice in conflict with avarice and
oppression’ was tilting towards abolitionism because of ‘the influx into
office of young men grown and growing up’ who ‘have sucked in the
principles of liberty as it were with their mother’s milk’.48
With these words, Jefferson all but said that leading men of
conscience who wanted to abolish slavery, supported by ‘the bulk of
the people’, needed only courage to place the ‘weight and worth of
[their] character’ behind an emancipation scheme. Yet Jefferson was
not ready to display that courage. Part of his reluctance was concern
about his political aspirations, and linked to this was the fear of
offending friends and fellow planters ready to charge him with
betraying his class. He had heard early in 1786 that the Virginia legis-
lature had taken up the revised constitution he had drafted in 1783
and had scornfully rejected a petition calling for a general manumis-
sion of Virginia’s slaves.This, reported Madison,‘was rejected without
dissent, but not without an avowed patronage of its principle by
sundry respectable members’.49 In this situation, those sympathetic to
Jefferson’s proposal to free all slaves born after the passage of the law
once they reached adulthood held back the measure, reasoning that
since the legislature had rejected the petition for a general emancipa-
tion they would scorn and revile proponents of such a weighty
attempt to change the course of Virginia’s history – and that of the
nation.
This was much on Jefferson’s mind in 1786 when he was mingling
with French intellectuals who yearned to see America wash its hands
of slavery and bring its laws into conformity with its revolutionary
principles. His friend Lafayette kept up his fusillade against the weak-
kneed American leaders, writing to John Adams, now the American
minister to England, that ‘in the cause of my black brethren, I feel
myself warmly interested and most decidedly side, so far as respects
them, against the white part of mankind. . . . It is to me a matter of
great anxiety and concern, to find that this [slave] trade is sometimes
Sparks from the Altar of ’76 15

perpetuated under the flag of liberty, our dear and noble stripes to
which virtue and glory have been constant standard bearers.’50 Also
pressing Jefferson hard was Jean Nicolas Démeunier, the young
French thinker and devotee of the Abbé Raynal who was charged
with preparing a long essay on the United States for Condorcet’s
revised Encyclopédie méthodique. Why, asked Démeunier, in a series of
queries to Jefferson in 1786, had Virginia passed a revised legal code
without some promise of emancipation? Eager to have Virginia’s
reputation saved from opprobrious comments in a book that was sure
to reach an international audience, Jefferson waffled in his reply.
Though he and the abolition-minded George Wythe were unable to
participate in the debate, he said, ‘men of virtue’ were not lacking to
press cogent arguments for ending slavery; but ‘they saw that the
moment of doing it with success was not yet arrived, and that an
unsuccessful effort, as too often happens, would only rivet still closer
the chains of bondage, and retard the moment of delivery to this
oppressed description of men.’51
Continuing to avow his disgust with slavery, Jefferson scourged the
man who ‘inflicts on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is
fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion
to oppose’. But from this unequivocal position Jefferson retreated to
a position that would soon steer the course he maintained for the
next four decades of his life. If he and his friends could not do what
they knew must be done, they must patiently await God’s interven-
tion – ‘the workings of an overruling providence’. When the slaves’
‘groans shall have involved heaven itself in darkness’, he assured
Démeunier, ‘doubtless a god of justice will awaken to their distress,
and by diffusing light and liberality among their oppressors, or at
length by his exterminating thunder’, slavery would come to an end.
Jefferson was experimenting, to use David Brion Davis’s phrasing,
‘with the locutions which for the rest of his life would characterize
his response to such questions’ about slavery. ‘We do not ordinarily
associate Jeffersonian democracy with a quietistic surrender to fate’,
Davis writes. ‘And what would the younger generation whom he
trusted to solve the slavery problem think when they heard their
intellectual mentor recommending faith in providence as a substitute
for social action?’52
Shortly after his reply to Démeunier, Jefferson fell into a liaison
that indirectly connected him with a clarion black voice becoming an
important part of the English abolitionist movement. Entranced with
the languorous, twenty-seven-year-old Maria Cosway, the loneliness
of the Monticello widower converged with Cosway’s marital unhap-
16 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

piness in a summer and autumn of passion. Meanwhile, across the

Channel in London, the black servant of the Cosway family was
writing the fieriest – and longest – abolitionist pamphlet of the late
eighteenth century. Ottobah Cugoano, enslaved at age thirteen in
West Africa in 1770, had gained his freedom in England in 1772, was
baptized at St James’s Church the next year, and had entered the
service of Richard Cosway in about 1784. By this time, he was
becoming a leader of London’s Committee for the Relief of the Black
Poor and a friend of the reformer Scipione Piattoli, adviser to Poland’s
King Stanislaus and drafter of the Third of May Constitution. One of
those remarkable Africans who gained literacy and put it to use, the
twenty-six-year-old black Londoner was at work on his Thoughts and
Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of
the Human Species at just the time the woman of the household in
which he served, away from her foppish husband, described as ‘a
preposterous little Dresden china manikin’, was consorting with
Jefferson in Paris in 1786. Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments came off
the press in 1787, one of the first antislavery pamphlets to flow from
the pen of an African-born ex-slave.A friend of Olaudah Equiano and
Thomas Clarkson, Cugoano became part of the growing interna-
tional campaign to end the slave trade and slavery.53
Did Jefferson read Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments while playing
cat and mouse with the wife of Cugoano’s master? Jefferson could
have read either the first edition of 1787 or a French translation
published in Paris the next year. The Cosways certainly knew of the
publication, for it was extraordinary for a person serving in the house-
hold of the court painter to publish a book on a touchy subject. Maria
Cosway was fascinated with music, art, and Jefferson, so she may have
found the muscular attack on slavery by her servant an inconvenient
topic of discussion with her paramour. But Jefferson’s head, if not his
heart, must have caught the poignancy that the woman who had
aroused passion in him as never before also held in her employ a
former slave who had gained a public platform in London through his
attack on slavery.
The year 1788 marked a turn, if only briefly, in Jefferson’s thinking
about his role as slave master.With Cugoano’s attack on slavery circu-
lating widely, Jefferson’s friend Brissot de Warville took the lead in
founding the Société des Amis des Noirs as a political lobby to end
France’s involvement in slavery and the slave trade. Lafayette,
Condorcet, and other of Jefferson’s friends quickly joined and
implored the Master of Monticello to add his name. Dodging behind
diplomatic protocol, Jefferson argued that he could not join for fear
Sparks from the Altar of ’76 17

of charges that he was meddling in French politics (though he soon

became involved in the intricate politics of the French Revolution).
Yet Jefferson was caught up in the vibrant salon discussions that typi-
cally turned from gardens, literature, science, and philosophy to the
universal rights of man. Amidst this, after receiving a letter from
Edward Bancroft asking his views on an experiment in Virginia,
where Joseph Mayo, a Quaker, had freed his scores of slaves and then
hired them as tenant farmers, Jefferson announced an astounding
change of position.Though he had only fragmentary reports that the
Quaker experiment had not gone well, perhaps because freed slaves
without title to their own property would not work hard, Jefferson
vowed that ‘I am decided on my . . . return to America to
. . . import as many Germans as I have grown slaves.’ He would allot
fifty acres to each family, slave and German intermingled, and ‘place
all on the footing of the Metayers [leaseholders] of Europe. Their
children shall be brought up as others are in habits of property and
foresight, and I have no doubt but that they will be good citizens.’ He
would retain from the marketable commodities they harvested ‘a
moderate portion of it as may be a just equivalent for the use of the
lands they labour and the stocks and other necessary advances’.54
Jefferson’s plan to intermingle freed slaves and German immigrants
on his Virginia land sharply reversed the conviction he so firmly
expressed in his Notes on Virginia that emancipated slaves would have
to be sent to some distant land because admixing with whites would
never work peacefully. Is it possible that he had changed his mind not
only because of his ardent friendship with his Enlightenment friends
in Paris and his amorous connection with Cugoano’s employer but
also because of another warmth that was developing, at just this
moment, with a beautiful young woman barely beyond adolescence
in his own Paris household – the charming teenager Sally Hemings?55

***

For all the comments above regarding the limits of the American
Revolution’s ramifications outside of Europe, R. R. Palmer’s focus on
the reverberations of the revolution within Europe bears amendment,
as the discussion above suggests, in the matter of race, slavery, and the
claims of enslaved Africans in the Americas to the universal rights
asserted in the Declaration of Independence. In the half-century after
independence, the United States made its descent into the unenviable
and contradictory status of slave-holding republic. Though the slave
trade had ended in 1808, an illegal slave trade still flourished and,
18 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

through natural increase, the slave population had quadrupled from

half a million when the American Revolution began to nearly two
million in 1820. Jefferson’s Friends of Liberty on the other side of the
Atlantic, understanding that the United States had descended into a
‘racial Thermidor’, would not leave the Sage of Monticello alone.56
Coming to remind him of the overdue universal freedom promised in
his Declaration of Independence was the Marquis de Lafayette, who
visited Monticello in 1824 and 1825.
For eleven days Lafayette stayed at Monticello, sharing meals and
earnest conversation with the mansion’s master. Brushing aside the
fervent idolatry he had encountered in scores of villages and cities,
Lafayette did not hide his bitterness at the growth of slavery and the
vast racial gulf that now yawned between whites and blacks. Speaking
openly in the presence of Israel, Jefferson’s slave, who waited on their
tables and stood postillion on his master’s carriage, Lafayette told
Jefferson ‘that the slaves ought to be free; no man could rightfully hold
ownership to his brother man’; and that ‘he gave his best services to
and spent his money on behalf of the Americans freely because he felt
that they were fighting for a great and noble principle: the freedom
of mankind, that instead of all being free a portion were held in
bondage’, which made him grieve. Israel later related how he ‘treas-
ured [the conversation] up in [my] heart’. But Jefferson demurred. He
contended that slavery should be extinguished, but that the proper
time had not yet arrived, not indicating, Israel recalled, ‘when or in
what manner’.57
In what amounted to a last-ditch effort to rescue Jefferson from his
own demons, Lafayette did not soften his displeasure with slavery after
Jefferson adopted a defensive posture.The French hero ‘never missed
an opportunity to defend the right which all men without exception have
to liberty’, wrote his secretary, who accompanied him throughout the
thirteen-month American pilgrimage.58 Such forthrightness soon led
Virginians to cordon off slaves as the French hero passed through the
state from town to town. This became apparent after his travelling
party left Monticello. After four days at James Madison’s Montpelier
estate, Lafayette proceeded to Fredericksburg. Slave owners there were
asked to keep their slaves out of sight when the procession made its
way through the town, while ‘all colored people are warned that they
are not to appear on any of the streets through which the procession
will pass’.59 In Savannah, Georgia, white authorities similarly banned
blacks from all celebrations, but that did not stop Lafayette from
searching out – after the parade – an old slave he had known nearly
half a century before. Once again, the universalistic principles of the
Sparks from the Altar of ’76 19

American Revolution were emanating from the eastern rather than

western rim of the Atlantic world.
By this time, African Americans were looking to England and its
Canadian province in the hope that ‘the cause of America’, as Paine
had phrased it,‘is in a great measure the cause of all mankind’. Indeed,
black Americans had been embracing Great Britain, not the United
States, as the avatar of freedom since the War of 1812 when thousands
of Chesapeake area slaves claimed their freedom, as they had done in
the American Revolution, by fleeing to the arms of the British army
where freedom awaited them. Moreover, they knew as well as every-
one else that, after the British and American abolition of the slave
trade beginning in 1808, it was the British Royal Navy that more
strenuously enforced the ban than the republican American govern-
ment.60 America, it was widely thought among those who were
black, had betrayed their revolution. It would take some time to
express this in the starkest terms, but by the 1840s Frederick Douglass
would say of the United States: ‘It is not a true democracy, but a
bastard republicanism that enslaves one-sixth of the population.’61
Mastering the art of dramatic pronouncements,Thomas Paine was
not far from the mark in 1776 by opining that the American
Revolution would affect posterity ‘even to the end of time’. At that
time, only a few months after arriving in America, he was hopeful for
both American independence and a radical cleansing of colonial
society. Years later, returning to the United States in 1802 after a
tumultuous experience in revolutionary France, he choked at what he
found. In a series of letters ‘To the Citizens of the United States’, the
threadbare Paine held to account the Americans in whom he had
invested so much hope. Calling his missives ‘sparks from the altar of
Seventy-Six’, he lamented the retreat in America from ‘a new system of
government in which the rights of all men should be preserved’.62
Paine would carry such disappointments to his grave. Among them
was the growth of slavery in the American South. What Jefferson
imagined would blossom into an ‘empire of liberty’ in North America
was turning into an empire of slavery, in part because the Sage of
Monticello had held himself in bondage to the southern patrician
slaveocracy rather than heeding the supplications of his transatlantic
friends, who had argued for a quarter-century before he died that
Jefferson could secure his place in history by stepping forward on the
‘boisterous sea of liberty’ to lead the abolitionist crusade.
2
The French Revolution in Global
Context

Lynn Hunt

Until the past ten years or so, historians have given largely internalist
accounts of the French Revolution. Most scholarly attention has
focused on causes such as food shortages and on major mechanisms,
e.g., the push for popular democracy or the resistance to women’s
rights, that were internal to the history of metropolitan or ‘hexagonal’
France. Few denied that the French Revolution had a global dimen-
sion, but that global dimension was usually seen either as an effect of
the geopolitical ambitions of the revolutionary leadership or as an
overseas echo of radical revolutionary ideology at home.The arrow of
influence always pointed outward, from mainland France, and espe-
cially from Paris, to other places, including the French colonies.
Mainland French historians were only too happy to note the far
distant reverberations of their French Revolution, but by and large
they rejected efforts to make the French Revolution part of a broader
Atlantic movement, as R. R. Palmer had argued it should be. Indeed,
those most favourable to Palmer’s argument tended to come from
outside of France or from the periphery of the French mainland.1
Hardly anyone or any country was exempt from the impact of
French revolutionary ideas and wars. Radicals in the United States,
Great Britain, the western German states, and various Italian cities
embraced revolutionary ideals and tried to apply them at home, with
mixed results. Between 1792 and 1796, citizens of the new United
States witnessed more celebrations of the French Revolution than of
Washington’s birthday or even Independence Day.2 Four Scottish
radicals were transported to Australia in 1794 for sedition because
they participated in pro-revolutionary organizations such as the
Scottish Association of the Friends of the People (an echo of Jean-
Paul Marat’s notorious newspaper, The Friend of the People).3 Their
fates paled next to the nearly one hundred republicans, including

20
The French Revolution in Global Context 21

leading intellectuals, who were executed in Naples in 1799 when

royalists supported by the British and Russian navies forced the
French to withdraw their support.4
Echoes of 1789 in the French colonies were even louder, as free
men of colour demanded equal political rights with their white coun-
terparts, who in turn insisted that the national French government
should let the colonial assemblies, exclusively white, decide on all
questions of status. In August 1791 a slave insurrection broke out in
the largest and richest French colony, Saint Domingue, and after
repeated turns and twists, the French National Convention abolished
slavery in February 1794. The abolition and the insurrection that
prompted it rocked the world of slave-holding all over the Americas.
When Napoleon failed to retake Saint Domingue in 1802, where he
intended to reintroduce slavery, he gave up on his ambition to gain
lands across the globe and sold ‘Louisiana’, recently acquired from the
Spanish, to the United States. The Louisiana territory of nearly a
million square miles included the land of what is now fourteen states
in the United States.
The French revolutionary armies often brought their ideals with
them and tried to impose them, for better or worse. ‘Sister republics’
were set up under French direction in the Swiss cantons (Helvetic and
Lemanic republics), the Rhineland (Cisrhenian, Mainz), the
Netherlands (Batavian), and especially the Italian states (as many as
fifteen different ones, including the ill-fated Republic in Naples).
Venturing even further afield, Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt, a
province of the Ottoman Empire, in 1798 in order to cut British
access to India. He defeated local armies, set up new assemblies, and
tried to establish individual ownership of property, but mainly
succeeded in arousing resistance to French intrusion. His efforts to
block the British in India failed, but not before one important Indian
ruler sent out an explicit call for help in fighting the British. Tipu
Sultan, the ruler of the south Indian kingdom of Mysore, curried the
support of a ragtag band of French soldiers and freebooters who set
up a Jacobin Club in his capital of Seringapatam and helped ‘citizen’
Tipu fight the British in 1799, to no avail.5 Tipu died in the climac-
tic battle, but clearly French revolutionary ideas did not, for the
French tricolour and Napoleonic eagle would appear again and again,
and not just in France. When he declared the independence of
Vietnam in 1945, Ho Chi Minh opened with the statement of what
he termed an undeniable truth, drawn from the American Declaration
of Independence – ‘All men are created equal; they are endowed by
their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; among these are Life,
22 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness’ – which he immediately

followed with the opening article of the French Declaration of the
Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789: ‘All men are born free and with
equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights.’6
Historians of the French Revolution have begun to pay more
attention to these kinds of connections to the broader world. The
most intense focus of interest has been the Haitian Revolution (Saint
Domingue became Haiti in 1804) and its links to the French
Revolution.This work has shown not only that the events in France’s
richest colony Saint Domingue were influenced by what transpired in
France but also the reverse, that events in France were influenced by
what transpired in the colonies. To what extent and to what end
remains up for debate, as David Geggus’s chapter in this volume
demonstrates very forcefully. Work on the colonies has not entirely
dislodged the internalist account, however; often it serves to simply
enlarge what is considered internal, that is, what is part of France
itself.What is needed now is not an exclusively externalist account, in
which external causes and influences replace the internal ones. More
attention to those external causes and influences would be most
welcome, but in the end we need an account that can persuasively
link external and internal causes, effects, and processes.
Many questions remain to be answered if a truly global account is
to gain credibility. Can popular violence and the aspiration for
popular sovereignty, for example, be best understood in a global
context, a national one, or a local one? How should a global contex-
tualization be undertaken, that is, what is the relevant frame of refer-
ence for determining external causes and influences: the European
powers, the rivalry with Great Britain, the Atlantic world, or a truly
global context? Is the aim to show parallel developments or converg-
ing ones (as C. A. Bayly calls them) or interconnected ones?7 And
what is the larger metanarrative that results from global contextual-
ization? Finally, and not least, can such an account incorporate, rather
than efface, the many contributions made by local studies and by
examinations of gender relations and other cultural processes, which
have often been most fruitfully studied on the local, or at least nation-
state, level? These are the questions that I hope to consider in admit-
tedly schematic fashion.8

The staying power of the internalist account

The internalist account enjoyed such staying power because histori-
ans of opposing political stripes all operated from the same presuppo-
The French Revolution in Global Context 23

sition that the mainland nation-state was the relevant frame of refer-
ence for the French Revolution. It is perhaps surprising that the colo-
nial aspect would disappear so much from view, since in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries the French officially considered at
least some colonies as integral parts of the nation-state, but disappear
it did. In France, colonial history became a separate subject, and it
figured little in the interpretations of the French Revolution.
Anglophone scholars followed their lead, including even R. R.
Palmer, who devoted only one page to the Haitian Revolution in the
second volume of his work on the Atlantic revolutions. He had ten
pages on the failed Polish revolution of 1794.9
As far as I can determine, there is no real political difference on this
subject. In the many thousands of pages in Jean Jaurès’s socialist
history of France, 1789–1900 (published in 1901–8), there is one page
devoted to slavery under the Old Regime and one to projects for its
abolition. François Furet does not mention slavery or the colonies in
his influential Interpreting the French Revolution (1989). Simon Schama
gives one sentence in his 950 pages of Citizens (1989) to the slave
uprising of 1791 and then only to explain the high price of sugar in
Paris in 1792. The blurb for the 2004 reprinting of Yves Benot’s
pioneering book of 1988 on La Révolution française et la fin des colonies
(1789–1794) shows just how little had changed even then.This is, he
says, a ‘little studied question because, with the exception of Jaurès’,
though I might dispute him there, ‘for the principal historians of the
Revolution – Michelet, Mathiez, Lefebvre, Soboul – one might say
that the colonies, the slave trade, slavery, all that is but a negligible
aspect in comparison to the great French and European problems. In
the same way, the hexagonal collective memory seems to have forgot-
ten these events for a long time.’10
The example of Tocqueville shows just how thoroughly the blind-
ers kept this subject from view. The colonies and slavery are never
directly discussed in his classic treatment The Old Regime and the
French Revolution, published in 1856. Indeed, the only time the
colonies are mentioned is in a passage about the French peasants:
people believe that the peasants only work because they are threat-
ened with starvation, Tocqueville observes, which is much the same
argument that is used about the Negroes in our colonies. Yet this
oversight cannot be explained by lack of knowledge or even interest,
since in 1839 Tocqueville was named to be spokesman for a parlia-
mentary commission established to consider the abolition of slavery
in the French colonies. His report was subsequently published by an
abolitionist society. Moreover, Tocqueville had discussed slavery time
24 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

and again in his 1835 essay Democracy in America. So it is not ideology,

politics, or racism that prompts historians to neglect the colonial
dimension of the French Revolution. It is the working of what came
to seem self-evident: that the Revolution has to do with France
defined as the traditional ‘hexagon’.11
Needless to say, the internalist account was never exclusively inter-
nalist. Tocqueville’s analysis of France’s social and political structure
rested on explicit comparisons with Germany and England because
the three had such similar institutions originally but then developed
in such different directions. Moreover, Tocqueville’s underlying aim
was the development of a metanarrative about the rise of egalitarian-
ism, which was hardly exclusively French and was in many important
respects derived from his prior study of democracy in America. Still,
the struggle over the remnants of feudalism and the rise of egalitari-
anism in France took place for Tocqueville within the metropolitan
borders. Although many nineteenth- and twentieth-century histori-
ans of the French Revolution might not have pursued Tocqueville’s
aggressive comparative programme, they almost always gave some
weight to competition with Great Britain as an ultimate cause. The
bankruptcy of the crown in 1787, from which all else followed, had
to be traced back to the losses in the Seven Years War and the desire
for revenge that animated the expensive support of American
independence. Yet this recognition of great power rivalry did not
necessarily point in a truly global direction. Indeed, it almost never
did.
Two examples will have to suffice to make this point. Even in
Theda Skocpol’s theoretically acute attempt to take into account what
she calls ‘the international and world-historical contexts’ of the
French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions, these contexts only supply
causes for social revolution. The revolutions that result are viewed as
events of the metropole alone. Even more telling is the example of
Bailey Stone, who published a ‘global-historical perspective’ on the
French Revolution in 2002.While he gives great prominence to the
Seven Years War, the War of American Independence, and the general
diplomatic context in Europe, he fails to mention slavery, Saint
Domingue, or the Haitian Revolution. In other words, acknowledg-
ing the influence of diplomatic, military, and international financial
factors does not necessarily translate into a ‘global’ account. It has
proved very difficult to treat the Revolution itself (as distinguished
from its causes or effects) in other than an internalist fashion.12
The French Revolution in Global Context 25

New efforts at internationalization

The international influence of the French Revolution has long been
recognized, especially by historians working in places other than
France. Revolutionary ideas and institutions travelled far and wide,
whether under the coercive impact of Republican and Napoleonic
armies or by the gentler but often no less momentous means of
example and inspiration.The ideological and institutional maps of the
nineteenth century were redrawn: slaves successfully revolted and set
up an independent state in Haiti; many other new nations appeared as
well (most of Latin America gained its independence from Spain in
the 1820s after the Spanish had been weakened by Napoleonic domi-
nation); nationalism took shape in reaction against the French;
serfdom, legal torture, and official religious intolerance were abolished
in some places; the techniques of the incipient police state were
perfected, to name just a few examples.
Edmund Burke sensed the magnitude of the event already in 1790,
and he is worth quoting at some length because he instantly grasped
what was at stake:

It appears to me as if I were in a great crisis, not of the affairs of France

alone, but of all Europe, perhaps of more than Europe. All circumstances
taken together, the French Revolution is the most astonishing that has
hitherto happened in the world.The most wonderful things are brought
about in many instances by means the most absurd and ridiculous; in the
most ridiculous modes; and, apparently, by the most contemptible instru-
ments. Everything seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and
ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of
follies. In viewing this monstrous tragi-comic scene, the most opposite
passions necessarily succeed, and sometimes mix with each other in the
mind; alternate contempt and indignation; alternate laughter and tears;
alternate scorn and horror.

Striking in Burke’s rendition is not just the magnitude of the break he

detects and its potential worldwide significance but also the difficulty
he has in pinning down the modes of transformation: ‘everything
seems out of nature’. Though Burke himself followed events in the
British Empire closely – he played a key role in the impeachment of
Warren Hastings, Governor of Bengal – he treated the French
Revolution as an entirely internal affair, except for its example to the
rest of the world. If he had put the Revolution in the global context
that he himself suggests is relevant, he might have been able to make
more sense of those ‘most ridiculous modes’ of transformation.13
26 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

In recent years, the most fruitful area for new research on the inter-
national dimension of the French Revolution has been the Haitian
Revolution. The mulattos of Saint Domingue (as Haiti was known
before independence) rose first in October 1790 but were defeated by
a combined force of planter militias and French troops. Then in
August 1791 the slaves began their massive uprising that eventually
forced the French to agree to abolish slavery in 1794. When
Napoleon tried to re-establish slavery in the Caribbean in 1802, the
former slaves on Saint Domingue fought his expeditionary force and
eventually made them withdraw, opening the way to the declaration
of the independence of Haiti. The history of these events and the
structural conditions and political processes that made them possible
had long been ignored, despite the best efforts of C. L. R. James to
draw attention to them in his pioneering book of 1938, The Black
Jacobins.The trickle of work that appeared on this subject in the 1980s
and early 1990s has now, however, swelled into a veritable flood as
younger scholars and even older ones who made their reputations in
other fields (Elizabeth Colwill in women’s history and Jeremy Popkin
in the history of the press, for example) have turned their attention in
this direction. It is perhaps not surprising that though British and
Caribbean scholars first got the ball rolling (James was Trinidadian,
Michel-Rolphe Trouillot was Haitian, and Robin Blackburn was
British), American historians of the French Revolution have now
picked it up, because the Haitian story is so clearly related to that of
slavery in the Americas more generally. French scholars too are now
joining in, as can be seen by the recent book (2007) by Florence
Gauthier on the mulatto Julien Raimond and his activism against a
growing ‘aristocracy of the epidermis’.14
There are many good reasons why the Haitian Revolution should
be at the forefront of efforts to put the French Revolution in a global
context. Saint Domingue was the richest single colony in the
Americas by all accounts, thanks to its role in sugar production, and
home in 1789 to 500,000 slaves, most of them born in Africa. Slaves
made up 89 per cent of the colony’s population, which had more than
tripled since 1750.The entire United States had 700,000 slaves, and in
the state with the highest proportion of them, South Carolina, slaves
made up 60 per cent of the population. The global circulation of
people (slaves, merchants, sailors, immigrants), commodities (sugar,
tobacco, coffee, cotton, indigo), and ideas (independence, rights,
racism) combined with an exceptionally complex diplomatic and
military situation to make Saint Domingue an international hot spot,
especially after the slave uprising began to make gains.
The French Revolution in Global Context 27

It has been easier to show the influence of the Haitian Revolution

in the Americas than back in mainland France. As planters and their
families began to flee Saint Domingue in great numbers, often for the
USA, an original distrust of the refugees, who were for the most part
monarchists after all, turned into growing alarm about the slave revolt.
In 1793 some 6,000 colonists came to US port towns along with
thousands more servants and slaves.Thomas Jefferson wrote to James
Monroe on 14 July 1793: ‘I become daily more and more convinced
that all the West India islands will remain in the hands of the people
of colour, and a total expulsion of the whites sooner or later take
place. It is high time we should foresee the bloody scenes which our
children certainly, and possibly ourselves (South of Patowmac) have to
wade through, and try to avert them.’ Jefferson, like the British but for
different reasons, encouraged Napoleon to retake the colony, but once
he saw the size of the expeditionary forces sent to accomplish the
task, he changed tack and allowed US merchants to supply those
resisting Napoleon. He ended up with Louisiana, which Napoleon
sold after his soldiers became bogged down.15
The other Caribbean islands and South American countries also
felt the impact, in some cases immediately. Within a month of the
initial uprising in 1791, Jamaican slaves were singing songs about it.
Since 350,000 slaves lived on Cuba and Jamaica, a canoe-ride away
from Saint Domingue, the threat must have been palpable. Rumours
of slave resistance and revolt spread far and wide, despite the unwill-
ingness of the new Haitian government to explicitly encourage them
in the face of continuing diplomatic isolation. The United States,
France, and Great Britain refused to recognize Haiti even after they
had recognized the independence of the many South American coun-
tries. In 1816, Haiti’s President Pétion helped arm Simon Bolívar and
allowed hundreds of Haitian fighters to sail with him to contest
Spanish domination. In return Bolívar promised to try to abolish
slavery wherever he succeeded. Many men of colour and slaves joined
his army of liberation, and all the new Spanish American republics
abolished the slave trade. They abolished slavery itself between 1829
(Mexico) and 1853. Slavery continued in colonial Cuba and imperial
Brazil, as well as in the southern United States, but the Haitian
example inspired abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic.16
Much of my account of this international influence is taken from
Robin Blackburn, whose work shows how the broader, that is, global,
view is more easily taken by those offering a synthesis or comparative
analysis based on available research rather than original research in
often recalcitrant archives. With the exception of the magnificent
28 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

transatlantic slave trade database, which was decades in the making out
of bits and pieces found here and there, historians have very few sets
of data that allow systematic comparison between countries, much less
the tracing of global patterns. The kind of work done by Laurent
Dubois, John Garrigus, and Elizabeth Colwill in notarial archives has
revolutionized our understanding of the life of slaves and free blacks in
Guadeloupe and Saint Domingue, but it is work that requires great
patience, care, and a steady building up of information before new
generalizations can be hazarded. What they and others have shown,
nonetheless, is the way slaves and people of colour shaped the events
in the Caribbean. In this way, the perspective laid out by James – and
long before him, by Marcus Rainsford in his history of Haiti of 1805
– has steadily gained ground. No one would now deny the significance
of the Haitian Revolution or its close links to the revolution in main-
land France, though in his chapter in this volume David Geggus offers
an important reinterpretation of some of the current orthodoxy.17
Less systematically investigated to date has been the influence of
events in the Caribbean on ‘internal’ French politics. The basic
outlines of the story are well known: the influence of the Abbé
Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes, with its fiery denunciation of
European colonialism and prediction of the appearance of a Black
Spartacus; the emergence of French abolitionism in the 1780s and
especially the founding of the Society of the Friends of Blacks in
1788 with its prominent members, including Condorcet, Lafayette,
Grégoire, and Mirabeau; and the intense and evolving debates over
the place of the colonies within the new constitution and especially
the status of free blacks and ultimately, under pressure, slaves, the slave
trade, and slavery itself.While it is probably true that most deputies to
the Estates General and then the National Assembly did not want to
even think about the abolition of the slave trade or slavery (slavery
was nonetheless abolished in 1794), it was much harder to dismiss the
rights of free blacks after 1789. The 27,000 free blacks and mulattos
of Saint Domingue owned one-third of the land and one-quarter of
the slaves in the colony and by their own account offered a bulwark
against disintegration of the slave economy. On what grounds, other
than racism, could they be denied political participation in the new
order?
What is missing in this story of the French reaction to events in the
colonies is a broader view, both of the place of France within the
global frame and of the colonies’ impact on revolutionary events
themselves. French historians have yet to produce an analogue to
David Armitage’s study The Ideological Origins of the British Empire
The French Revolution in Global Context 29

(2000), though Emma Rothschild is in a sense in the midst of prepar-

ing one with her various studies from different vantage points of the
French empire.18 Much much more needs to done on the way the
French conceptualized – or did not conceptualize – their empire,
both its parts and as a whole.Too often the desire for revenge against
the English seems to be the only global cause cited for the outbreak
of the French Revolution. Similarly, much more needs to be done to
uncover the ways in which events in the colonies after 1789 forced
the French to rethink their imperial ambitions. Napoleon’s efforts to
re-establish slavery – successful in all but Saint Domingue – have
made it seem that no rethinking took place and moreover that all the
real innovation was taking place in French relations with Europe and
the Middle East. I suspect that we just haven’t looked closely enough
at the evolutions of imperial policy.
Finally, no systematic study has been undertaken into the influence
of procolonial and anticolonial lobbies on other issues before the
various legislatures. Did alignments formed over the rights of free
blacks and the status of slavery and the slave trade carry over into
other areas, or not? Did the Jacobin dislike for luxury and conspicu-
ous consumption include an inherently anti-imperial position? John
Shovlin has recently reminded us that the number of works in ‘polit-
ical economy’ (a term coming into fashion in the 1760s in France)
skyrocketed between 1750 and 1789 – 668 in the 1770s, 756 between
1780 and 1788 and 804 in the year 1789 alone – but he says nothing
about the relative weight of discussion in this literature of the colonies
and empire. Indeed, the colonies and the slave trade appear only in
passing in this book on political economy and the origins of the
French Revolution. I am not blaming this absence on him. As his
book shows, the French romance with the rural extended from the
physiocrats through the Jacobins and on to the government of Vichy
and its opponents.When any of them said ‘rural’ or ‘land’ or ‘soil’, they
did not mean the lands of plantations tilled by slave labourers.19 A
deep suspicion of the deceptions of financial speculation and the
corruptions of luxury always seemed to go hand in hand with discus-
sions of colonial trade in France.Time and again, from the John Law
affair in the early 1720s to its fraudulent liquidation in fall 1793, the
Compagnie des Indes would become the flashpoint for worries about
the moral fibre of the nation.The murky affair of 1793 proved to be
arguably the biggest turning point in the entire French Revolution: it
brought down Fabre d’Eglantine, and by association, Georges Danton
and his closest supporters.The Terror itself, then, is intimately tied up
with the Indies Company, but just how and to what extent?20
30 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

If we still know so little about how events in the colonies shaped

opinion within France, then it is perhaps not surprising that it is diffi-
cult to determine just what role the global framework had in precip-
itating the events known as the French Revolution. Bayly offers the
now conventional externalist argument: ‘The problem for European
states, then, was that although they were increasingly being forced
into warfare worldwide, most of them did not have the resources to
prosecute wars, which were so costly in terms of men and treasure.’
The French were the particular victims of this dilemma, it appears.
‘The large financial burden taken on by the French Crown in order
to help the Americans pushed royal ministers into risky, but incoher-
ent, programmes of reform.These gradually undermined the basis of
the monarchy itself.’21 Needless to say, however, the programmes of
reform only seemed incoherent once they failed and the French only
seem to be the victims of the war they supposedly won because they
had a successful revolution afterward. Although I doubt that Bayly
wants to view revolution as a sign of failure, that seems to be the
implication of his argument.
The point is not so much to criticize Bayly, who at least tries to
provide a global framework for the events of the French Revolution,
as to suggest that a thorough rethinking of the international situation
is required.A rethinking would entail not just describing the interna-
tional context, as Bayly does, but also examining more closely the
links between domestic politics and the international situation. Few
European states, in fact, were ‘being forced into warfare worldwide’,
contrary to Bayly’s argument. Only Britain and France were repeat-
edly fighting on a worldwide scale in the second half of the eigh-
teenth century. Did they do so deliberately or inadvertently? That is,
was colonial competition the source of the worldwide conflict or was
worldwide conflict the unanticipated result of powers with colonies
going to war against each other? While it is true that the British ability
to finance war borrowing at a lower cost was a significant advantage,
other factors need to be brought into the equation: the size and
expense of the navies, the cost of policing the colonies, and the shift-
ing attitudes of governments and elites towards the imperial enter-
prise. The French ministers fought bitterly among themselves over
these issues.22

Revolutionary politics in a global context

So far I have concentrated on the issue of the causes of the French
Revolution. Can the formative political processes of the Revolution
The French Revolution in Global Context 31

be better understood if placed in a global context? They can, as I have

tried to show in a limited way for one of these processes, the human
rights revolution.The French Revolutionary preoccupation with ‘the
Rights of Man’ has to be seen as part of the circulation of ideas and
cultural practices between and within Europe and the Americas (and
of course, ultimately, on a global scale – though the global scale
becomes more relevant after the Declaration of the Rights of Man
and Citizen than before it). New notions and practices concerning
individual autonomy and the inviolability of the body took shape
from the 1760s onward in the Atlantic world. They did not radiate
from a single intellectual centre such as Paris. Instead, they truly circu-
lated among leading thinkers in disparate places (think of Rousseau,
Voltaire, Beccaria, Price, and Jefferson), between thinkers and a
general public on at least two continents (a public that read novels,
dramatic lawyers’ briefs, and reforming tracts), between artists and
their growing public for portraits (keeping in mind that many
American portraits were painted by itinerant British painters), and
among the public, the reformers, and government ministers who
abolished torture, moderated cruel punishments, and instituted or
refused to institute a previously unimaginable list of human rights.23
How do such new attitudes arise? In many different ways no
doubt, but almost all of them transcend one nation’s borders, as the
case of human rights demonstrates. The universalism of the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen resonated in a partic-
ular French political context, to be sure, but it had sources in Anglo-
America and in the writings of German, Dutch, Swiss, and Italian
thinkers, and it had repercussions around the world. One of the many
interesting questions that might be examined is why Dutch (Hugo
Grotius), Swiss (Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui), Prussian (Samuel
Pufendorf), and Italian (Cesare Beccaria) thinkers had such influence
on the development of universalist conceptions of natural law and
human rights. Did the small countries and states on the periphery of
the Great Powers have a disproportionate impact on universalism
precisely because of their small size and peripheral standing?24
Like human rights, independence, placed in a global context by
David Armitage, circulated as an idea and as a set of political practices.
Bayly has written that ‘[i]t was in the realm of ideas that the impact
of the revolutions was most obvious to contemporaries.’Yet ideas are
never just ideas; they are cultural constructs that call forth actions.
Human rights and independence were certainly not just ideas; they
were claims that grew out of actions and produced other actions in
their wake.They were such powerful ideas because they posited new
32 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

capacities for autonomous action where such autonomy had not been
granted in the past.25
While the aspiration for popular or national sovereignty clearly
crossed borders, popular violence seems especially rooted to local
contexts.The fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 or the attack on the
Tuileries on 10 August 1792 appear to be very much internal French
affairs, even Parisian ones, at least in terms of their causes and their
unfolding.Yet revolutionary political practices circulated just as surely
as did the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. It was this
kind of circulation that most alarmed Burke when he railed against ‘this
strange chaos of levity and ferocity’. Did French villagers set up
maypoles in 1789 because of their association with traditional village
festivity or because as liberty poles they had attracted considerable
attention in the American colonies? What did Tipu Sultan think of his
liberty pole? When Roman revolutionaries burnt cardinals’ hats at their
‘altar of liberty’ did they see themselves as followers or innovators?
The global influence of the French Revolution is usually attributed
to the depth of the transformation wrought by the revolution within
France and the turmoil created by the nearly unceasing revolutionary
wars that continued until 1815. The revolutionaries proceeded to
politicize just about every imaginable aspect of daily life, from the
names of children to the measures of time (the revolutionary calen-
dar) and space (the metric system). They killed the king and queen,
abolished noble titles, eliminated the remnants of feudalism, confis-
cated most of the property of the Catholic Church, opened careers to
merit, and proceeded to elect not just deputies and local officials but
also judges, justices of the peace, bishops of the Catholic Church, and
even for a time military officers. Protestants, Jews, actors, execution-
ers, free blacks, and ultimately even slaves gained the right to vote.
Who could remain unmoved by such a spectacle?
An important element in the circulation of these ideas and practices
has been little examined: the materialization and as a consequence the
commercialization of politics.This process had taken shape in a partic-
ularly dramatic and influential way during the agitation surrounding
John Wilkes in Britain in the 1760s. Because issue number 45 of
Wilkes’s weekly The North Briton had precipitated a conflict with the
British crown, the number 45 soon took on talismanic significance. It
appeared on sleeve buttons and breast buckles, mugs and punchbowls,
snuffboxes and brooches. Wilkes himself appeared in cartoons and on
signposts and as china and bronze figurines sitting on the top of the
mantelpiece. Pamphlets, broadsheets, and newspapers carried the
stories of his struggles far and wide.26
The French Revolution in Global Context 33

The influence of this kind of political material culture has been

studied to some extent within France – most notoriously an entre-
preneur got a licence to demolish the Bastille prison and promptly
sold off its stones to patriots around the country – but the story has
not been traced across the boundaries of the hexagon to the colonies,
to other countries in Europe, or elsewhere. One striking, albeit para-
doxical, result of the intense politicization created by the Revolution
was the commercialization of everyday items as political souvenirs.
Playing cards, dishware, curtains, wigs, stationery – almost any item of
daily life could carry revolutionary insignia and be sold as signs of
patriotic belonging. Considerable profits could be made selling the
tokens of republican virtue. Napoleon took these developments to a
new level. In 1796 Jean-Charles Pellerin developed a technique for
printing cheap coloured wood engravings – called imagerie d’Epinal
after the town in eastern France where he had his business – and
before long Napoleon was the prime subject of the prints. Napoleon’s
enduring fame within France – and no doubt to some extent across
the borders – rested in some considerable measure on this kind of
cultural dissemination and reproduction.27

And where does that leave metanarratives?

Bayly argues that ‘The age of revolutions had quite dramatically
speeded up’ the two changes in human life that he considers crucial:
‘the growth of uniformity between societies and the growth of
complexity within them’.Three revolutions had coincided, according
to Bayly: the moral rearmament of the state to incorporate new
demands, new forms of national identity, and an industrious revolu-
tion of the middle classes. In a sense, then, Bayly combines Tocqueville
and Marx but with a global twist. Like Tocqueville he emphasizes the
ways in which people became more alike, which ironically made it
possible for the state to exercise even more power; and like Marx he
emphasizes the rise of the middle class, though not because of indus-
try per se, and not with the implication of an inevitable class struggle.
These developments apparently fostered ‘the growth of European and
American dominance over the world’s economies and peoples’. I say
apparently because just how European and American dominance
follows remains opaque to me, especially since the USA in 1820
hardly seems like much of a world power and even France was rela-
tively weak.28
My metanarrative ambitions are much more modest than Bayly’s.
Rather than trying to explain everything that happens in the entire
34 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

world between 1780 and 1820, I would be satisfied with explaining

what happens in France and its significance for a broader world. The
global turn comes at a propitious moment in the historiography of the
French Revolution, for that historiography has been languishing in a
kind of explanatory cul de sac. The Marxist interpretation has been
effectively undermined (the French Revolution did not foster the
triumph of capitalism over feudalism), and now the dominance of its
‘revisionist’ or Furetian (so called after the leading French historian,
François Furet) challenger has come into question too: the French
Revolution cannot be reduced to a semiotic circuit in which speaking
for the people occupies the vacuum left by the collapse of monarchi-
cal power. Historians do not want to be forced to choose between a
social revolution with political consequences and a political revolution
with social ones. Can the global turn offer a way out of this dead end?
It only will, I maintain, if we can hold on to all the things we have
been able to learn from local and national studies. The global turn
should not just offer a broader or bigger view; it has to offer a better
one. Here I think that Bayly’s emphasis on dress and bodily deport-
ment offers a promising angle of approach. But he does not really grasp
the crucial gender dimension of these developments, and as a conse-
quence, he passes by a wonderful opportunity to sharpen his analysis.
After all, we did not need to wait for Bayly to recognize the impor-
tance of what he calls ‘the growth of uniformity between societies and
the growth of complexity within them’.Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques
Rousseau and, later, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber put these devel-
opments at the heart of their diagnoses of the discontents of moder-
nity. Bayly remarks that ‘the idea of the domestic was in itself a product
of public uniformity’, but is it right to conclude that ‘Women’s clothes
remained ornamental and impractical’? Only if you entirely neglect all
the class dimensions of women’s clothing: laundresses and fishwives did
not wear ornamental and impractical dresses.29
The question of dress is indisputably important, however, and it is
perhaps not surprising that the French Revolution has served as the
locus classicus for this question too. As long ago as 1930, J. C. Flügel
called attention to what he termed ‘the Great Masculine
Renunciation’, which occurred during and just after the French
Revolution. As Flügel put it,‘Man abandoned his claim to be consid-
ered beautiful.’ Middle- and upper-class men gave up their knee-
breeches for the trousers previously worn only by the working class,
and they now wore their own hair rather than wigs. In 1793–4 the
French revolutionary government even considered introducing a
national civic uniform for all men. Sartorial display had been a privi-
The French Revolution in Global Context 35

lege of social class; it became one of gender, which meant that women
now expressed social class in their dress. Men’s dress emphasized
sameness, while women’s dress emphasized difference. The art histo-
rian Kaja Silverman derives from this shift nothing less than the
modern regime of the gaze; women became objects to be looked at
by men, whereas in the past men were as much the object of looking
as women.30
Bayly’s reference to ‘the growth of uniformity between societies
and the growth of complexity within them’ does not quite capture
this development because he overlooks the new ways of relating
cultural forms to political legitimation.The displacement of the ruler
by the nation required the building of a citizenry in which individu-
als, at least adult male white ones, identified with each other as part
of a nation of active, autonomous participators in politics. Sartorial
differences between men did not disappear, of course, but they were
to some extent downplayed. Similarly, Benedict Anderson has exam-
ined the role that newspapers and novels played in creating the sense
of simultaneity required for the imagined community of nationalism.
The new forms of collective political experience – whether of rights,
independence, democracy, or nationalism, all of them products of this
period – rested on new cultural forms that transformed the experi-
ence of time, space, and the apprehension of individuality. Such devel-
opments did not necessarily take place on a conscious level, and
though they occurred to some extent in individual state contexts they
were also deeply affected by the circulation of cultural and political
forms across national and even continental borders. Participation in
the global market for commodities helped to shape this process of
building new citizens. The spread of tea, coffee, sugar, and cotton
clothing drew attention to commonalities within and across borders
and reinforced the impact of newspapers, novels, portraits, exhibitions,
public concerts, and eventually museums. The new public, without
which political revolution was unthinkable, was French, British,
American, etc., but it was also more international than that, in ways
we have just begun to examine.31
A better interpretation of the French Revolution will bring the
global back in but it will not lose sight of the local and national. It will
be a political, economic, social, and cultural interpretation. It will not
take for granted that the French wanted to compete with the British
for colonial domination but ask why and under which constraints. It
may turn out that France’s religious policy, by which neither Jews nor
Protestants could own slaves, had more of a long-term impact on
French colonial ventures and consequently on government finances
36 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

than the rates of interest paid to government creditors. Having rela-

tively few settlers in their colonies compared to the British saved them
from independence movements but may have led them instead to
revolution, both white and slave. Similarly, on the other end, the end
of consequences as opposed to causes, the universalism of the French
Revolution not only drew its energy from new cultural forms – from
coffee-houses to art exhibitions – but also fostered yet new ones in
turn.The universalistic claims of the Declaration of the Rights of Man
and Citizen excited an international debate about human rights, and
their very universalism virtually ensured an international audience.
That audience turned to new cultural forms to make sense of the
experience, whether in a positive mode, as in the wildfire spread of
melodrama after 1800, or in more negative ones, such as the develop-
ment of nationalist gymnastics in the German states eager to establish
their difference from France. To make sense of these developments, it
is not enough to invoke the global, as I have for the most part done:
one must trace specific lineages where they lead.Who had melodrama
and when, for instance? Were its roots just European? What the global
turn has done most productively is to force us to challenge our usual
categories, not to assume where the lines lead, but to actually follow
them. It reminds us that we have much yet to discover, which is always
an exciting prospect.
3
Revolutionary Exiles:The American
Loyalist and French Émigré
Diasporas

Maya Jasanoff

Two revolutions
One March day in 1794, a keen-eyed Frenchman with a pug nose
limped into an inn at Falmouth, on the dark, stony coast of Cornwall.
Chatting with the innkeeper over his meal, the man mentioned that
he was bound for the United States as soon as his storm-damaged ship
was repaired. Oh, said the innkeeper, there was an American lodger at
the inn, an old general.The Frenchman asked to meet the American,
and promptly started up a conversation about the United States,
though he found his interlocutor awkwardly reticent. Eventually the
Frenchman asked his new acquaintance for letters of introduction to
friends in the United States. ‘No’, answered the American, abruptly;
then added, ‘I am perhaps the only American who cannot give you
letters for his country. All my ties there are broken . . . I must never
go back.’ His name was Benedict Arnold. Once one of George
Washington’s best generals, Arnold transferred his loyalty to Britain at
the height of the American Revolution. In the United States, his
name stood as a synonym for treachery. He lived now in Britain, an
exile, chased by stress and debt. ‘I must admit that he made me feel
very sorry for him’, the Frenchman remarked. ‘Political puritans may
blame me, but I am not ashamed, for I was witness to his torment.’1
Well might he have felt compassion for the infamous turncoat. For
the Frenchman – the diplomat Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-
Périgord – turned his own coat so many times it may as well have
been made of patchwork. Talleyrand not only witnessed Arnold’s
punishment, he shared it. Banished from revolutionary France because
of his deep connections to the royal house, Talleyrand had just been
expelled from his temporary asylum in Britain because of his
37
38 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

suspected sympathies with the Jacobins. Perhaps it was no wonder that

when Talleyrand’s ship approached the Delaware River many weeks
later, he immediately tried to take passage again, for India: he felt most
comfortable, he said, at sea.2
Accident put them in the same room together, but it was more
than accident that cast these two notorious exiles adrift in Britain.
Together they presented two faces of interconnected revolutions, and
of those revolutions’ international effects. Separated by only six years,
the American and French Revolutions have always been understood
as linked, the keystones in an ‘Age of Revolutions’ arching around the
Atlantic and deep into Europe. They shared characters and incidents
– a link neatly epitomized by the Marquis de Lafayette deciding to
send George Washington a key to the Bastille, via Thomas Paine.The
revolutions shared a commitment to equality and republican govern-
ment, and a scepticism of organized religion. They recorded their
values in documents that have been seen as laying the foundations of
a concept of universal human rights. Both nations have developed
powerful origin myths hinging on iconic revolutionary moments
(1776, 1789).3
Yet one feature common to these revolutions has received less
attention. Both revolutions were also civil wars, and like all such
conflicts, they triggered substantial migrations of refugees and exiles.
At least 60,000 Americans loyal to the British cause left the United
States during and after the American Revolution – bringing 15,000
slaves with them. Resettling across the British world, in Canada, the
Caribbean, West Africa, and beyond, loyalists created the most wide-
ranging refugee diaspora the British Empire had ever confronted.Yet
within a decade this American exodus would be numerically super-
seded by a French migration double the size. After 1789, between
130,000 and 150,000 people fled from revolutionary France, seeking
asylum throughout Europe and across the Atlantic in the United
States.While French revolutionary ideals swept across a world in flux,
these French émigrés presented living evidence of the revolution’s
internal disruption, and added human weight to the cause of counter-
revolution.
The last two decades of the eighteenth century thus saw approxi-
mately two hundred thousand loyalists and royalists on the move,
ranging from Philadelphia to Freetown, St Petersburg to Sydney, the
Bay of Fundy to the Bay of Bengal.They made an age of revolutions
into an age of refugees – and their international resettlement patterns
reflected the imperial dimensions of those revolutions. What do the
contrasts between these refugee diasporas reveal about the events that
Revolutionary Exiles 39

triggered them, and the world in which they unfolded? Several attrib-
utes common to both migrations usefully bear comparison: their rela-
tive numerical strength, the pressures encouraging individuals to
leave, their geographical distribution, and the conditions they
encountered abroad. Investigating these migrations side by side also
holds larger implications for interpreting the turbulent Age of
Revolutions in which they took place.
At the beginning of his magisterial study of England in the Age of
Revolutions, E. P. Thompson opined that too often ‘the blind alleys, the
lost causes, and the losers themselves are forgotten’ by historians.4 His
complaint aptly describes the historiographical fate of loyalists and
émigrés. Neither group has earned much place within the sprawling
literatures on the American and French revolutions, and for analogous
reasons. Within United States historiography, the relative absence of
loyalists serves as an illustration of what happens when history is written
by the victors. Loyalists are at best fringe players in canonical narratives
of the nation’s founding. Though several scholars have studied loyalist
ideology and profiled leading loyalists, the social extent and diversity of
loyalism remain less well understood, and the individual experiences of
ordinary loyalists have been little explored.As a result, loyalists are often
stereotyped in America as socially elite, politically reactionary, and
essentially ‘un-American’ – conservatives who stubbornly failed to
recognize that the future lay with the republic, not the British Empire.
(They are still widely referred to as ‘Tories’, a label pejoratively applied
to them by American patriots, though their political opinions ranged
more widely than that term suggests.) It has become a commonplace
to acknowledge certain contradictions embedded in the new republic:
its self-contradictory commitment to slavery, and its hostility towards
American Indians. But the flight of the loyalists calls attention to a form
of exclusion that has yet to be incorporated into US national self-
understandings, an exclusion rooted in political belief.5
The French Revolution has generated an altogether more
contested and varied scholarship, as historians have tried to make
sense of its transformative radicalism, its spectacular violence, and, not
least, its ultimate failure. Even historians inclined to celebrate French
republicanism must grapple with the fact that the Jacobins turned
universal principles into mass executions; while the rebellion in the
Vendée offered unforgettable evidence that revolutions double as civil
wars. (Contemporaries widely perceived the American Revolution as
a civil war, though the intense partisan conflict it involved gets little
attention now.) But émigrés appear as little-studied and unsympa-
thetic figures in a historiography primarily interested in probing the
40 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

revolution’s internal structures and socially equalizing aims. Cast as

‘the white and the black’ – the nobility and the clergy – the émigrés
(like the loyalists) were traditionally but misleadingly assumed to have
come overwhelmingly from the upper tiers of society.6 Just as loyalist
refugees appeared to be ‘backward’ by choosing to remain subjects of
the British Empire, émigrés tended to be strongly identified with the
armed forces of counter-revolution. Their eventual victory, with the
Restoration, only helped to consolidate the sense that émigrés were
elite reactionaries, as some old émigrés became new ‘ultras’, self-
consciously dedicated to the values of the Old Regime.This may well
be one reason why the Restoration remains a little-studied period in
modern French history.7
These politicized historiographical traditions mean that examining
loyalists and émigrés can seem, even now, to smack of conservatism.
So it is not altogether surprising, considering how much the revolu-
tions continue to resonate in France and the United States, that few
academic historians have been drawn to this topic.Yet – as Thompson
and historians of the French Revolution such as Richard Cobb so
marvellously demonstrated – marginal figures offer valuable perspec-
tives on big events. Bringing dissenters and outcasts into the frame
provides a fuller picture of these revolutions’ political, social, and
cultural effects. Most of all, loyalists and émigrés illuminate the global
consequences of these self-evidently international events. Rejecting
or rejected by revolution, the exiles ventured out into a world
reshaped by war and imperial expansion.Where did they go and what
did they find?

Two diasporas
As Britain, the United States, and France shuffled towards peace in the
early days of 1815, ex-president John Adams composed a long letter
to a colleague, reflecting on the fissures that threatened his country.
Thinking back to 1774, when he attended the first Continental
Congress, Adams mused: ‘If I were called upon to calculate the divi-
sions among the people of America . . . I should say that a full third
were averse to the revolution.’ He contrasted their ‘overweening fond-
ness . . . for the English’ with the opinions of ‘an opposite third’ who
‘conceived a hatred of the English, and gave themselves up to an
enthusiastic gratitude to France. The middle third, composed princi-
pally of the yeomanry, the soundest part of the nation, and always
averse to war, were rather lukewarm to both England and France.’8
Adams’s off-the-cuff estimate (echoed in other letters) that one-third
Revolutionary Exiles 41

of the American population was ‘averse to the revolution’ has often

been cited as a benchmark for the strength of loyalism in the thirteen
colonies.9 Ironically, others have interpreted this passage as a reference
not to American loyalists and patriots but to American opinions about
the French Revolution.10
The ambiguity of Adams’s statement – or at least, the divergent
readings it has invited – indicates how interconnected these revolu-
tions were in the minds of people who lived through both. It also
highlights the difficulty of gauging the extent of loyalism in the first
place, let alone the number of loyalists who left.11 The estimate of
60,000 loyalist migrants can be supported by piecing together impres-
sionistic estimates provided by colonial governors, incomplete musters
of refugees, and returns of evacuations.12 Together, these refugees cut
across the ethnic spectrum of early America.The emigration included
several hundred Mohawk Indians, long-time allies of the British, who
settled on land grants around Lake Ontario.At least 8,000 black loyal-
ists, former slaves who received freedom in exchange for taking up
arms in British forces, also traded in the United States for the British
Empire.This mass emancipation, the largest in American history up to
that time, has rightly been hailed as a key moment in the development
of British abolitionism. In numerical extent, however, it must be offset
by the still larger number of blacks, at least 15,000, who were carried
away from the colonies as slaves by white loyalists.13
Counting the number of French émigrés proves considerably more
straightforward, thanks to the relative centralization of the French
state. Beginning in 1792, different localities registered the names of
émigrés; and departments kept records of émigré names, ranks, profes-
sions, and property until the end of 1799, when the lists were officially
closed.These documents not only fix the scale of the exodus reliably
at between 130,000 and 150,000 individuals, they provide a degree of
demographic detail about the émigrés that is simply not matched by
the available records on loyalist refugees. While loyalist refugees
reflected America’s ethnic diversity, the French émigrés represented a
genuine cross-section of society, ranging from princes and priests to
bakers and blacksmiths. Though it is relatively difficult to map the
strength of loyalism or trace internal American migration before the
evacuations of 1782–3, available data on France paint a clear
geographical picture of plebeian migration, showing it to be strongest
in those regions most directly affected by invasion, civil war, or the
intensity of the Terror.14
Bernard Bailyn once observed that the American Revolution was
not a ‘great social shock’, like the French and Russian revolutions,
42 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

blasting apart existing institutions and hierarchies.15 Loyalists lost prop-

erty in the United States, of course, but privilege and land ownership
would not be reconfigured to anything like the same extent unleashed
by the French abolition of feudalism and sale of biens nationaux.
Similarly, the principles of tolerance and secularism espoused by
Jefferson and his peers had fewer destructive consequences for devout
Anglicans than did the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in the eyes of
some French priests. For all that loyalists were prosecuted and perse-
cuted – even, according to one etymology, becoming the victims of
America’s first lynchings – there was no American equivalent of the
guillotine.16 And yet, as a proportion of the population, far more loyal-
ists left the United States than did émigrés from France. The émigrés
represented about one in two hundred French citizens; while the
75,000 loyalists and slaves who left the United States comprised one in
forty members of the population. Furthermore, while almost all
(around 90 per cent) surviving French émigrés seem to have found
their way back to France, far fewer American loyalist refugees would
resettle in the independent United States.17
How can this proportional discrepancy be explained? Much of the
answer lies in the different kinds of pressures that loyalists and émigrés
encountered. The ‘push’ factors confronted by French émigrés,
including highly punitive, nationwide legal measures and govern-
ment-sponsored violence, were by and large more intense than the
popular harassment and state-specific legal sanctions faced by
American loyalists. But these reasons to flee were counterbalanced for
émigrés by uncertain prospects abroad, where they had to find asylum
in foreign countries in many cases at war with France, and open to
invasion. Loyalists did not have the ‘push’ of the guillotine or invasion
by large foreign armies to send them running. On the other hand, the
combination of definitive defeat in war, concerns about their safety in
the newly established United States, and strong ‘pull’ factors elsewhere
in the British Empire made leaving their homes appear a compara-
tively attractive choice.
Persecution of American ‘Tories’ began well before the revolution,
in the tumultuous conflicts over taxes imposed by parliament. From
the Stamp Act riots onward, mobs and gangs like the Sons of Liberty
targeted suspected loyalists, ransacking property, burning reviled
figures in effigy, and, in rare but vivid instances, pouring pitch tar on
victims and sprinkling them with chicken feathers. In a chilling allu-
sion to the English Civil War, colonies established local ‘Committees
of Safety’, designed to monitor and enforce patriotism.18 This would
be one of several American institutions emulated in revolutionary
Revolutionary Exiles 43

France; another would be loyalty oaths, which became a primary

instrument for determining allegiance to the new regimes.
The rising tide of violence provoked some loyalists to leave before
the war even began, most conspicuously the loyalist governor of
Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, who sailed for England in
1774.19 With the outbreak of war in 1775, states enacted a wide range
of punitive legal measures against loyalists. Many passed bills of attain-
der against specific individuals. Most also indicted enemies of the state
in more generic terms, and confiscated their property. Maryland went
a step further, voting on 4 July 1776 that ‘adherents to Great Britain’
were ‘to suffer death’. Anti-loyalist legislation intensified after the
American victory at Saratoga in 1777.Within six months of the battle,
six states had stiffened and expanded their Test Laws. In 1778, New
Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, and South Carolina all passed
punitive laws allowing loyalists to be arrested or banished.
Pennsylvania issued an act of attainder against ‘divers traitors’; New
Jersey established a committee of safety; Delaware prohibited trade
with the enemy. Georgia implemented a vague but sinister law against
‘the dangerous consequences that may arise from the practices of
disaffected . . . persons within this state’.20
As this range of laws suggests, loyalism could be interpreted widely,
and loyalists responded to these measures in a variety of ways. The
majority of loyalists, to be sure, simply kept their heads down, riding
out confrontations with their patriot neighbours. A New Hampshire
farmer called Abner Sanger, for example, who had volunteered with
the patriots in the thrilling spring of 1775 but become disillusioned
with republican ideas, was ‘taken & carried before a Violent
Committee’ in the town of Keene with his brother, ‘Condemned &
put into Close Prison cold & deark’. Sanger’s brother fled a few
months later, but he himself stayed on and managed to avoid further
arrest; once, when a patriot captain came ‘into Town with his Mob to
Rob & Plunder the Toreys’, Sanger escaped notice by ‘cuting & split-
ting wood on plain by Chapmans’.21 At least 19,000 loyalists took a
more active stance by joining provincial military regiments, and fight-
ing alongside the British to defend their vision of colonial America.
The threat of sanctions and harassment caused approximately 30,000
others to leave their homes and resettle in the cities under British
control, New York, Charleston, and Savannah. And about 10,000
loyalists left the United States during the war, creating a precedent for
the large-scale evacuations that would come with the peace.
In much the way that loyalist migration followed the ebb and flow
of British military fortunes, the pace of emigration from revolution-
44 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

ary France mounted in step with the radicalization of the revolution.

What eventually became a broad-based exodus began at the very top
of the social pyramid, when, just two nights after the storming of the
Bastille, one of the first and most prominent émigrés took flight. On
instructions from his brother, Louis XVI, who wanted to protect the
royal line, the Comte d’Artois slipped out of Paris with his family and
darted across the border to Flanders. Artois and his entourage found
temporary refuge in Turin, with his father-in-law the King of
Sardinia, establishing there the first of several courts in exile that he
and his relatives would maintain in the years to come.22
The ‘Great Fear’ and the abolition of feudalism in the summer of
1789 induced scattered emigration, particularly among nobles; but
following the march on Versailles in October 1789 larger numbers fled,
including many liberal aristocrats who had initially supported the
revolution. In the space of just two days after the Versailles incident,
300 people applied to the president of the assembly for passports.23
Each new political upheaval produced fresh waves of refugees. The
Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1790 turned Catholic priests into
employees of the state, and required them to swear a loyalty oath, initi-
ating widespread disaffection among thousands of ‘refractory’ priests
who refused to comply. (In a map that bears striking similarities to
patterns of nineteenth-century French anticlericalism, non-juring
priests concentrated primarily in the west, as well as on the northern
and eastern frontiers, in the Massif Central, and in urban areas outside
Paris.24) The king’s own failed attempt to escape from Paris in June
1791 touched off conspiracy and fears of invasion, and signalled greater
tensions ahead.25 By this time, army officers, confronting intolerable
conditions in the ranks, were leaving France by the hundreds. Many of
them joined the counter-revolutionary force taking shape on the
Rhine under the command of the émigré princes.The spring of 1792
brought the beginning of war, and with it, the landslide into a repub-
lic.Two weeks after the storming of the Tuileries, a new law gave non-
juring priests just fifteen days to swear the loyalty oath or to leave –
essentially banishing in a stroke 30,000 people. Any doubts they may
have had about the seriousness of the ultimatum would be swept aside
by the September massacres one week later, when hundreds of prison-
ers and priests were slaughtered in Paris.
By the end of 1792, with the royal family locked into the Temple
prison, all those who took arms against France stood under sentence of
death; all émigré land and moveable property was confiscated; and all
non-juring priests were expelled. A sequence of laws passed in March
and April 1793 consolidated measures against émigrés, effectively strip-
Revolutionary Exiles 45

ping them of citizenship and condemning them to death.Their family

members who stayed behind lost the right to hold office and to hold
property – graver penalties by far than those facing families of American
loyalist refugees. This had an especially great impact on women, who
composed only about 15 per cent of the total emigration (half of them
from the labouring and peasant classes, in which they comprised a
quarter of émigrés).While the wives of some loyalist refugees remained
in the United States and pursued legal action to protect their family
property, émigrés’ wives were actively encouraged by the state to
divorce their husbands, and thereby retain their rights and possessions.26
Some émigrés were able to manipulate the law, however, and protect
their land through sham divorces or land transfers.27
Spreading war and the Reign of Terror sent thousands more
running from the revolution: up to twice the number who had fled
before 1793. Though the majority of earlier émigrés had been cler-
gymen or nobles, about 40,000 of the new refugees came from the
Third Estate.While nobles fled more or less evenly from throughout
France, the geographical distribution of Third Estate emigration
reflected patterns of rebellion, invasion, and the Terror. In the west,
émigrés ran from the shattered villages of a region torn apart by civil
war, including large numbers of refractory priests who fled to Britain.
In the north-east, ravaged by invading armies, they crossed the borders
into the Rhineland and Flanders; Switzerland also hosted a large
émigré community. Along the Mediterranean coast, site of strong
federalist opposition to the Convention, the republican seizure of
Marseille and Toulon induced thousands to escape from Terror. (Many
more émigrés sheltering in nearby Nice, then part of Savoy, had been
forced to flee into neighbouring Piedmontese areas when French
republicans captured the city in September 1792.) The huge popular
migration would only abate with the Thermidor coup of July 1794.28
All told, the systematic nature of legislation targeting the nobility
and others, coupled after 1792 by the systematic use of the guillotine
to enforce revolutionary discipline, meant that dissenters within
France faced greater and graver reasons to leave than did the major-
ity of American loyalists. Granted, in France as in America, many
royalists simply stayed quiet and stayed put: the majority of French
nobles eluded persecution and remained; the majority of priests did
swear the oath to the republic. Staying at home, among family, friends,
and one’s regular surroundings, is always the unmarked choice. But a
further consideration must have been equally pressing as loyalists and
royalists reviewed their positions: where would they actually go and
what treatment would they receive abroad? From this perspective,
46 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

Americans and Frenchmen confronted quite different choices, and

maps of the loyalist and émigré diasporas accordingly reveal two quite
distinct geographies of exodus.
Britain’s defeat in the American Revolution hit loyalists hard; and
in fact the most savage partisan fighting between loyalists and patriots
took place after Yorktown, particularly in the Carolina and Georgia
backcountry. The loyalists’ situation was compounded by what they
perceived to be a further defeat, when British peace negotiators failed
to secure any meaningful guarantee from the United States to restore
or provide compensation for confiscated loyalist property. Loyalists
interpreted the Treaty of Paris as an overt betrayal of their interests;
and enough members of parliament agreed with them to bring down
the ministry that had negotiated it. But not all was lost.To make things
up to the loyalists, British officials put into action an empire-wide
programme of relief.The centrepiece of British aid consisted of land
grants, offered to loyalists free of charge and temporarily free of rent,
in sparsely populated Canada and the Bahamas.The government also
offered loyalists free passage to British domains around the Atlantic.
And once loyalists reached their destinations, British authorities
distributed allowances and supplies, from basic food rations through
to shoes, hoes, and nails. Improvised though they were, these efforts
together constituted a remarkably comprehensive relief effort, span-
ning multiple locations across the British Atlantic world.
Thousands of loyalists, deprived of their property and unsure of
their prospects in the United States, decided to take advantage of
British promises. The departure of British forces from the United
States at the end of the revolution doubled as the largest evacuation
of refugees that had ever unfolded in the British Empire. In July 1782,
at least 7,000 loyalists and slaves sailed from Savannah on British
transports, bound for other British Atlantic ports. In December, more
than 9,000 others set off from Charleston, many of them headed for
Jamaica or St Augustine. The protracted evacuation of New York
began in the spring of 1783. By the time it finished in November of
that year, 30,000 loyalists had left the city for other parts of the British
Empire – including approximately 3,000 black loyalists, whose names
were carefully recorded in one of the only registers of the evacuation,
known as ‘The Book of Negroes’.29
The last plank of the British relief programme addressed the matter
of indemnification for loyalist property losses – the subject on which
loyalists had felt most betrayed by the peace treaty. In 1783, parliament
took the virtually unprecedented step of setting up a panel to review
loyalists’ property losses and provide them with compensation directly
Revolutionary Exiles 47

from British treasury funds.The Loyalist Claims Commission, as it was

called, received more than 2,000 claims in its first nine months alone,
detailing losses of just over seven million pounds – ‘an alarming sum’,
gasped one of the commissioners, John Eardley Wilmot. When the
commission wrapped up its work six years later, it had processed
3,225 claims and awarded more than three million pounds in aid.30
As a piece of public charity alone, the Loyalist Claims Commission
stands as a landmark in British welfare schemes – undertaken at a time
when pension programmes, for example, were only just beginning.
No less significant, by rewarding far-flung American colonists, the
commission represented an embracing assumption of responsibility by
the British government towards overseas imperial subjects.
Like the British Empire to which they adhered, loyalists rebounded
from the loss in America on a global stage. In some of their new
settings, they made a transformative impact. So many loyalists – about
30,000 all told – came to Nova Scotia that in 1784 it was divided into
two, creating the province of New Brunswick. Loyalists and their
descendants would dominate politics and society in the Maritimes for
generations to come. In Quebec, the arrival of 6,000 loyalists helped to
tip the political culture away from French-speaking Catholics and
towards Anglophone Protestants, with enduring effects for the structure
of modern Canada.The Bahamas had been little more than a string of
sparsely-populated rocks before 2,000 loyalists (and 4,000–6,000 of
their slaves) came to settle and establish plantations. Even in places
where they did not form a majority of the population – such as Jamaica
and Britain, home to 10,000 loyalists between them – loyalists made a
mark as printers, soldiers, painters, clergymen, and more. In perhaps the
most intriguing migration, in 1792 about 1,200 black loyalists moved a
second time, from Nova Scotia to the experimental free black colony
of Sierra Leone.31 Loyalists scattered as far afield as India: the East India
Company army would soon be sprinkled with American-born officers,
including two of Benedict Arnold’s sons.32 And some black loyalists
would sail even to the end of the earth, among the first convicts trans-
ported to Australia’s Botany Bay.33 Tracing the loyalist diaspora is like
drawing a map of the expanding British Empire, featuring every major
site of imperial involvement after 1780.
For loyalist refugees, then, the end of the revolution marked the
beginning of an imperial, international exodus. French émigrés,
however, experienced almost the reverse trajectory: their migration
was influenced and shaped by global war, but would come to an end
with peace. Most émigrés remained in Europe, where they relied
primarily on the hospitality of foreign states to shelter them in a
48 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

period of enormous political turbulence. The shifting regimes of the

Age of Revolutions had most immediate bearing on members of the
French royal family, as they quested for international recognition and
support.The Comte d’Artois moved from Turin in 1791 to Coblenz,
and on to Westphalia, before settling in Holyrood House in
Edinburgh, in virtual if comfortable house arrest.34 His elder brother
the Comte de Provence – styled Louis XVIII after the Dauphin’s
death in 1795 – set up court in Verona, Brunswick, Latvia, and at last
in England. Britain, Russia, and German states directly supplied the
émigré government with financial, political, and military support.
(Émigrés in some instances contributed to these regimes in turn: the
young Duc de Richelieu, to give one prominent example, advanced
rapidly in Russian service and became governor of the newly estab-
lished port of Odessa.) By 1791 the royal princes in the Rhineland
commanded an émigré army more than 20,000-strong.35 In one of
the largest initiatives on the émigrés’ behalf, Britain sponsored an
émigré landing at Quiberon in 1795, designed to capitalize on the
anti-republican uprisings in the west; as events turned out, republican
forces comprehensively crushed the invaders, effectively ending
émigré military hopes.
The intensity of war and revolutionary ideology meant, however,
that European states also often treated émigrés with caution – if,
indeed, they admitted them at all. Prussia, for instance, carefully moni-
tored the activities of French émigrés, and after 1792 established
restrictions on the number of refugees who would be allowed in.36 In
the Rhineland, where some governments sponsored the counter-
revolutionary armies, other states refused to allow the refugees to plot
openly against France.37 Perhaps surprisingly, émigrés would find
their warmest European welcome in the bosom of France’s historic
enemy: Britain. From aristocrats to artisans, Britain hosted a flourish-
ing refugee society. Here too, émigrés attracted suspicion: the Aliens
Act of 1793 required all émigrés to register with the authorities, and
established a surveillance system to track their movements.Yet seen as
a whole, the émigré experience in Britain reflected, and in turn
helped to facilitate, a broad shift in the Anglo-French relationship
from enemies to allies. The last three kings of France all spent the
majority of their time in exile more or less comfortably ensconced in
Britain, forging connections at the highest tiers of society. The
emigration facilitated Anglo-French amity on a broader level too, as
French and British citizens intermingled socially to a greater extent
than at any time since the Huguenot influx a century earlier. Mixed
marriages were one inevitable result, such as the happy union
Revolutionary Exiles 49

between the novelist Fanny Burney and General Alexandre d’Arblay,

adjutant to the Marquis de Lafayette. In the words of the émigrée
Adèle d’Osmond de Boigne (who met her Savoyard husband in
London), ‘From [the émigrés’] prolonged stay in England, dates the
change in attitude of the English people in favor of the French.’38
While the majority of émigrés remained in Europe, some
inevitably ventured further afield. Research has not accurately
revealed how many émigrés travelled to other parts of the French
Empire, including Saint Domingue – regions that would experience
their own versions of the revolution, and produce their own refugee
diasporas. Such an accounting would have to include the political
prisoners deported to French imperial outposts, like the group of
non-juring priests and royalists sent to Guiana after the 18 Fructidor
coup of 1797.39 Anecdotal evidence exposes the presence of French
émigrés in another region that would be reshaped by the revolution-
ary wars: India. Chevalier Antoine de l’Etang, who had supervised the
royal stables at Versailles, became stable superintendent and veterinary
surgeon to the Nawab of Awadh in Lucknow, and worked in the East
India Company’s stud department.40 The former Assembly member
Bon Albert de Beaumetz travelled to America with Talleyrand,
married a daughter of patriot general and secretary of war Henry
Knox, and voyaged with her to Calcutta, hoping to sell American land
to East India Company nabobs.41
The largest number of French émigrés who left Europe, though,
travelled to the United States.An old, often-repeated estimate suggests
that as many as 20,000 Francophone refugees lived in America in the
last years of the eighteenth century. Recent research has made clear,
however, that the vast majority of these had fled not from revolution-
ary France, but from Saint Domingue.42 The exiles from mainland
France were perhaps more notable for their social and political promi-
nence than for their actual number. Liberal aristocrats like the Duc de
la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt established personal and intellectual ties
with the Federalists, committed to similar visions of government.
Talleyrand formed a strong friendship with Alexander Hamilton.The
exiles’ transition from one republic to another was not entirely seam-
less, however. Staunch royalists felt less comfortable in the United
States than did their more liberal counterparts, while more radical
members of the French community made Americans uneasy in turn,
helping to inspire America’s own anti-French backlash, in the Alien
and Sedition Acts of 1798.43
In July 1794, members of the Committee of Public Safety deposed
their most radical colleagues, and Robespierre and Saint-Just lost their
50 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

heads under the same blade they had caused to fall on so many others.
The Thermidor coup marked the end of the Terror, and the begin-
ning of the end of the emigration.As the pace of exodus slowed, anti-
émigré legislation softened. Late in 1799, a month before declaring
that the revolution was over, Bonaparte restored full rights of citizen-
ship to relatives of émigrés; and the Concordat of 1801, re-establish-
ing relations with the Vatican, paved the way for the return of
non-juring priests. The Peace of Amiens of 1802 included a general
amnesty for émigrés as long as they swore not to plot the restoration
of the monarchy. Even that, of course, would be achieved in 1814. By
then, the majority of émigrés had already returned to France.
The Restoration confirmed the coming of counter-revolutionary
peace to a nation traumatized by a quarter-century of conflict.
Haunted by the memory of the guillotine, survivors of the Revolution
spun tales of the bals des victimes at which aristocrats were said to have
cavorted in memory of their executed peers.44 Anxious rumours
continued to suggest that lands confiscated from émigrés during the
revolution and sold as biens nationaux would now be returned.45 That
such a redistribution did not take place signalled a crucial point of
accommodation by the restoration government with the revolution-
ary legacy. But the ascent of the Comte d’Artois to the throne as King
Charles X in 1824 marked a self-conscious attempt to turn back the
clock: he celebrated his coronation with an archaic ceremony at
Reims, even touching the sick for scrofula, as his medieval forebears
had done. Not coincidentally, it was during the reign of this reac-
tionary former émigré that a French counterpart to the Loyalist
Claims Commission took shape.The Indemnity Bill of 1825, passed a
generation after revolutionaries had confiscated émigré property, set
aside one billion francs to be allocated in bond payments to émigré
families. Over the next five years, the time allotted for all claims to be
liquidated, more than 30,000 families filed under the act. In the event,
the window for remuneration closed with the Restoration itself: in
July 1830 Charles X would be deposed in favour of his less conserva-
tive kinsman Louis-Philippe. Through decades of revolution and
counter-revolution to come, liberals continued to deride the indem-
nity, labelled caustically the milliard des émigrés, as theft from the state
coffers on behalf of traitors.46

A counter-revolutionary empire
So were they really commensurate, these two diasporas? Some broad
parallels are plain. The social diversity of both groups provides strik-
Revolutionary Exiles 51

ing evidence that revolutions unsettle the small as well as the great. In
both America and France, personal decisions to remain loyal to old
regimes did not correlate solely with any single attribute, such as
social status, religious belief, or geographical origin.As a consequence
of their choices, loyalists and émigrés shared the experience of prop-
erty loss, legal sanctions, and relocating under stress to unfamiliar
places. Both groups took up arms by the thousands to defend their
positions. And once the revolutions had ended, both groups sought
compensation for their losses from the governments they had consis-
tently supported, the British and Bourbon monarchies. Both groups,
above all, were casualties of republican nation-building – and to this
extent unlike earlier groups of European exiles, such as Huguenots,
Palatines, and Jacobites – standing as living proof of the exclusionary
policies so often allied with modern nationalism.
Despite these similarities, however, the experiences of loyalist
refugees and French émigrés could just as well be interpreted as an
illustration of the fundamental differences between the revolutions
that cast them adrift. Both of these republican revolutions were civil
wars; both civil wars triggered international ones. But where the
French Revolution began as a radical domestic upheaval, the
American Revolution was of course a colonial uprising – and the
refugees’ fates underscored that distinction. French émigrés rejected
the republic and were denied membership in it in turn.As exiles, they
had to make friends out of their enemy’s enemies, and vest their hopes
in the counter-revolution, their ultimate source of rehabilitation.
Loyalists, however, began and ended their lives as subjects of the
British Empire, an entity that endured and was able to embrace them
despite the American rebellion. By trading the thirteen colonies for
British colonies elsewhere, they found an antidote to revolution by
never leaving the larger polity to which they adhered. And though
loyalist refugees personified Britain’s loss in America, their relative
success at rebuilding their lives elsewhere attested to the empire’s
broader success at bouncing back from defeat.
Seen as an imperial conflict, the American Revolution seems to
share little with its French counterpart. This apparent contrast may,
though, be more one of quality than of kind. For the French
Revolution had its own imperial dimensions, and its own colonial
refugees – notably those 15,000 or more émigrés from Saint
Domingue. As multiethnic refugees from a colonial revolt, the Saint
Domingue émigrés present some obvious similarities with the
American loyalist refugees.Whereas American loyalists could travel to
neighbouring British possessions in Canada and the Caribbean,
52 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

however – regions that remained neutral or loyal, despite American

republican overtures – the Saint Dominguans travelled overwhelm-
ingly to the United States and nearby British domains.47 (Mirroring
the evacuations of British-held cities in North America, thousands of
refugees sailed away with British forces when they pulled out of Saint
Domingue.48) For them, there would be little shelter in other French
colonies or in France itself, all unsettled by an empire-wide revolu-
tion. As Lynn Hunt has observed, internalist explanations of the
French Revolution have generally failed to address the conflict’s
dramatically global dimensions, while externalist accounts remain
somewhat divorced from the rich historiography of the revolution
within France.49 A global study of French revolutionary émigrés,
colonial as well as domestic, suggests one way of bridging that divide
– and could draw out the contrasts between the American and French
revolutions as imperial wars in turn.50
Ultimately, the greatest value in exploring the American and
French diasporas side by side emerges not so much from a compari-
son of their national particularities, as from the insights they give into
the world they shared – a world in the throes of imperial reconfigu-
ration. Loyalists and émigrés did not only trace parallel courses.Their
fates directly intersected through the entity that most prominently
supported both: Britain and its empire. It was more than mere
geographical proximity that made Britain the most receptive
European home for the French émigrés – more, also, than Britain’s
resistance to French invasion, which would unsettle other émigré
havens in Italy and northern Europe. For Britain had already faced
revolutionary resistance, and retooled in response to defeat. Britain’s
success at rebounding from the loss in America placed it in a strong
position to confront the challenges posed by revolutionary France,
and a newly cemented combination of liberal principles and author-
itarian methods allowed it to become the strongest counter-revolu-
tionary power in Europe and the world.
Imperial historians used to interpret the American Revolution as
dividing a ‘first’, largely Atlantic, colonial British empire from a
‘second’ empire, anchored in Asia, and involving direct rule over
millions of manifestly alien subjects.This idea has been challenged on
several fronts. Not least, the British Empire was already both Asian and
Atlantic at the time of the American Revolution; indeed, as P. J.
Marshall has argued, the same governing methods that led to success-
ful empire-building in Bengal actually undermined British rule in the
American colonies.51 Then, too, as the pattern of loyalist resettlement
serves to remind, the post-revolutionary British Empire retained an
Revolutionary Exiles 53

important western Atlantic presence, fortifying its holdings in Canada,

now the largest of colony of settlement, and keeping the valuable slave-
based colonies of the Caribbean. Rather than seeing the American
Revolution as a defining imperial moment, historians have more
recently emphasized the significance of the French Revolutionary-
Napoleonic wars in consolidating a new sense of British national and
imperial identity. French republicanism and global war, the argument
runs, catalysed the development of a British imperial state anchored in
monarchical patriotism at home, authoritarian rule abroad, and an
inclusive governing approach to multiethnic subjects.52
What tend to get lost in such periodizations of imperial change,
though, are the all-important years between the American and French
revolutions. In less than a decade after Yorktown, the empire’s admin-
istrative structures, territorial limits, and governing principles would
be refashioned around the world. In 1782, Irish ‘patriots’ won a
measure of self-government, reflecting a cautionary lesson learned
from America. In 1784, the India Act brought East India Company
administration under closer parliamentary supervision; a few years
later the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings helped to exorcize
British anxieties about corrupt rule in India. Loyalist refugees them-
selves played a role in the reconfiguration of imperial government in
Canada, from the partition of Nova Scotia to the reorganization of
Quebec under the Constitutional Act of 1791. In 1787, British aboli-
tionism consolidated with the founding of the Society for the
Abolition of the Slave Trade, highlighting a moral contrast between
Britain and the slave-owning United States. In 1788, as an abolition-
ist-sponsored colony was taking shape in Sierra Leone, another new
sphere of British imperial activity opened in the Pacific, with the
arrival of the first convicts in Botany Bay.
All these changes were undergirded by a clarified sense of imperial
purpose. Whether it was reforming Indian government, regulating
conditions on slave ships, or granting American loyalists land and
compensation, contemporaries widely invoked the concept of
‘national honour’ to describe such initiatives. The empire might be
authoritarian, ruled more through proconsuls than parliaments; but it
was also accommodating, guaranteeing protection to imperial subjects
regardless of where they lived, what ethnicity they were, or what reli-
gion they espoused. National honour demanded as much.The ideol-
ogy and methods characteristic of the British Empire after Waterloo,
in short, were already very much in place at the beginning of the
French revolutionary wars – refined in the aftermath of Britain’s
earlier revolutionary war, in America.
54 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

French émigrés to Britain experienced first-hand the imperial

legacy of the American Revolution.53 The most specific way in which
Britain’s experience of responding to American loyalists (and the loss
in America more broadly) influenced Britain’s response to the French
refugees (and the French Revolution more broadly) can be seen in
relief efforts undertaken on the émigrés’ behalf. In the wake of the
September massacres, as lurid tales poured into Britain together with
fresh waves of refugees, three relief committees formed in London to
provide financial assistance to the émigrés, and to Catholic priests in
particular.Where American loyalists in Britain had initially depended
on piecemeal handouts from the government, these organizations
represented a more systematic approach to relief – and not by acci-
dent.The founder of the largest relief committee was none other than
the former Loyalist Claims Commissioner John Eardley Wilmot.
Together with Jean François de la Marche, bishop of St Pol de Léon
and informal leader of the émigré priests, Wilmot managed to raise
more than £12,000 for the exiled clergy in just two months. By the
end of 1793, when the British government undertook to provide
funds directly to the émigrés, the Wilmot Committee had raised a
total of £26,000.54 Wilmot himself continued serving as a distribu-
tion agent until 1802.
The loyalist and émigré relief programmes shared other figures in
common. One of Wilmot’s colleagues on the committee, Sir William
Pepperell, was himself a prominent loyalist, and had for years acted as a
spokesman for his fellow refugees in Britain. Another committee
member, Brook Watson, had served as commissary-general at the time
of the British evacuation from the United States, and been responsible
for supplying refugees in Canada and elsewhere with provisions and
supplies.55 Back home on his well tended estate at East Sheen – his
‘plantation’, as one loyalist preferred to call it – Watson frequently
entertained loyalist refugees he had befriended in New York.56 Several
people involved in the resettlement of the black loyalists in Sierra
Leone also found their way onto the Wilmot Committee, notably the
young banker and abolitionist Henry Thornton, and his Clapham
housemate William Wilberforce.57 Some of those involved in émigré
relief, it must be said, were well known philanthropists who lent their
support to a wide range of charitable efforts. But then, the expansion
of philanthropy in this period was itself a manifestation of the strength-
ened sense of national honour that Britons managed to extract from
the loss in America. The close correlation between the loyalist and
émigré relief committees presents one tangible way in which that
moral sensibility informed the British response to revolutionary France.
Revolutionary Exiles 55

In a memoir he published in 1815 about the Loyalist Claims

Commission, Wilmot made no reference to his later work on behalf
of the French émigrés. It seems fair to surmise, though, that he would
have discerned in the efforts for the French the same spirit of ‘liberal
compensation . . . which redounds, and must for ever redound, so
highly to the honor of the British Nation’ that he identified in the
work of the claims commission.58 The frontispiece to his book illus-
trated this humanitarian sensibility with a striking image of national
and imperial inclusiveness. ‘The Reception of the American Loyalists
in England’, drawn by the American-born president of the Royal
Academy, Benjamin West, shows a looming Britannia extending her
protective arm over a throng of loyalist refugees, prominently featur-
ing an American Indian, several blacks, and widows with children.59
The allegory makes plain Britain’s preferred self-image after the
American Revolution, as an imperial nation-state committed to the
protection of marginal and multiethnic subjects. How well did that
self-image apply to the Britain that received the French émigrés?
The French émigrés may not have represented the same ethnic
range as the American loyalists, but they did feature one group of
people who, a short while before, would have attracted special hostil-
ity in Britain: Catholic priests.As recently as 1780, Catholics had been
targeted in the greatest explosion of public violence London had ever
witnessed, the Gordon Riots; and in 1801 prime minister William Pitt
failed to pass Catholic emancipation in the wake of the Act of Union
with Ireland. Yet among the French émigrés none attracted more
sympathy and support than the non-juring priests. In October 1793,
the composer Charles Burney wrote to his daughter Fanny – the new
Madame d’Arblay – of an extensive network of ‘very illustrious and
honourable’ women engaged in raising money for the priests,‘to save
the national disgrace of suffering these excellent people to die of
hunger before the Parliament meets and agrees to do something for
them’.60 The Claphamite Hannah More donated the profits of one of
her pamphlets to the relief of the priests.61 And one of the most
enthusiastic champions of the exiled clergy was Edmund Burke, Irish-
born friend of America and opponent of France, who also helped to
establish a school for émigré boys.62
In their open support of French Catholic priests, Britons show-
cased that same liberal humanitarian tolerance that had been extended
towards black loyalists and others. But the French Revolution gave
such attitudes a fresh twist. For as the participation of ‘conservatives’
like Burke and More in the cause underscores, charity towards the
priests and other French refugees demonstrated Britain’s own relative
56 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

conservatism in contrast with revolutionary radicalism. The Catholic

church looked good to the British at a time when all churches seemed
threatened by the godless Jacobins. French princes, the personification
of an absolutist tradition Britons once abhorred, earned support at a
time when all monarchies seemed threatened by republicanism on the
march. (And, to be sure, when those princes no longer commanded
real power.) The principles confirmed in the British Empire after the
American Revolution – granting inclusive protection in return for
loyalty to the crown – now stood as the pillars of a compelling
counter-revolutionary alternative to France, a middle way between
absolutism and republicanism. It is no coincidence that the term
‘loyalist’ gained new currency during the French Revolutionary wars,
as ‘Loyalist Associations’ pledging support to the king flourished across
Britain and parts of the empire.
The Age of Revolutions that began in the American colonies thus
had the effect of fortifying British imperial rule. As such, Britain
provides a central example in what Jeremy Adelman has identified as
a worldwide revitalization of empires in this period: an age more of
imperial revolutions than of democratic ones.63 While the American
defeat encouraged Britain to clarify the limits of imperial power, the
French wars quickly gave Britain compelling excuses to push forward
into unsettled regions. In India, British authorities responded to the
perceived threat of alliances between the French and indigenous
princes to depose Tipu Sultan, the aggressive ruler of Mysore, and to
bind the Nizam of Hyderabad, among others, more closely to the East
India Company state. In concert with the Ottomans, Britain invaded
Egypt to dislodge the quasi-republic established there by Bonaparte.
The French occupation of Holland provided an incentive for British
forces to seize Dutch possessions in Java and southern Africa. In Latin
America, Britain engaged in a complicated manipulation of loyalties,
sponsoring rebellion against the Spanish empire by Francisco de
Miranda and launching its own expansionist campaign in the River
Plate. Though this latter mission failed, British volunteers played a
vital role in Spanish American independence movements (just as they
would in Greece); only for South America’s new republics promptly
to be drawn into Britain’s informal empire. Around the world, the
effects of the Age of Revolutions proved anything but democratic for
those regions that fell into the grip of Britain’s rapidly growing
empire. The successful establishment of republicanism in the United
States stands out as an exception in a forty-year period that otherwise
witnessed a massive global expansion of British rule, consolidated
around liberal principles.
Revolutionary Exiles 57

In relation to the British empire alone, then, tracing the loyalist and
émigré diasporas demonstrates the inadequacy of nation-specific
paradigms or narratives of independence in explaining the conse-
quences of these revolutions. In truth, such accounts do not even
successfully describe the effects of revolution for the United States or
France, both of which promptly took imperial turns of their own.
While the United States pushed steadily westward towards the
Mississippi, Napoleon steered France from crusading republicanism to
dictatorial imperialism. In contrast to the revolutionary regimes he
had implemented in Italy and Egypt, Napoleon after 1799 worked to
build an empire bound together by dynastic ties, a strong military, and
a meritocratic elite. Compared to the liberal principles characteristic
of British imperial rule after the 1780s, however, the French Empire
under Napoleon bore the stamp of its revolutionary forebear,
imprinted by centralization, universalist principles, and an emerging
sense of ‘civilizing mission’.64 These distinctive British and French
imperial styles persisted well into the twentieth century, and their
vestiges can still be identified: about a dozen former British posses-
sions technically retain the monarch as head of state; while one-time
French colonies in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean are now fully
incorporated into the nation as départements. For French citizens as
much as for British subjects, revolution facilitated an imperial recon-
figuration as sweeping as it would be enduring.
Yet the contours of great events rarely look so clear to those who
live through them. If comparing loyalist and émigré diasporas points
out a line of continuity through the Age of Revolutions, it also
provides an insistent reminder of the sheer human confusion
provoked by this period of global upheaval.After all, some of the revo-
lutionary disruptions that imperial Britain stepped in to suppress
came from its very own loyal subjects. In the thickly wooded hills of
the Freetown peninsula, in Sierra Leone, resentment against British
authority brewed among the black loyalists who had settled in the
promised land of freedom. Charged with unexpected rent on their
land, and shut out of high office, disgruntled settlers launched a revolt
against their British governors. For a week in June 1800, former black
loyalists had to choose again whether or not to stay loyal to the
government – until the rising was comprehensively crushed with the
help of some freshly imported subjects, the Jamaican Maroons, whose
own rebellion against the British had recently been put down.
Making a tidy link from one revolution to the next, William
Wilberforce sniffed that the black loyalist rebels in Sierra Leone were
‘as thorough Jacobins as if they had been trained and educated in
58 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

Paris’.65 But he might as well have said Port-au-Prince, where former

slaves invoked French revolutionary principles to lead Haiti to inde-
pendence. Some of these revolutionaries had been schooled in mili-
tary action by the British, fighting in the American war.
Incidents such as this draw out the human texture and transna-
tional complexity of a world in flux, where former loyalists could
become revolutionaries, and revolutionaries could become imperial-
ists.66 As they found asylum in the wide embrace of the British
Empire and beyond, loyalist refugees and émigrés understood first-
hand how widely the ripples of revolution reached. Their global
exodus supports the characterization of this era as a period of ‘World
Crisis’, from which imperial powers – and the British Empire in
particular – emerged strengthened and refreshed. For in the end, to
loyalists and émigrés, and to the imperial Britons who confronted
both groups, the Age of Revolutions and the World Crisis must have
seemed very much the same.
4
Iberian Passages: Continuity and
Change in the South Atlantic

Jeremy Adelman

This chapter is about the ways in which the Spanish and Portuguese
empires in the Atlantic world made the passage through an age of
global confrontation between rival political systems, culminating in
the dissolution of the empires and the redefinition of sovereignty in
the 1820s. It makes several entwined arguments. First, the Iberian
empires were part of an interlocking system of imperial competitions
from which there was little to immunize themselves. Instead, faced
with the compound pressures of a global system, they adapted. They
did so with hitherto under-acknowledged effectiveness, and with
unintended effects for the internal make-up of each empire. Still,
modifications could not withstand the escalation of global competi-
tion to a crisis when it ravaged the core of the system, which leads to
this chapter’s second claim: the Napoleonic wars – when seen from a
more global perspective – hammered the occupied or stricken
empires, from the Ottomans to the Iberians. For the Iberian Atlantic,
the internal structures of sovereignty collapsed in the metropoles and
forced colonies to amalgamate older practices with newer ones to
shore up legitimacy as politics grew increasingly polarized and social
systems imploded.
Rulers devised policies in response to external and internal threats.
But policies required a politics, and in the age of revolution, political
debates led to questions about the fundaments of state sovereignty,
which set the stage for social revolutions. But the politics of these
breaks, as this chapter seeks to show, depended much more on actors’
efforts to follow and adapt to rules that were themselves crumbling,
which opened up a broad array of possibilities – a process which, in
retrospect, appears improvised and reactive.This is more than a claim
about the contingencies of macrosocial change; it speaks to the chain
of disequilibrium that lies at the core of how systems of sovereignty

59
60 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

were fashioned and consolidated – and thus the alternatives embed-

ded within them. If we are accustomed to thinking of revolutions as
events that overturn one system in favour of something different, this
runs the risk of obscuring the politics, often very drawn out, that
connected the crises of anciens régimes with successors, the very passage
that opened alternatives along the way.What is so illuminating about
the Iberian empires and their progeny is that the passage was an
extended one, gathering force by the late eighteenth century,
prompted by common global pressures, and giving way to wide-
ranging constitutional debates and civil wars in the 1820s, which
revealed the multitude of political and economic arrangements – and
which expressed themselves in a variety of outcomes.1
The quest for models of sovereignty to resolve global pressures and
local conflicts yielded to hybrid and frequently unstable systems.The
approach to constitutionalism – the touted mechanism for building a
post-colonial order – did not rely on any single creed or practice, but
was as syncretic as the imperial system it was supposed to replace. In
the end, this age of revolutions – like those that would succeed it –
gave birth to a plethora of intellectual proposals and institutional prac-
tices that would compete for claims to post-imperial legitimacy. The
nation as the repository of sovereignty was simply one, admittedly
potent, of these claims.The emergence of ‘the modern’ might also be
seen as the result of a passage that expanded the plurality and
complexity of local orders.2
The concept that unites the themes of this chapter, sovereignty,
needs defining. Historians have conventionally been informed by
sovereignty’s original conceptualizers, treating the state in almost
anthropomorphic, singular terms, as the state, with definable and
coherent powers. This has been best expressed in the widespread
maxim, derived from Max Weber, that the state is the legitimate
monopolizer of the legal uses of violence, from which, as Carl Schmitt
later added, it was uniquely endowed with the power to declare its
own exceptions. Understandably, this remains a common current, not
least for those seeking to end crimes against humanity by reclaiming
violence as the public authority’s singularity – and making it account-
able. While I am not challenging the appeals of this definition for
those who are anxious to replace one order (or lack of it) with a
coherent successor, this chapter invokes an approach to sovereignty
that stresses the basic pluralities within any given order and the global
state system that envelops each one. It points to the multitude of
claims by subjects, images of rulers, and practices of governance that
are bundled together in loose and not always so coherent ways. This
Iberian Passages 61

is especially the case when dealing with the pluralist legal cultures of
empires and their colonies; but as this approach seeks to illuminate,
this feature did not end when empires gave way to successors, but
were subsumed within them, even within ‘the nation’ itself. What is
more, political-economic orders were much less ‘bounded’ units; their
authority aggregated at more than one juridical level, from munici-
palities to transoceanic constitutions. We might treat statehood as an
amalgamation of practices locked in equivocal conjunctions, and are
thus more about relationships between powers – exemplified by
Montesquieu and Madison’s image of a ‘balance’ – than their natural
or coherent features. This applied to the internal as well as external
conditions of public authority.3
This is important for understanding how empires worked in the
early modern period, for as Lauren Benton has shown in colonies
from India to New France, colonial systems rested on practices better
understood through the prism of legal pluralism. But there is more:
the pluralist foundations did not dissolve with the end of empire in
favour of a more homogeneous nation-state. Indeed, one of the legal
and constitutional options that persisted, or reinvigorated itself during
the age of revolutions discussed in this book, is the choice for empire
itself. What is more, where and when European power in the
Americas receded, the complex improvisations of empires under
duress did not end with secession; the effort to build a successor
system was no less syncretic than its predecessors. This is what lay at
the heart of so many of the strains and stresses on early constitution-
alism in Latin America in the 1820s, which echoed the general char-
acter of what C. A. Bayly has called the ‘hybrid legitimacy’ of
post-Napoleonic states. The revealing difference about Iberian
America was the sheer diversity that exploded from beneath the
veneer of unity; no cult of royalty or religion of nationhood could
reassemble the pieces of former colonies with ease, or even force.The
vocabulary of national self-determination did not resolve the ambi-
guities and equivocations that accompanied the effort to legitimate
inequality and to legalize privilege, nor in some senses was it seeking
to before self-determination was elevated to a universal principle after
the First World War.4
Rivalry among European powers was a feature of state formation,
as the late Charles Tilly reminded readers with his famous observation
that, in Europe’s contours, wars made states and states made wars. But
what has perhaps been less observed is that increasingly war-making
went global; we can reframe Tilly’s formulation in more expanded
ways, rendering European dynamics in a context that expands the
62 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

boundaries of state formation beyond Europe and that shaped the

power balances within it. Doing so helps us to understand the nature
of the conflagration from the 1750s to the 1820s, for nowhere did
European empires displace their rivalries more than across the
Americas, fuelled by the soaring ‘value’ of possessions on account of
the lucrative bond of unfree labour to resources just as freedom devel-
oped new valences in Europe. It is often forgotten that a spark for the
War of the Spanish Succession was a contest over the control of the
slave trade from Africa to Spanish colonies in the Americas. And
thereafter, despite the Treaty of Utrecht’s provisions, the struggle for
mercantilist controls and territorial claims over the disputed border-
lands of the mainland and islands of the Caribbean ramped up.5
For the Iberian empires, this presented a particular challenge.
Unlike those of the relative latecomers from London and Paris, their
claims to possession in the New World dated back to a precise, if
entirely unworkable, settlement proclaimed by the Pope with the
Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which claimed to have delineated Spanish
and Portuguese territories and gave papal blessing to their missions to
colonize them and convert their native populations. In the ensuing
centuries, rivals preferred to raid and pillage; English pirates, as Francis
Drake famously noted, would give the Spanish no peace beyond the
line, and the French also muscled in when they could. But by the late
seventeenth century, this kind of poaching activity gave way to terri-
torial possession.That they were there first meant that Iberian powers
had to defend their borders from interlopers who graduated from
privateering to outright occupation, and increasingly used seized
outposts as bases for contraband and settlement for their own planta-
tions. Being defensive has often carried some baggage; it has often
implied being older, more ossified, less agile and responsive to
changes. Not a few contemporaries in Lisbon and Madrid used this
kind of alarmist rhetoric to accentuate the urgency of the pleas for
change, which many subsequently took literally.The Spanish physio-
crat Pablo de Olavide argued in 1768 that Spain was a reflection of
England’s past: ‘England, that powerful and populated kingdom, was
before in the same situation in which Spain finds itself today. It was
devoted to the same erroneous principles and was poor, depopulated
and miserable.’This Black Legend rhetoric has had a long shelf-life; it
is a view that has changed only in recent years.Without discounting
the limits of Iberian feudality, more and more historians have come to
see Iberians adapting their political economies precisely because they
had to. Being first-comers, their models of sovereignty evolved in
response to the globalization of European power; that they were first-
Iberian Passages 63

comers meant that they had to transform inherited structures that had
proven so effective in a different conjuncture. The challenge was less
the inability to change, but that so much had to change.6
Behind the defensive positions of the Iberian empires were deep
debates about how to reform them to meet the growing political and
military threats as the eighteenth century unfolded. By the middle of
the century, rulers and ministers wrangled over how to adapt their
ways and embark on increasingly ambitious plans to modify the insti-
tutions, private and public, that held their empires together.Variously
described as the Bourbon (for Spain) or Pombaline (for Portugal)
reforms, these were portmanteaus for a variety of ways to pursue one
broad objective: to reconstitute the empires so that private rents and
public revenues flowed more effectively to support and defend the
territorial contours of imperial states. Alexandre de Gusmão, the
Portuguese imperial minister, likened empires to bodies, and the flow
of resources with trade was their lifeblood. What was needed was an
‘active’ model of empire to replace the ‘passive’ one, a system of
commercial colonization to supplant the spoils of conquest.7
Reform recombined important aspects of empires – and gave them
enough stamina to endure the intensified scramble for the control of
trade and defence of imperial frontiers. Old convoys, flotillas of specie-
bearing merchantmen escorted by warships, which made easy targets
for predation, were suspended in favour of licensing systems for trading
ships.The annual fairs, like Portobello’s, a favoured magnet for maraud-
ers, faded.What emerged was a much more decentred, network-based
system of commercial exchange, which was not as easily raided, but
also less easily regulated. This took place earlier in Portugal’s empire,
which was, in any event, never as resolutely centralized as Spain’s. In
both, governance adapted to an emerging autonomous and dispersed
commercial system, which was not as easily targeted for revenue
extraction. To some extent the administrative reforms were meant to
give new centralizing powers, whether this was the formation of
monopoly trading companies in the north of Brazil or the creation of
powerful Intendants in Spanish America, who were supposed to rein-
vigorate the flow of resources to the centre.Across the colonies, vicere-
gal habits ceded space to a multitude of new legal districts and officers,
further pluralizing the layers of public power. Scarcely patrolled fron-
tiers were militarized and fortifications built, while militias were
trained, comprised of plebeian colonial populations, often free blacks
and mulattos. Meanwhile, to pacify unruly grey zones, ‘treaties’ were
signed with Indian borderlanders, even by those powers like Spain
unaccustomed to this legal convention. Each empire set about to
64 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

delimit and defend the territorial reach of its domain, and within each
to promote commerce, more investment in mining, settlement of fron-
tiers, and the surge in traffic in African slaves to create a substratum of
labourers upon whose shoulders the fate of empires would rest.8
There were resistances, in both the metropoles and the peripheries.
In Lisbon, the Marquês de Pombal had always faced some formidable
detractors, especially among the interests who were squeezed out by
his preference for a new breed of merchant and investor. So, when his
patron, King José I, died in 1777, the minister was soon exposed to
his many critics. He was deposed. This did not scupper reform, but
simply slowed it down. The reforms also provoked unrest in the
colonies, albeit not as much because incumbent interests easily
adapted to the new opportunities presented by commercial incen-
tives. Still, hikes in taxes did signify a departure from the older colo-
nial pacts, which had left so much colonial extraction outside the
purview of collectors. The foiled Tiradentes revolt in Minas Gerais
(early 1789) was one such episode, though it is worth adding that it
was more of an exception to prove a rule about the ways in which
Brazil adapted itself to new policies. Spain faced analogous, though
more alarming, reactions. In Madrid, bread riots brought an end to
experiments in free grain trade. In the Americas there was even more
unrest. In the 1780s, the Túpac Amaru revolt in the Central Andes,
Comunero uprisings further north, and seditious activity across New
Spain indicated the ways in which many local peoples, sometimes
aligned with disgruntled officials, resented some of the extractive
burdens and centralizing efforts. The resistance was enough to get
officials to back off some of their reformist zeal and restore the
elements of an imagined idea of the old colonial pact.9
But some of the reforms intensified, especially in domains that
motivated greater commerce as a way to spur the creation of more
rents that could then be available for taxation. In Brazil, this meant
dismantling some of the powers of Pombal’s commercial monopolies
and letting local Juntas do Comércio, ruled by trading magnates, regu-
late and promote local trade. Old Boards of Inspection lost some of
their authority. Merchant capitalists, especially in Rio de Janeiro, pros-
pered as never before, and their rents were redeployed into the credit
systems that tied the Brazilian staple-producing hinterlands to Atlantic
commerce. As with the deregulation of trade, this was a more gradual
and less disruptive process in the Portuguese Atlantic than in Spain’s
dominions.There, the opening of trade was much more sudden with
the flurry of comercio libre decrees and the formation of merchant
guilds in many of the port cities of the empire.The objective was to
Iberian Passages 65

replace an older model that sought to direct as much as possible

through the metropole to benefit merchant capital of Spain’s entre-
pôt, Cádiz, with a model that promoted greater traffic between all
Spanish and Spanish-American ports as a way to enhance infra-impe-
rial trade and its rents as a whole.10
Bolstering the fortunes of merchant capital ushered in a dramatic
change in the social landscape on the frontiers of the Iberian colonies.
The boom in trade inducted labour to the ‘wastelands’ and mines from
northern New Spain to the Pampas. For this reason the late eighteenth
century has sometimes been depicted as a second Conquest, not mili-
tary but commercial, a kind of ‘market revolution’ that spread trading
capillaries to the backlands, though it did not exactly rely on voluntary
‘market’ means to brace labour to the land. Far from it; across the
colonies officials and merchant capital relied on a range of coercive
techniques, from debt servitude to outright bondage, to enlist indige-
nous peoples into the market for wares and workers. From textile
factories (obrajes) in Ecuador to tea plantations in Paraguay, native
peoples were procured – with varying devices relying mainly on provi-
sions of commodities and credit to create webs of dependent popula-
tions – for the production of commodities.The combination of greater
investments from the pools of merchant capital into mining, with the
release of workers from Indian villages, lay behind the expansion of
specie production in New Spain and the Andes, which pumped silver
into the trading networks and revenue pockets of the Iberian Atlantic.
In some spots, the boom began to exhaust itself: in Potosí the mother
lodes were getting tapped out by 1805 and food supplies for displaced
villagers were running scarce and getting expensive. In other agrarian
regions of Mexico, there is growing evidence that here too there was
overheating, rising food prices, and increasing scarcities. In a word,
there was a limit to this model of market revolution, since it so rarely
involved any fundamental transformation in techniques of production
and productivity; but it was only being reached in a few, albeit some-
times important, provinces.11
Where the reform-led expansion of commodity production in the
Iberian empires expanded with fewer restraints was on the agrarian
frontiers sustained by slave labour – and emboldened by the height-
ened traffic in African captives.Though we have become accustomed
to thinking about the abolition of the slave trade as one of the signa-
ture components of the ‘age of revolutions’, it is clear that in this
domain – and in so many others – a new politics of liberty coincided
with, and in some senses was a response to, an expansion of bonded
labour. Throughout the ‘age of revolutions’, the traffic in African
66 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

captives rose, and did not fall. Indeed, it spiked after the insurrection
that spread across St Domingue and the heightened abolitionist
campaigning. It was stoked by reform within the Iberian empires,
which sluiced more precious metals into the commercial networks of
the South Atlantic. A decisive feature was the legal opening of the
slave trade between Iberian entrepôts. By the 1770s, Madrid’s Council
of the Indies was receiving pleas from merchants and officials from the
colonies calling upon the government to free up the slave trade.
Cartagena, noted one petition, was struggling ‘for lack of slaves’.The
government responded by ending the practice of the old asiento
system, which allocated the contract to import slaves to Spanish ports
to a single firm (and the control of which had led to the commercial
feud between France and England and the outbreak of war earlier in
the century). By 1789, Madrid had issued a series of decrees allowing
individual merchants to participate in the traffic, followed by exemp-
tions on duties and then a series of concessions allowing foreign
merchants to unload their cargoes of captives. Brazilian merchants had
enjoyed a more liberal system for decades, and by the 1780s
commanded fleets of tumbeiros to ship their captives from Angola to
South America and the Caribbean.12
A South Atlantic system consolidated what one Brazilian historian
has called the ‘Atlântico Fluminense’, which pivoted around the
powerful merchant class of Rio de Janeiro and the webwork of slave
trading that radiated from it, tying Lima to Luanda. Consider the
following numbers: from 1781 to 1790, 754,000 Africans were
imported to the Americas, of whom 319,000 were destined for Saint
Domingue, which meant that 435,000 were spread across the rest of
the hemisphere. The following decade saw a dip to 687,000 captives
shipped, but only 66,000 bound for Saint Domingue (leaving 621,000
for the rest of the Americas to exploit). And from 1801 to 1810, no
slaves went to Saint Domingue, but 609,000 went to the rest of the
hemisphere. After 1808, when the sea lanes were cut off for the legal
trade in slaves, shipments flowed to French and Iberian ports.13 The
result was an increasingly autonomous and lucrative business that
expanded the pool of commercial rents into which imperial authori-
ties could dip for revenues, and a puissant class of merchant capitalists
in the colonies to whom monarchs and ministers could turn for loans
and loyalties.An internal report to the Spanish government concluded
that, by the turn of the nineteenth century,‘the opulence of America,
whose influence in the Commerce and Navigation among the
European nations [is great] . . . could not exist without the slave
trade’.14
Iberian Passages 67

CANADA
(British)

Boston
San Francisco
(1776)
Philadelphia
CALIFORNIA
San Diego
Santa Fe
LOUISIANA
UNITED
STATES
Atlantic
(1769)
TEXAS
(1762) Ocean
Charleston
New Orleans
St. Augustine
Monterrey FLORIDA
(1770) (1784)
Zacatecas Saint-Dominigue (French)
San Luis Potosí SANTO DOMINGO
Guanajuato CUBA
Guadalahara Querétaro PUERTO RICO
Mexico City Vera Cruz BELIZE
Acapulco Oaxaca (British) JAMAICA British West Indies
(British)
Puebla Guatemala
Caribbean Sea CAPTAINCY-GENERAL
OF VENEZUELA
Portobelo (1777)
Cartagena Caracas
Panama VICEROYALTY DUTCH GUIANA
OF NEW GRANADA
Santa Fe de Bogota (1717 & 1739)
Quito Belém
Guayaquil São Luís
GRÃO PARÁ
VICEROYALTY
OF PERU
PERNAMBUCO
Trujillo Recife
Pacific Callao
Lima Cuzco
BRAZIL
(Portuguese) BAHIA
Ocean UPPER Salvador
La Paz MINAS
PERU GERAIS
Potosí Vila Rica
VICEROYALTY
OF RIO DE LA PLATA
(1776) Rio de Janeiro
CAPTAINCY-GENERAL Asunción São Paolo
OF CHILE Tucumán
Córdoba BANDA
ORIENTAL Porto Alegre
Valparaíso
Mendoza
Santiago Santa Fe

Buenos Montevideo
Aires
IA
ON
AG
PAT

Limit of Spanish Empire

Territorial boundaries

Map 2 The Americas in the late eighteenth century (adapted from J. H. Elliott, Empires of the
Atlantic World, New Haven, CT, 2006, p. 354).
68 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

Motivated by a combination of colonial pressures from merchants

and landowners seeking commercial rents and officials searching for
revenues, reforms had decidedly ambiguous effects. Rapid change
helped to integrate the parts of the empires closer together even as the
provinces of the empire grew more heterogeneous. Heterogeneous
integration also had effects on the inner balances; some degree of
administrative centralization coincided with the decentring of the
empires’ social structures. Outposts in each empire acquired endoge-
nous powerful elites, bordering on regional aristocracies tied to
merchant classes in the major ports. The result, in sum, enabled
empires to establish greater territorial footprints, with agents and
enforcers reaching the fringes of the systems and operating within
networks flowing with credit from an archipelago of mercantile
centres. Within each of these, we can see how the relations within
ruling imperial coalitions thereby recomposed. Still, for all the
complexity of the reforms’ effects, which pulled the empires together
and apart, the Iberian Atlantic was hardly stuck in sclerotic ways,
unable to adapt to changes in the world market or the advent of new
business practices; this was not a case of immunity to modernization
that required it to be imposed from without.
The 1790s altered the delicate balance without overturning it.The
outbreak of the Revolutionary Wars, especially Spain’s with France
from 1793 to 1795, and then more cripplingly with England from
1796 to 1802, and then again from 1804 to 1808 after the failure of
the ‘Peace’ of Amiens, intensified the pressures on the Iberian empires,
especially Spain.Warships ravaged the imperial sea lanes, especially for
cargoes destined for European ports. Less affected were the coastal
routes of the South Atlantic system, and the booming trade between
Africa and South America. Indeed, trade flourished within the
empires, though not necessarily (unless there was a pause in the fight-
ing) between the metropoles and their possessions. The result was a
commercial blow to merchant capitalists of Spain and Portugal –
which was important, because when the fighting would finally settle
down at the end of a bellicose cycle in 1814, battered peninsular
merchant capitalists were determined to claw back their access to
commercial rents, even if it meant alienating the increasingly
autonomous merchants of the outposts. As with the distribution of
imperial rents, so with imperial revenues; the metropoles faced
growing fiscal crises as defence costs spiked but revenues from trade
dwindled, while in the colonies, there was a similar rise in expendi-
tures, but treasury income also rose, though not always at the same
pace. From the 1790s, the metropoles leaned ever more heavily on the
Iberian Passages 69

colonies for remittances; the Indies became the single largest source
of income for the imperial treasuries, but subject to wild shifts and
vulnerability to attacks along the sea lanes. The result was a turn to
greater borrowing, which grew increasingly coercive as warfare
ravaged public accounts.This was a story about a double dependency
of imperial sovereignty: the centres of empires on their peripheries,
and the state upon merchant capital to buoy it through years of inter-
imperial warfare.15
Double dependency was on the minds of political economists – for
those concerned with entwined relationship between private rents and
public revenues. Manuel Belgrano, a lawyer with the merchants’ guild
of Buenos Aires and learned in physiocratic texts, was concerned that
the state was growing overly dependent on the movement of goods to
sustain it; its taxes and regulations threatened to weaken the founda-
tion of opulence. He wanted freer trade to ensure access to markets for
colonial producers who could then provide the social bases for a
wealthy sovereign. His ideas echoed from another corner of South
America: José Ignacio de Pombo in Cartagena worried that excessive
taxes and regulations might breed corruption and bad manners. In
1807, he warned that ‘it is very important that the government, to
avoid this terrible affliction, with respect both to customs and public
morals, as well as the public treasury, as well as to honorable citizens
that rely upon legitimate commerce’, open the ports to active trade.
The concern about the state’s dependency on merchant capital, and
merchants’ on colonial staples, involved an acknowledgement of the
new spatial relationships within empires in the age of revolutions.The
Brazilian political economist José Joaquim da Cunha Azeredo
Coutinho noted that ‘the metropole is . . . like a mother who must
give the colonies, like her sons, all the good treatment and help neces-
sary to defend and ensure their lives and welfare’. For Portugal to be a
great power in the world, it needed wealthy colonies. ‘It is therefore
necessary that the interests of the metropole become linked to those
of the colonies, and that these be treated without rivalry. For when all
the subjects are richer, the sovereign will be even more so.’16

***

The portrait above defies the common image of backward and brittle
systems cracking under the pressure of global competition and
confrontation.These were not empires doomed to collapse. Nor were
they cracking from within, as colonial subjects and their enlightened
letrados struggled for freedom from old ways to realize proto-nation-
70 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

alist aspirations. Indeed, the dominant language of political economy

was not rights talk, but market talk. This does not mean that the
increasing mobility of property did not provoke unease about corrup-
tion and degeneration of bonds between subjects and sovereigns. It
did. But this anxiety has to be put in both a global context of insta-
bility wrought by war and the commercial integration of the Atlantic
world – not the unique feature of Iberian sclerosis. Property, colonial
reformers argued, respected by subjects and sovereign alike, was the
basis of public wealth and private opulence – a healthy and well
mannered system that did not need to break with the past for its
virtuous combination to work. The overwhelming tenor of debate
about public affairs was steeped in loyalism, with nothing approach-
ing the intellectual or social conditions of revolution within the
Spanish or Portuguese empires. Indeed, global pressures emboldened
efforts to accommodate (or rearticulate, to use an older vintage of
social theory) inherited structures of production and trade into a new
political economy of empire, and a new balance between merchant
capital and the state.17
We still face the inevitable question: if empires were not fated to
collapse, what did account for their break-up without explaining
revolutions as the consequence of circumstance? The answer lies in
the ways in which global conflagration provoked local contestation,
and the slide from negotiations over how to handle a mounting impe-
rial crisis to a civil war, and from civil war to revolution. It is not just
the causality that is in question – how global forces shaped local ones
– but also the sequence that explains what is so revolutionary about
this conjuncture. We are more often accustomed to thinking that
revolutions in thought or practice detonated crises of the old regimes;
the story that unfolds here suggests very different sequelae with a
variety of outcomes depending on the course of the civil wars within
empires, civil wars that would in turn reverberate through the 1820s
as constitutionalists took up the challenge of building successors to
Iberian empires. The change in sovereignty, the demise of older
systems and the emergence of successors, was a process that has often
eluded triumphalist nationalist narratives, or those which insisted that
old regimes – among them, empires – were doomed because they
were outmoded. This process was missing, because the shifts were
explained by teleologies that hid the political choices over how –
indeed whether – to defend or rebuild sovereignty.
The problems were increasingly clear in the 1790s, for the more
insightful imperial analysts of the time worried about the sustainabil-
ity of their regimes under duress. Should the global situation deteri-
Iberian Passages 71

orate, some worried, extreme measures had to be considered. One, the

brainchild of the influential minister to the Court in Lisbon, Rodrigo
de Souza Coutinho, who had handled the Treasury’s growing debts
with some considerable skill, involved a recognition that Brazil was as
important to the future of the imperial monarchy as the metropole.
Should the latter run into a serious crisis, the monarchy might have
to consider relocating the centre of the empire to a new world capital,
Rio de Janeiro.This was, at it turned out, a prophetic emergency plan.
Most observers hoped the contest between empires would wane, and
the physiocratic-inspired policies be allowed to have their felicitous
effects of recombining property and politics in a way that put the
empires on healthy foundations.What they did not anticipate was the
effects on empires as the confrontation in Europe intensified after
1805. When the crisis finally did break out, it inspired the Spanish
reformer Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos to remark that the break-up
of the Spanish empire was a civil war contained within and unleashed
by a broader, global one.18
Governments in Lisbon and Madrid faced unenviable choices as
Britain and France poised to square off once more, not only involv-
ing the empires of the Atlantic, but reaching east to the territorial
empires of St Petersburg and Istanbul. Within each of the Iberian
capitals there was a major debate about what to do, once it became
clear that Napoleon had designs on the peninsula and the possessions
beyond. Some wanted alignment with London, others with Paris, and
another faction urged neutrality. The last faded away after 1804; by
1807 the alignments leaned one way when Napoleon’s Iberian
designs were fully unveiled. For the Portuguese it was a more straight-
forward matter, given the longstanding alignment with England;
besides it was in no position to defend its sea lanes if the Royal Navy
were to take aim at them. Still, an important circle of pro-French
ministers argued that French armies would invade Portugal.This was
a minority faction – but strong enough to keep the Braganza Court
dithering up to the last minute. The paralysis in Madrid was worse,
compounded by in-fighting at the very top, which culminated in
Ferdinand VII’s seizure of the throne from his father and the fall of his
disreputed ministry. Indeed, the cracking at the top of Spain’s govern-
ment created the opportunity the French ruler sought. He saw a
chance to take both countries and lay claim to their possessions over-
seas, thereby striking a mortal blow to Anglo-Atlantic power. Sending
his armies across the Pyrenees in late 1807, he set off a crisis of sover-
eignty at the very core of the Iberian systems. The policy decisions
varied, with decisive structural consequences. The Braganza court
72 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

dusted off an old emergency plan drawn up by Souza Coutinho: it

fled in a massive fleet escorted by the Royal Navy, to relocate in Rio
de Janeiro. ‘Americanizing’ the monarchy spared it the question of
what bound the colonies to ancien régime sovereignty. In Spain, despite
some entreaties to do the same, Ferdinand was captured by the
French, and a makeshift government fled southwards to Andalusia,
seeking refuge from French troops, to be closer to the port of Cádiz
lest an escape be unavoidable. This government would therefore
struggle to preserve its enfeebled centrality in an empire that had no
effective centre.19
What all parties agreed upon in the aftermath of the invasion is that
the loss of the centres did not imply the end of empire.The question,
at least for the ruling classes and officials, was how to preserve it –
especially in the face of the new Napoleonic regime’s reforms, which
included the promise of a constitution, equality for colonial subjects,
the abolition of the Inquisition, and freedom of the press, just the
kinds of decrees that appealed to Spain’s and the colonies’ reformers.
In a sense, 1808 was the axial year of an axial age; it was not mere
coincidence that the spread of abolitionism coincided with the diffu-
sion of constitutionalism as unstable and vulnerable regimes at war
sought to prop themselves with new appeals to legitimacy. The
Iberian Atlantic took part in this shift through a series of improvised
practices that focused on new means to embolden the loyalty of
imperial subjects to their sovereign – not least because the drawn out
war on the peninsula became as costly as it was brutal. Someone had
to pay, and both Spain and Portugal pleaded that the colonies and
their merchants underwrite the struggle. The quid pro quo was a
change in rulership, not rulers, through new practices of representa-
tion. Since the break was more decisive in Spain, with the govern-
ment in shock, the alteration in the rules of the game was more
abrupt.The Inquisition was abolished, censorship was lifted from the
press, and when Napoleon’s agents sought to encourage Spain’s
colonies to declare fealty to the newly imposed government in
Madrid (under his brother Joseph Bonaparte) by promising colonial
subjects basic equality, elections, and a constitution, the fleeing
Spanish government in Andalusia responded in kind: it promised to
convoke a parliament to discuss making a new constitutional monar-
chy.The insistence that a new legal regime would undergird the state,
and the assurance that colonies would enjoy basic representation in an
imperial arrangement, signified a break from ancient practices in
order to preserve the regime as a whole. For the Americanized
Portuguese government, it was enough that the crown, court, and
Iberian Passages 73

ministry were now based in Rio de Janeiro and could step up the cult
of regalism in the colonies, which had the additional advantage of
allowing influential colonial subjects access to the corridors of power.
There was less need for a de jure change in the rules in order to
preserve de facto integration. But the significance of public opinion,
and in Spanish America of elections, was crucial, and in some areas
sprung to life with vertiginous energy. In Buenos Aires, Caracas, and
Santa Fé de Bogotá, the printing presses were the engines of public
debate; in Lima, Mexico, and Rio de Janeiro, under the eyes of more
cautious royal authorities, the press was more polite and constrained.20
If public opinion was one pillar of legitimacy, formal mechanisms
of representation provided others. Metropolitan governments in Spain
in 1808, and Portugal in 1820, called for constitutional assemblies to
draft a founding charter of imperial nationhood to reinvigorate the
ties between rulers and ruled. The motive here was ‘liberal’ in the
sense that self-described metropolitan liberals thought that the
monarchies would be stronger, and governments more stable, with
modern law backing them up. And the only way to accomplish this
was to invite elected deputies to deliberate. The Spanish Junta issued
a clarion call to the colonies in the name of ‘the nation’, insisting ‘that
the Spanish dominions in America are not colonies, but an essential
and integral part of the Monarchy’. Accordingly, each part of the
empire-nation was invited to elect and dispatch envoys to a new
assembly charged with drafting a founding charter. Much the same
obtained in Portugal, later. Electoral life in towns across both empires
sprang to life (with a few exceptions). However, when American dele-
gates arrived in the assemblies, they immediately encountered a wall
of resistance to their understandings of equality of all subjects of the
empire. Metropolitan delegates contrived ways to diminish the
strength of colonial delegations – which did little to endear Lisbon
and Madrid to colonial outposts. The burst of electoral activity was
meant to bolster the legitimacy of the regimes, and to some extent it
did. But it also had the effect of revealing the colonial status of
American subjects, which until then could be mystified by the mech-
anisms of viceregal justice. The innovations could not contain the
effects of the spread of world war, which began to split the seams of
Iberian empires.21
There was a second source of friction. Improvising also created
resistances. Some potentates disliked the political opening altogether,
and in their efforts to damp down the enthusiasm of public opinion
and deliberative political life, they thwarted officials’ decrees.This was
most severe in Mexico in 1808; powerful peninsular merchants and
74 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

aristocrats were shocked at the Viceroy’s turn to the capital’s munici-

pal council, the Cabildo, for consultation on how to handle the
collapse of the metropole. The result was a riptide of unrest, culmi-
nating in the Hidalgo Revolt, which spread quickly through the
countryside and nearly engulfed the capital. Something analogous
happened in the Andes, where in Quito a new junta governed in the
name of the people, and the Peruvian Viceroy sent his armies to crush
the pretenders outright. Around the empire, the openings coincided
with an upsurge in reaction and closures, which provoked one
Granadan publicist, Camilo Torres, to issue a famous ‘Memorial de
Agravios’, which catalogued the abuses committed by officials who
refused to live by the letter of new laws and their spirit and thus
threatened the moral fabric of nation in defence of old privileges. He
proclaimed that Americans were not ‘strangers within the Spanish
nation’, but ‘descendants of those who spilled their blood to acquire
new dominions for the Spanish crown’. Nor was the violence
restricted to the Spanish. Unrest came to a head in the south and
north of Brazil, for while the Americanization of the crown had
brought it closer to its colonial subjects, it also had the effect of
bracing the capital more closely with its distant provinces, like Rio
Grande do Sul and northern Pernambuco, which disliked the new
centralizing arrangements.The friction provoked armed unrest, and in
the case of Pernambuco, a secessionist movement (not from ‘Portugal’
but from Rio de Janeiro, it is worth emphasizing). Localized violence
had the effect of stigmatizing the very instruments that had been
devised to revitalize the empires. For reactionaries, it was evidence of
why these changes were so threatening. For those who pushed to
expand the scope of colonial voice within empire, violence doused
their optimism. And many fence-sitters grew alarmed as the liberal,
gentlemanly improvisations began to fail.
There was a third irritant that shook the colonial coalitions that
stood behind the idea of reconstituting empires. From the 1790s, the
scramble for revenues from taxpayers and consumers, and increasingly
for loans from merchants, challenged some of the older mercantilist
regulations governing foreign vessels entering colonial ports. Belgrano,
Pombo,Azeredo, and other lawyers and political economists argued for
greater flexibility and more openness for colonial exporters.
Sometimes viceregal officials obliged, often as a means to enlist contri-
butions to local coffers. For the most part, they had no choice, for the
French occupation basically mooted the rules that were meant to
protect traffic with the metropole; there was no metropole with which
to trade unless the colonists were going to join Napoleon’s
Iberian Passages 75

Continental System. This meant, in effect, that Iberian colonies were

thrown open as markets to ‘friendly’ or ‘neutral’ trading partners. The
Portuguese were the first to announce this as a principle for the new
imperial political economy; Souza Coutinho, while still aboard the
flotilla crossing the Atlantic en route from occupied Lisbon, drafted an
‘Open Ports’ decree, which Prince João VI announced to great fanfare
when he disembarked in the tropics. That it was the ruler who
announced the decree would make it hard for recalcitrants to disobey.
In Spanish American ports, the openings were more halting; there was
greater resistance because the agents of peninsular houses feared that
this would be the death knell to Cádiz (with good reason), and the
struggling government in Cádiz couldn’t easily open colonial ports
without alienating the merchants in the peninsular port upon whom
the government was increasingly dependent for loans to sustain itself.
This tussle did not materialize in the Portuguese Atlantic until after the
French withdrawal, whereupon old peninsular houses clamoured to
reclaim old protectionist privileges.What this meant was great friction
at the top of the ruling class of the empires, unravelling the ties of
dependency between merchants and monarchs.22
The combination of these forces crippled, but did not condemn,
the efforts to keep the empires together in the midst of global war.
Across the imperial landscapes, conflict was brewing, and in some
places erupted in civil war; in some corners of empire, such as
Mexico, the Andes, and Brazil, insurgents were crushed. Elsewhere,
coalitions declared home rule within empire. Some managed to
survive. This was the case in the River Plate, though even the home
rule coalition slipped into internal feuding. And in Caracas, autono-
mists, led eventually by Simón Bolívar, who began his political career
in the vacuum created by a French invasion, managed to defeat loyal-
ists, to become the first colony to secede altogether (though techni-
cally Paraguay was adrift before). This did not last. Imperial armies,
backed by colonists who disliked the ways of the new government,
drove Bolívar from his homeland. Here we must appreciate the depth
of the ambiguity of the situation: the outlying dominions of empire,
for the most part, clung to it in spite of its troubles, while politics was
becoming increasingly polarized – and thus militarized.23
Yet as the institutional fabric of the empires decomposed they did
not fall apart when their centres were at their weakest. Portuguese and
Spanish armies and guerrillas, supported by a British expeditionary
force, drove the French out of the peninsula in a gruelling war; colo-
nial armies put down rebels and insurgents. Only the fissiparous River
Plate provinces had successfully defected by 1814, though still
76 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

without having declared independence. In that year, Ferdinand

returned to power in Madrid to assert control over his fragile empire.
It was then, when the restored regime tried to restore the status quo
ante, that frail systems began to go up in flames; the counter-revolu-
tion begat the revolution.
What needs to be clear at this point is that revolutions did not find
their origins among brewing anticolonial sentiments waiting to seize
the opportunity to break free in the name of the nation when the
empires were weakest. In the passage between escalating international
war between empires and its internalization within them, it was not
so much separation from empire that was at stake, but how to recon-
stitute it on new foundations, even by giving it a new centre, or multi-
ple centres.The debate ignited by this process led to internal discord
and bloodletting over how to reassemble the stricken parts of empire
into new wholes in a conjuncture of rapidly changing political
ground rules. Alternatives came to the fore: declarations of village or
provincial autonomy, millenarian kingdoms, home rule within
empire, and defence of autocracy. They all jostled in a delicate dise-
quilibrium. Under the carapace of decomposing empires what
emerged was not the idea of a singular nation born of oppression, but
a plethora of ideas about sovereignty that followed the fracturing of
the political spaces once outlined by empires. For the time being, this
plethora could be encompassed within empires because they lacked
territorial centres.
If there was little to predict the inevitable demise of the Iberian
empires, why did they crumble just as the post-revolutionary European
regimes pacted to desist from the kinds of escalating frictions of the
previous century? Surely, this would have been the moment to rein-
vent the Iberian empires, as monarchs and ministers in St Petersburg,
Istanbul, London, and Vienna were doing to their respective empires.
But this is not what transpired in the Iberian Atlantic. It was precisely
the drive to restore that blew the fragile empires to pieces, and why
the developments of the passages that preceded the restoration created
legacies that were too important to reverse.24
The spotlight now was on how the loyalist fragments within the
peninsula and scattered across the colonies, which had managed to
squelch most of the plebeian unrest and more radical calls for self-
rule, would handle the challenge of imperial reconstruction. Instead
of a single response, there were several strategies and policies. At one
end was Brazil, where the mercantile elite in alliance with the enno-
bled slavocracy had given new ballast to the Braganza dynasty. Rio de
Janeiro had become, in the appropriate image of Kirsten Schultz, a
Iberian Passages 77

kind of tropical Versailles. Royalist pageantry and the dispensation of

noble titles to rich colonists were the symbolic cover for a recalibra-
tion of sovereignty, defined above all by the decision in 1815 to make
Brazil a ‘Kingdom’ in its own right, to accompany Portugal and
Algarve. This was no longer, therefore, a ‘Portuguese’ empire, but a
Luso-Atlantic one – a formulation that Souza Coutinho had recog-
nized was a fact before a decree.The shift inspired the empire’s jurists,
legislators, and political economists to celebrate the sagacity of the
monarch. There was no one more euphoric than Edmund Burke’s
Portuguese translator, José da Silva Lisboa, soon to be ennobled as the
Viscount of Cairú for his efforts to give intellectual and legal princi-
ples to the new regime. He celebrated the King’s promotion of open
trade: echoing Montesquieu’s idea of doux commerce, he noted that
‘where there is commerce there is doçura [softness] of customs, and
where there is doçura of customs there is commerce’. The slave trade
boomed, exports prospered, and British capitalists lined up behind the
modified regime. But not everyone shared this enthusiasm.There was
a major uprising in Pernambuco against Rio de Janeiro’s new powers,
and the conflict in the southern borderlands also accentuated localist
feelings. And then there was the cost of Portuguese reconstruction
after the French occupation. Combined, reconstruction and simmer-
ing civil conflict left the government hobbled with massive debts and
undermined the new pact of dependency between merchants and
monarchs.25
The same forces were at work in the Spanish Atlantic, but their
confluence was more incendiary. Ferdinand, bolstered by metropoli-
tan merchants eager to reclaim defunct privileges, was determined to
reinstate Spain’s centrality in an empire that had, in the meantime,
reaggregated its heterogeneity. The king launched a counter-revolu-
tion to recentre the empire by tearing up the short-lived constitution
of 1812 and its electoral affiliations. He reimaged himself as a benev-
olent absolutist, spreading a new cult of his regalism to offer a rival
legitimacy to the one feebly upheld by the constitution. He sent
instructions to his most reactionary officers to restore a fictive abso-
lutism, dissolving the Cortes and ordering the mass arrest of liberal
reformers at home and in the colonies.Where he ran into fierce resist-
ance and insurgents, he dispatched tens of thousands of troops now
released from the peninsular campaign. The largest army to cross the
Atlantic set sail for Venezuela and Nueva Granada under General
Pablo Morillo to ‘pacify’ the colonies. Fence-sitters were frightened.
And plebeian forces that had become champions of local autonomy
and the abolition of slavery were outraged. Henry Wellesley, the
78 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

British ambassador, sent a confidential memorandum to Lord

Castlereagh warning that the returning king threatened to shatter the
‘nation’, which had finally rid itself of French occupiers: ‘The King
will be in difficulties if he rejects the Constitution.’ The words were
prophetic, not necessarily because the charter had endeared itself to
citizens but because they were not prepared to slide back into vassal-
dom, especially if citizenship had promised to deliver them from
feudal or colonial-extractive burdens.26
Forced reunification backfired. Militarized restoration cost money
– and Ferdinand resorted to coercive measures to squeeze revenues
from merchants around the empire. The old loyalist coalition, held
together with the promise of a measure of home rule and regal loyal-
ism, was smashed.The effect was to embolden a new coalition, includ-
ing many who had once preferred home-rule within empire and its
constitution, to opt for outright secession.Whereas Simón Bolívar had
all but given up on his cause by 1815, Spanish revanchism gave him a
new lease on life. As these coalitions came together, and Ferdinand’s
armies struck out against guerrillas, insurgencies spread; Indians, slaves,
and plebeian populations mobilized into ‘revolutionary’ forces.
Secessionists embraced the abolitionist cause to enlist footsoldiers
among the ranks of colonial subjects upon whom the wealth of the
Indies was based. Plantation belts and mining provinces went into a
major social crisis. Spanish armies became embattled occupying forces.
‘Liberating armies’ evolved from secessionist phalanxes to swelling
regiments that demolished the social structures that had sustained
colonial extraction. Mulattos like Manuel Piar and mestizos like José
Antonio Páez emerged as the popular leaders of plebeian armies, a far
cry from the gentlemanly urbanites who proclaimed home rule
within empire a decade earlier. José Artigas, the ‘founder’ of Uruguay,
proclaimed in 1815 that all ‘Free Blacks, Sambos of the Same Class,
Indians, and Poor Creoles’ were entitled to their own land at the
expense of the estancieros. The spectre of a cross-class and interracial
alliance in favour of a social revolution terrified the planters of neigh-
bouring Brazil, who clamoured for Portuguese armies to return to the
Banda Oriental to preserve order. Bolívar himself, scion of a slavocrat
family, went beyond the promise of freedom for slaves who joined his
side; as he fought, he promised freedom for all slaves. He pleaded to
the assemblymen at Angostura in 1819 for them to lend moral creden-
tials to the cause by putting the abolition of slavery into the charter of
‘Colombia’s’ new regime. ‘You know’, he told his readers, ‘that one
cannot be simultaneously free and enslaved except by violating at one
and the same time that natural law, the political laws, and the civil laws.
Iberian Passages 79

. . . I beg the confirmation of absolute freedom for the slaves, just as I

would beg for my life and the life of the republic.’27
This was a vortex. Mobilization on this scale and kind left little
room for missteps by those seeking to restore the anciens régimes. It
accentuated local divisions, and in many provinces deepened the civil
conflict. It also forced the Spanish armies (and to some extent
Portuguese troops operating in the south of Brazil) to evolve into
counter-insurgent forces, which further crippled fiscally limping
states. But if there were missteps, imperial monarchs took them.Across
the colonies, especially in South America where the fighting was most
bitter, metropolitan centralism seemed to strip Spanish Americans of
what they felt they had won in preceding years, and which was seen
as an acknowledgement of their loyalty to the crown when it needed
their fealty and fortunes most. One by one, provinces began to secede
and declare outright independence, thereby escalating the armed
confrontation. Meanwhile, in the old heartland viceroyalties of New
Spain and Peru, authorities were able to wield the example of the
carnage in other dominions as a deterrent to secessionist temptations
– but this did not prevent even die-hard loyalists from wondering
where all this was going. By 1820, the strategy of military reunion of
empire kicked the legs out from the legitimating work of public
opinion and representation, and thus shifted the work of integration
to the armies, which governments could scarcely support, not least
because colonial rents were vanishing. The cycle of civil war and
violence – the machinery of imperial decomposition – therefore
brought down the remnant state institutions. In January of that year,
army officers in Cádiz rose up, calling for a restoration of the 1812
Constitution as a check on the King’s absolutism.The virus spread to
garrisons around the metropole; the civil war threatened to sweep
across Spain itself. Once more without a solid metropole, and with
not much left to be loyal to, the remaining viceroyalties severed their
ties to Spain, this time for good.This was in 1821, a decade and a half
after they had begun to improvise new means to keep the empire
together.28
Spain’s internal discord metastasized to its neighbour, where similar
tensions between Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro had been brewing.
Garrisons in the south of Brazil seethed with resentment, for their
campaigns appeared to be fruitless; many defected. Meanwhile, in the
north, in Bahia particularly, discontent in the ranks broke into the
open with mutinies.This was not a comforting context for big sugar
planters in a province where slave uprisings were endemic. But it was
in the metropole that the fragility of the regime finally broke open.
80 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

Portuguese liberals called for their own constitutional assembly;

conservatives resisted. But the one thing they could agree upon was
that the metropole should reclaim its place in the empire. In this they
were also encouraged by Portuguese merchants who felt – under-
standably – deprived of their protected access to Brazilian markets
thanks to the Open Ports decree. None of this earned much endear-
ment in Brazil, whose aristocracy saw fewer and fewer returns for
their support of formal ties to Lisbon. So, when the King was forced
to return to Lisbon in 1821 to restore some order, and the constitu-
tional assembly that had been convoked turned into an occasion for
Peninsular deputies to heap scorn on Brazilian counterparts (as colo-
nials, racially inferior fraternizers with Africans, and generally less
enlightened), the recentralizing drive motivated a secessionist
groundswell. Freedom from Portugal, noted the Gazeta do Rio de
Janeiro, would ensure ‘the bases of the kingdom’s future greatness and
prosperity, and free it from all elements of disorder and anarchy’.The
sentiment spread. Finally, King João’s son, the Prince Regent Pedro I,
announced Brazil’s independence as an imperial monarchy in its own
right. Some assemblymen called for an army to be raised to restore
Brazil’s place – though the futility of this exercise was all too evident
on the Spanish side. This only served to drive the Brazilian ditherers
into the arms of the independence coalition.29
The decomposition of Iberian empires, and the age of revolutions
of which they were part, have often been seen as the unfolding of the
inevitable – the outcomes of compound pressures of modernization
that swept them aside ineluctably, especially if there were markets to
exploit and new identities to foster; outside forces ‘pulled’ on the
inner lives of these empires. It is clearly important to any account of
large-scale history: at the heart of the global crisis was the disequilib-
rium of competing empires. What has been proposed here is an
‘endogenous’ complement, an approach that accentuates much
neglected ‘push’ factors that explain how collective actors changed
their preferences – or didn’t. These are overlooked in world history
because they are often treated as local residuals that explain why some
societies or large numbers of individuals did not quite keep up with
the pace of modernization.This chapter has argued that these factors,
especially the conflicts and the militarization of politics that arose
when the fundaments of sovereignty were pushed to the thresholds of
their existence, posed basic questions about the shape of public power.
But what is important to appreciate in retracing the steps is how the
agents involved were seldom seeking radical alternatives (the staple
telos for revolutionary narratives). It was the passages that changed the
Iberian Passages 81

preferences for many people because they activated disenchantments

with an older order as a condition for considering alternatives.30
There is more to the significance of endogenous forces than the
completion of a global portrait of a world filling up with the ‘hyper-
active’ (to borrow a captivating image by C. A. Bayly) agents of
European states.31 The politics of shifting preferences as the internal
process through which Iberian-American societies passed was so
revolutionary because it propagated alternative models of sovereignty.
Empires of the New World contained within them an assortment of
arrangements, from indigenous chieftainships to high magistrates.
‘Legal pluralism’ helps to describe some of the hybrid nature of these
systems. But when monarchies and empires were cast aside, newly
independent societies faced the challenge of how to reaggregate the
diversity into a whole. And which whole?
The question of how to reassemble the fragments of former
colonies into something else was a latent one as long as the main
attention was the defence of, and then increasingly the toppling of,
incumbent systems.The shift to the latter involved a change in ‘pref-
erences’ that expressed themselves in a series of intermediate posi-
tions, from fealty to the status quo, autonomy within empire, and
equality of imperial parts, and finally exit. But even the exit option
was often motivated by a fear of further dissolution. Several declara-
tions announced more than just secession, they also announced the
creation of new empires, like Iturbide’s in Mexico, or Pedro’s ‘Grito
de Ipiranga’, which proclaimed that Brazil was a nation because of its
imperial credentials. Nor were new empires of the Americas the only
form for political communities. In fact, most of Iberian America could
agree much more on what it was separating from than what it was
separating for.We know increasingly that independence did not signify
that large numbers of people grew clearer about what they did want
as a precondition for rejecting what they did not. If anything, the
efforts to fill the vacuum created by Napoleon’s invasion of 1807
yielded to a range of alternatives, including among them the
Americanization of the idyll of empire and monarchy, onto which
liberal precepts could be grafted. Either way, Iberian implosions
brought these alternatives to the surface.32
It was up to constitutionalists of the 1820s to find creeds and
clauses to reconcile alternatives – or at least to devise a durable legal
framework for deciding how to make public choices about collective
preferences. But after years of civil war and mass mobilization in
Spanish America, reconstructing a ruling coalition when the social
hierarchies that once sustained them were falling apart and when
82 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

frayed commercial and credit networks were being forced to bankroll

states with uncertain life-spans, the prospects were daunting. By
contrast, with the ballast of a planter–merchant alliance, buoyed by an
expanding slave trade, and spared hyperinflation, Brazilian conserva-
tive pragmatists were better poised to adapt an evolving constitutional
monarchy.These contrasts point to variations in the results of a more
global crisis that shook commercial empires. From the multiple
origins of change came multiple outcomes, suggesting that the
growing interconnectedness of the world’s parts was contoured by
competing options for sovereignty. It was from these public choices –
and the increasing violence that surrounded them – that we can trace
the traumatic origins of modern politics in the Iberian Atlantic.
5
The Caribbean in the Age of
Revolution

David Geggus

According to anthropologist Sidney Mintz, two institutions have

defined the Caribbean region: black slavery and colonial rule.1 No
other part of the world was ruled from Europe for so long or had such
a large proportion of its population living as slaves. Slavery and colo-
nial rule shaped an export-oriented plantation economy that domi-
nated the region from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-twentieth
centuries. The years 1760–1840 may be seen as a watershed in the
unravelling of this history, but the changes the period witnessed were
extremely uneven and contradictory. Although the Caribbean was
home to the most transformative revolution of the age, which created
Haiti out of French Saint Domingue,2 revolution was not necessarily
the most transformative force at work in the region, which also saw
the peaceful abolition of slavery in all the British colonies, a general-
ized abandonment of legal racial discrimination, and a weakening in
the Caribbean’s position in the world market that were only partially
connected to the political violence of the Age of Revolution.3
Scholarly assessment of the relative importance of European and local
influences in promoting change in the region has trended in recent
decades toward stressing Caribbean agency, but with varied success.

Continuity, change, and revolutionary change

In marked contrast to the wave of decolonization that swept the
North and South American mainlands in the half-century after 1775,
only one of the Caribbean’s thirty or so colonies became an inde-
pendent state before the 1840s. In 1804 the black population of Saint
Domingue threw off French rule to found Haiti. Neighbouring
Spanish Santo Domingo briefly declared its independence in 1821
only to be immediately annexed by Haiti, and it would not break
83
84 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

away to become the Dominican Republic until 1844. In the other

colonies of France, Spain, Britain, Denmark, Sweden, and the
Netherlands, imperial rule remained secure and (outside of Cuba)
essentially unchallenged.To the extent that the map of the Caribbean
was redrawn in this period, it was due to war rather than revolution
and formed part of a trend under way since 1713 that saw imperial
power shift from France to Britain.4
The British and Spanish West Indies did not follow the example of
their mainland counterparts because they were easily blockaded
islands with large slave populations and few whites. Their planter
classes were less willing to risk rebellion than those of Virginia and
Venezuela, especially after the royal governors of those colonies had,
in 1775 and 1812, encouraged slaves to turn on their treasonous
owners. It may also be that a sense of American identity developed less
easily in the Caribbean. The extent of absentee ownership in the
British islands meant that their wealthiest landowners simply did not
live there.The Spanish islands were different but, after 1763, relatively
favoured by an imperial government that was eager to develop their
plantation economies.
Of the region’s six colonial powers, only Britain had by 1840
ended slavery in its possessions – something all the Spanish American
republics except Paraguay already had largely accomplished – and the
number of enslaved people living in the Caribbean was only some 14
per cent less than it had been in 1760. It is true that the enslaved
proportion of the regional population had shrunk to only one-fifth,
well below the 70 per cent that characterized the eighteenth-century
Caribbean, but there were still in 1840 more than 40 per cent of its
residents who had lived as slaves at some time.5 In the Spanish West
Indies, the use of slavery accelerated throughout this eighty-year
period, as those islands underwent belated economic development
boosted by Saint Domingue’s demise. Although all Western powers
officially withdrew from the Atlantic slave trade between 1802 and
1820, Cuba and Puerto Rico illegally imported in the 1830s about
195,000 enslaved Africans, and in 1840 their plantation economies
were still rapidly expanding.6 Antislavery ideology attracted little
support in metropolitan Spain, while plantation profits and a growing
black labour force diminished desires for independence in its island
colonies.
Any appraisal of the Caribbean’s experience of revolution in this
period has to take note of this resilience of colonialism and plantation
slavery in the region. Such an assessment also cannot ignore that
much of the change that came about did not flow from revolutionary
The Caribbean in the Age of Revolution 85

causes. The Haitian Revolution freed about half a million people in

1793, and perhaps another 110,000 the following year, when the
French Republic (temporarily) extended emancipation to
Guadeloupe and Guyane.7 The Haitian Revolution thus liberated
one-third of the Caribbean slave population definitively, and more
than 40 per cent if we include those re-enslaved by Napoleon
Bonaparte in 1802.8 The British emancipation act of 1833 freed fully
half of the remaining population, some 665,000 slaves (whose
numbers, moreover, had fallen from about 775,000 due to the
banning of the British slave trade twenty-five years before).9 Whether
in absolute or relative terms, metropolitan abolitionism contributed at
least as much as Caribbean revolution during this period to freeing
slaves and to shrinking the regional slave population.10 One might
further argue that the final success of British antislavery was the more
significant development in that, as precedent and example, it was more
relevant to the future demise of American slavery than was the
Haitian Revolution.
The revolution and the British emancipation act both helped to
change the Caribbean in another way by contributing to the consid-
erable decline in the region’s economic and geopolitical importance
between 1760 and 1840. The Haitian Revolution ended Saint
Domingue’s role as the world’s major exporter of sugar and coffee,
and reduced France’s stake in the Caribbean from being the largest to
a fairly negligible one.The 1833 emancipation act severely disrupted
plantation production in most British colonies, in some of them
permanently. By 1840, sugar exports from the two major producers
were down by half.11
The Caribbean’s economic decline, however, was not so much
absolute as relative. Regional output was far higher in 1840 than in
1760, and it was worth far more in 1815 than in 1789. Not only did
Spanish West Indian sugar production triple during the French wars,
and then soar, but wartime expansion in the British and Danish
colonies more than made up for the fall in French and Dutch exports,
which themselves experienced substantial recovery by the late
1820s.12 British Caribbean sugar production continued to increase
until the late 1820s.13 Though it was severely disrupted by slave
emancipation in the 1830s, its losses were more than outweighed by
the bigger harvests in Cuba.14 Saint Domingue’s enormous coffee
output, halved in the 1790s, was less easily replaced, but by 1815
expansion in Jamaica and Cuba had gone far in making up losses.
Continued expansion in Cuba and subsequent recovery in Haiti itself
further reduced the shortfall down to 1840.15
86 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

Yet by then the Caribbean was a backwater in world affairs. This

was a startling shift after being at the centre of European rivalries and
a dynamo of the Atlantic economy since the seventeenth century.
Although Caribbean sugar exports were increasing in volume, their
share of the world market was already slipping by 1815. This was
initially because of the economic revival of Brazil, and later because
of the growth of competition from Louisiana, Mauritius, and India,
and the emergence of a successful sugar beet industry in Europe.After
a half-century of gestation, Brazil also suddenly emerged in the mid-
1820s as the world’s primary source of coffee. Indigo, long established
in the Caribbean, quickly vanished after 1800 as India reclaimed its
former place in the world market, and Caribbean cotton, which
briefly flourished in the late eighteenth century, met a rapid demise
following the crop’s take-off in the United States.16
Economic growth elsewhere thus diminished the Caribbean’s rela-
tive importance as a source of agricultural staples, and it helped to
drive down the value of its exports. After 1815, world prices of sugar,
coffee, and cotton all fell rapidly.17 The region’s significance in world
trade also declined as Britain and the United States pursued new
overseas markets, reducing after 1800 their long reliance on the West
Indies. After 1830, the French unleashed their colonizing energies on
Africa, and the Dutch intensified their involvement in Indonesia. As
faster-growing populations in Britain and the United States urbanized
and industrialized, the Caribbean simply mattered less as a centre of
wealth creation. Raw cotton overtook sugar as Britain’s principal
import around 1825. Although there is a great deal wrong with the
‘decline thesis’ of Lowell Ragatz and Eric Williams, there is no gain-
saying its basic point that the Caribbean economy had come to count
for less in British politics by the time slavery was abolished in 1833.18
This decline in the economic importance of the Caribbean as a
whole was far from being simply a product of the Age of Revolution.
The shrinking of the slave population was brought about jointly by
British abolitionism and the Haitian Revolution.The damage done to
Saint Domingue’s plantations by the revolution did stimulate
competitors outside the region but it redounded largely to the benefit
of other Caribbean planters. Jamaica succeeded Saint Domingue as
the world’s primary exporter of both sugar and coffee, until it was
overtaken by Cuba and Brazil. Global economic development under-
cut the Caribbean’s once privileged position.
Revolutionary change in the Caribbean was largely confined to
the French colonies in the period 1789–1803, and chiefly to Saint
Domingue. This is not to belittle the magnitude of the process, for
The Caribbean in the Age of Revolution 87

Saint Domingue had the strongest export economy in the Americas

in the late 1780s, and nearly one in four American slaves lived in a
French colony. Of all the ‘Atlantic’ revolutions, Saint Domingue’s
most fully embodied the contemporary struggles for freedom, equal-
ity, and independence, and it produced the greatest degree of social
and economic change. Beginning as a home-rule movement among
wealthy white colonists, it rapidly spread to militant free people of
colour seeking political rights, and then gave rise to the largest slave
uprising in the history of the Americas. Its narrative is a succession of
major precedents: colonial representation in a metropolitan assembly,
the ending of racial discrimination, the first abolition of slavery in a
major slave society, and the creation of Latin America’s first inde-
pendent state. By 1804, colonialism and slavery, the defining institu-
tions of the Caribbean, were annihilated precisely where, during three
hundred years of unchecked growth, they had most prospered.
France’s other Caribbean colonies participated in these changes to
varying degrees until the Napoleonic regime restored the status quo
– not of 1789, but of 1786, rejecting even the timid gesture toward
representative government introduced into the Windward Isles at the
close of the Ancien Régime.19 Elsewhere in the Caribbean, we can
find, at best, potential revolutionary change, power contested with
force by slaves, free coloureds, and a handful of white colonists, who
did not meet with the success of their French-ruled counterparts.20
Such conflicts, and others involving maroons and Black Caribs, clus-
tered thickly in the Age of Revolution, making it a particularly turbu-
lent time in the Caribbean. The 1790s and, to a lesser degree, the
following decades constituted a peak period in the incidence of slave
revolts and conspiracies in the region. Free people of colour also
conspired for their own ends (as in Cuba in 1795), as did whites
(Masonic plots in Havana in 1810 and 1821, for example). And in
1795, the British were almost driven from the islands of Grenada and
St Vincent by a multiclass alliance led by free men of colour that was
suppressed only with massive military force.21
Though all these efforts failed, one epoch-making change affected
almost all colonies in the Caribbean. That was the abolition of legal
racial discrimination that the British, French, Dutch, and Danish
extended to their Caribbean colonies between 1828 and 1832. This
momentous turning-point has attracted curiously little research. Like
abolition in 1833, it was a product of reform rather than revolution,
even if it is hard to exclude the French revolutionary experiment with
racial equality in the years 1792–1802 as a possible causative influ-
ence. Those who have studied this transition depict it primarily as a
88 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

reaction to the rapid growth of the free non-white population, to

metropolitan abolitionist pressure, to colonial whites’ reluctant search
for allies against the enslaved, and above all, to the persistent petition-
ing for reform by the free coloureds themselves.22 Since their
campaigns for reform generally date from the period 1811–13, one
wonders if the simultaneous, and similarly little studied, emergence of
‘racial democracy’ in the new Spanish American republics also helped
to inspire this free coloured activism.23

Europe, the Caribbean, and abolitionism

Historians have traditionally located the origins of the revolutionary
crisis and of abolitionism in Europe and Anglo-America.This assump-
tion has increasingly been challenged in recent decades. In the case of
the antislavery movement, arguments have been put forward that
claim resistance by Caribbean slaves as a major causative factor in the
emergence, development, and eventual success of abolitionism.
The dominant Euro-centred narratives of abolitionism’s emergence
come in three versions.The oldest and most discredited is that of Eric
Williams, which focused on economic change.Yet it is also the most
global, since it incorporated Caribbean soil exhaustion and slave resist-
ance, the growth of Asian colonies, and the imperial disruption caused
by the American Revolution, alongside its main argument concerning
the rise in Britain of an industrial capitalism that favoured economic
liberalism. Strikingly different is David Brion Davis’s idealist interpre-
tation that emphasizes eighteenth-century changes in philosophy, reli-
gion, humanitarianism, and literature, and (in its later development) the
utility of the antislavery idea in British politics. Seymour Drescher’s
third way systematically dismisses most of Williams’s arguments and
presents antislavery as a question of mobilization around libertarian
values that were older than the eighteenth century.24
Seeking to write the slaves themselves into this predominantly
metropolitan narrative, Michèle Duchet contended in 1971 that the
antislavery stance adopted by French philosophes should be seen as a
response to reports of slave resistance in the Caribbean.25 The ques-
tion of whether Europeans would ever have opposed slavery if slaves
had not done so is philosophically interesting, but ultimately unan-
swerable, since slave resistance is as old as slavery.Yet even if Duchet
was correct that maroons and rebels put slavery on the agenda of the
French Enlightenment, the texts she was concerned with had little to
do with British abolitionism, whose foundational texts overwhelm-
ingly depicted the suffering slave, not the rebellious slave. More
The Caribbean in the Age of Revolution 89

recently Gelien Matthews has sought to show how the three major
uprisings in the British Caribbean between 1816 and 1831 inflected
antislavery discourse in Britain, but her neglect of earlier metropoli-
tan responses to rebellion exaggerates the apparent changes.26
Emphasizing transatlantic interaction and accepting, unlike Michael
Craton, that abolitionism inspired slave rebellion, Matthews’s main
point is that abolitionists engaged with rather than retreated from the
issue of slave insurrection, but she avoids arguing that this engagement
was important to the outcome of the antislavery campaign.27
As for the contribution of slave resistance to the successes of anti-
slavery, the arguments are varied and the details complex. In Robin
Blackburn’s view, the Haitian Revolution and the later rebellions in
Barbados, Demerara, and Jamaica inspired abolitionists, enhanced
metropolitan opinion of blacks, discredited slave-owners, and made
politicians progressively weary of paying to defend slavery. ‘The
progress of abolition’, he writes, ‘crucially depended on . . . slave
resistance.’28 Painting on a very broad canvas, Blackburn’s approach is,
rather than demonstrating precise connections, to stress the primacy
of the Haitian Revolution as the first major breakthrough in the
struggle against slavery, and to imply that it hovered inevitably over all
subsequent developments. For the doggedly empirical Seymour
Drescher, on the other hand, the Haitian Revolution was of symbolic
but not substantive importance; it provided propaganda to both pro-
and antislavery forces, but contributed unequivocally to neither.There
is no evidence, he asserts, that it was a decisive issue in the key aboli-
tion debates in the British parliament in 1792, 1807, or 1833.29
It is far from certain that the Haitian Revolution did, on balance,
enhance the image of blacks in the Western world.Though inspiring
to some, the Haitians’ military victories were easily rationalized as the
product of slavish qualities: cunning, endurance, immunity to disease.
The revolution’s numerous atrocities were selectively reported, so that
black barbarism was more prominent in the public record than white
barbarism. Like so much of the revolution’s legacy, the impact on
racial attitudes was thus ambiguous and may have done no more than
reinforce existing preconceptions.30
The willingness of slave-owners everywhere to go on importing
slaves in huge numbers after 1791 should also make us sceptical that
fear of insurrection brought the slave trade to an end.31 Certainly, the
sudden revival of the antislavery movement in 1804 can be partially
attributed to Haiti’s achievement of independence and the public
alarm it briefly created in Britain. The proslavery Times newspaper
abruptly espoused abolition for this reason.32 More important to the
 Gulf of BAHAMAS
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Map 3 The Caribbean in the Age of Revolutions (adapted from Vincent Brown, The Reaper's Garden, Cambridge, MA, 2007, p. xvi).
The Caribbean in the Age of Revolution 91

abolitionists’ success, however, was the reconfiguration of the House

of Commons earlier that year due to the incorporation of 100 Irish
Members of Parliament. This changed the political landscape and,
together with further changes in ministerial politics, opened the way
for the successful vote of 1807.33
Similarly, the parliamentary reform of 1832, which decimated the
West India faction, greatly facilitated the voting of slave emancipation
the following year. Jamaica’s ‘Christmas Rebellion’ of 1831 (the
second largest slave revolt in the Americas) may have catalysed the
process by radicalizing the demands of some leading conservative
abolitionists, but the antislavery movement had already shifted from a
gradualist programme to demanding immediate abolition in 1830, a
development that itself had helped to set off the rebellion. Finally, as
Seymour Drescher observes, the rebellion was not enough to over-
come parliamentary and government opposition without another
abolitionist campaign in 1833.34
While much of the case for slave resistance powering abolitionist
success is unconvincing, one argument, applicable to both 1807 and
1833, is compelling. It is that the Haitian Revolution enabled British
politicians to vote their consciences without fear that it would signif-
icantly advantage France, which the revolution had removed as a
serious competitor in the tropical produce market.35 Although this
line of thinking was not brandished in public debate, it is hard to
imagine Parliament ending the slave trade, or slavery, if France had
remained a commercial as well as political rival. It is true that, by
1833, France’s status as the traditional enemy of Great Britain was
fading fast. Yet British legislators would surely have been much less
likely to risk disrupting colonial production to their competitors’
advantage if Saint Domingue had still been a French colony.

Europe, the Caribbean, and revolution

The simultaneity of the revolutionary crises in the Caribbean and
Europe raises issues of causality and comparison.These can be largely
subsumed under two questions. Could there have been a Haitian
Revolution without the French Revolution? How much did the
revolutions have in common?
Historians have increasingly recognized the colonial revolution as
an autonomous force that helped to radicalize the French
Revolution, rather than being merely a reflection of it. In the heyday
of French imperialism, Léon Deschamps wrote that ‘Conflicts derive
from ideas and the ideas came from France’.36 Thirty years later, the
92 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

ex-colonial officer Jules Saintoyant described a colonial revolution

that was parallel, not tributary, to the metropolitan revolution, but his
vision extended only to the white settlers. Then the black West
Indians, C. L. R. James in 1938 and Aimé Césaire in 1960, published
narratives of the Haitian Revolution that made blacks its central
actors and the colonial question a central issue in the French
Revolution.37 Bicentennial syntheses by Yves Benot and Robin
Blackburn brought a new sophistication to integrating metropolitan
and colonial developments that has led on in the past twenty years to
an unprecedented burst of research on both aspects of the problem.38
It seems fairly easy to demonstrate how colonial affairs changed the
metropolitan revolution, if only in the realm of colonial policy. At its
outset, the revolution of 1789 was not generally intended to have a
colonial dimension and the constitution of 1791 explicitly excluded
the colonies.39 Yet, throughout the 1790s, politicians in Paris were
compelled to play catch-up with the onrush of events in the
Caribbean. This began in July 1789, when wealthy colonists from
Saint Domingue cajoled their way into gaining seats in the National
Assembly, and it continued with the legalization of the colonial
assemblies that the white colonists had elected. A small rebellion by
free men of colour in 1790 won them a minor adjustment in the
colonial colour bar, and then the massive slave revolt of 1791 led, first,
to the granting of equal rights to all free people of colour (to win
their assistance in fighting the insurgent slaves), and then to the aboli-
tion of slavery, following the invasion of Saint Domingue in 1793 by
Spanish and British troops. After the Convention decided to use slave
emancipation as a weapon of war in the Caribbean, the constitution
of 1795 declared the colonies to be integral parts of the French
Republic. Napoleon reversed this latter (and largely unimplemented)
innovation as soon as he came to power, but many think it was
Toussaint Louverture’s decision to promulgate his own constitution in
1801 that finally precipitated Bonaparte’s disastrous attempt to erase
all the gains of the colonial revolution.
Although colonial policy-making in the French Revolution
closely tracked the leftward trend of metropolitan politics, and then its
retreat, it was predominantly reactive and the initiative generally lay
with Caribbean actors. In this sense, we can speak of convergent revo-
lutions in France and Saint Domingue.A purely metropolitan revolu-
tion, albeit with universalist pretensions, was progressively forced to
take account of the claims of colonial activists, white and non-white,
enslaved and free. The decree of April 1792 on racial equality in the
colonies and that of February 1794 abolishing colonial slavery were
The Caribbean in the Age of Revolution 93

milestones in American history and highpoints of the French

Revolution, and primarily pragmatic responses to overseas events.
This does not exactly mean, however, that the foundation of modern
race-blind democracy was due to the slave insurgents of Saint
Domingue, as Laurent Dubois’s work appears to suggest.40 Blacks
were enfranchised, in France, at the same time as Jews, and at the same
time slavery in France was outlawed, in September 1791.41 This was
a month before news of the slave uprising arrived, and at the time
quite uncontroversial.
Presumably these changes owed something to the campaigning of
the Société des Colons Américains, the club that Dominguan free
coloureds founded in Paris in 1789, but here we know rather less
about how the colonial revolution shaped the French. Benot and
Blackburn, following James, and more recently Florence Gauthier and
Jean-Daniel Piquet have made the case for a growing popular soli-
darity in France with colonial non-whites, although not always
convincingly. Benot also suggested that the violence of certain revo-
lutionary episodes might be attributed to the colonial experience of
their perpetrators.42 Jean Jaurès claimed that middle class revolution-
aries became demoralized by their dishonest compromises on the race
question, which in the summer of 1791 left them vulnerable to
conservative reaction.43 Seymour Drescher, taking a longer view,
suggests that the early acceptance of ‘scientific racism’ in France was
partly due to bitter memories of the Haitian Revolution.44
The colonial influence on the French Revolution is therefore a
mixture of the obvious and the obscure. At the very least, colonial
issues served to sharpen the main metropolitan conflicts, between
Feuillants and Jacobins in 1791, between Jacobins and Girondins in
1793, and between radicals and conservatives in 1797.45 Before
coming to the French Revolution’s impact on the colonies, we need
to touch on those prerevolutionary developments on which the case
for an autonomous colonial revolution is grounded. Slave resistance,
free coloured activism, and white settler autonomism all had complex
prehistories in the world before 1789, but historians have never
agreed on their revolutionary potential.
A singular paradox of the Haitian Revolution is that the largest of
all American slave insurrections took place in a colony that had seen
few previous rebellions or conspiracies; in this, Saint Domingue was
very unlike its neighbour Jamaica. Scholars who adopt an ‘internal
perspective’ on the revolution and downplay French influence tend to
evoke, therefore, other traditions of resistance, notably poisoning and
the activities of fugitive slaves (known as maroonage), as well as the
94 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

unifying influence of Vodou, the rapid growth of the enslaved popu-

lation, and a supposed worsening in its conditions of life.The critical
points in dispute concern the frequency and dimensions of resistance,
whether it should be considered apolitical or proto-revolutionary, and
how it contributed to the slave uprising of 1791, which a Haitian
nationalist tradition depicts as being spearheaded by maroons and
Vodou priests.46
The free coloured population of Saint Domingue was unique in
the Americas in being moderately large and moderately wealthy, and
in some respects increasingly oppressed. Some of its members were
involved with white colonists in resisting the colonial administration
in the 1760s. Only in the 1780s, however, can one speak of inde-
pendent political activity.This consisted of discreet lobbying efforts by
the wealthy planter Julien Raimond to persuade the colonial minister
to reform the regime of racial discrimination, at least insofar as it
affected freeborn, light-skinned, and wealthy individuals like himself.
The fact that the free coloured population was quickly approaching
parity with the whites and played an important role in the militia
makes it reasonable to imagine that further challenges to the racial
status quo were likely, whatever happened in France.47
For Saint Domingue’s white population, politics had a lot in
common with that of Ancien Régime France: the resentment of the
‘ministerial despotism’ of an absolutist state, law courts that posed as
popular champions, increased friction caused by vigorous attempts at
reform in the 1780s. Dominguan landowners and lawyers envied the
fiscal autonomy of the regional pays d’état, and the self-government
and better terms of trade of their British colonial counterparts. In the
1670s, 1720s, and 1760s, colonists had briefly rebelled against agents
of royal authority, and in the 1780s they enjoyed closer links with the
newly independent United States, as Yankee merchants opened busi-
nesses in Le Cap and Port-au-Prince. Probably only the wildest
dreamers imagined that an easily blockaded island, whose colonists
were greatly outnumbered by slaves, could emulate the mainland
colonies’ secession, but to others a British protectorate may have
seemed feasible.48
For this white population of about 30,000, the onset of the French
Revolution rapidly changed from opportunity to threat. No sooner
had those seeking a political voice achieved their ends, than they
found the twin pillars of their society, slavery and white supremacy,
under assault from metropolitan critics, who were soon joined by free
coloured activists in Paris and in Saint Domingue who petitioned for
equal rights. The Declaration of the Rights of Man in late August
The Caribbean in the Age of Revolution 95

1789 seems to have had an immediate impact on the aspirations of the

free men of colour. Julien Raimond went from seeking minor reforms
to demanding full racial equality. For a few months, there was some
doubt whether men of mixed racial descent like Raimond genuinely
wished to include free blacks in their campaign, but this issue was
soon resolved.49
The French Revolution provided the free men of colour a forum
in which to campaign for change that was unimaginable under the
old regime, but it also increased the hostility of their opponents,
because it greatly raised the stakes. Before the revolution, racial equal-
ity meant the right to become a doctor or lawyer; now it meant access
to political power. And in the context of revolutionary change, it was
easier to make the charge that any concession to free non-whites
would undermine the slave regime that was the basis of colonial
wealth. While politicians in Paris dithered and prevaricated over the
issue, Saint Domingue and Martinique went through several years of
vicious conflict before white supremacy in the colonies was officially
abolished.
That change came about, we have seen, in response to the slave
uprising in northern Saint Domingue, which the French recognized
they could not suppress without the help of the free coloureds. The
relationship of the black revolution that began in 1791 with the
French Revolution and with the Age of Revolution more generally
is a difficult conceptual issue. Historians who integrate the slaves’ epic
struggle into a broader Atlantic or Western narrative are sometimes
criticized for an ethnocentric misreading of the slave revolution’s
cultural specificity. Those who fail to make the connection seem
guilty of a prejudiced analysis that denies the slaves and the state they
created a place in the onward march of civilization.
Eugene Genovese, in a seminal study of slave resistance, argued that
the Saint Domingue slave rebellion developed into a true revolution
that sought to build a modern state under the influence of libertarian
ideology from France, but then retreated into a ‘tragic counter-revo-
lution’ by allowing a peasant economy to replace the plantation
regime. He has been criticized for denying the slaves their own ideol-
ogy and regarding their African values as archaic.50 On the other
hand, R. R. Palmer’s Age of the Democratic Revolution and Jacques
Godechot’s France and the Atlantic Revolution have been castigated,
along with any number of French Revolution histories, for omitting
Haiti’s revolution, whether by oversight or deliberate exclusion.51
It is extraordinarily difficult to know what were the expectations
of those tens of thousands of slaves who took up arms in 1791.
96 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

Common sense tells us that they would not have killed and burned
on such a massive scale without intending to live afterwards free from
the possibility of French revenge.Yet some evidence from the first year
of the revolt suggests only reformist goals, such as gaining an extra
two free days per workweek, or abolishing the whip. Only two formal
demands for abolishing slavery issued from the rebel camps, and one
of these, in my view, was a forgery.52 It is well known that, during
negotiations with the whites in December 1791, the slaves’ leaders
secretly offered to force their followers back to work on the planta-
tions if only fifty of them were freed. It is less well known that no
evidence connects the future leader Toussaint Louverture to the cause
of ending slavery until its actual abolition in August 1793.53 Trying to
make sense of these contradictory clues, some historians have
suggested that the insurgents’ aims evolved in time from reformist to
revolutionary.54 Such a formulation, however, does not fit the facts;
the most radical demand – that the French leave the colony – came
at the very beginning of the uprising.
Compounding this problem of goals are the contrary indications
regarding the insurgents’ rhetoric. Several contemporaries wrote that
the slaves were demanding ‘the rights of man’, but these tended to be
white conservatives who may have wished to discredit the French
Revolution. More numerous are descriptions of the insurgents posing
as defenders of the beleaguered monarch, Louis XVI, who, they
claimed, had decreed they be freed (a common feature of slave revolts
in the years 1790–1830).55 The principal slave leaders, Jean-François
and Biassou, would in fact maintain this ‘church and king’ discourse
down to their deaths in the early nineteenth century. In 1793, as war
broke out among the colonial powers, they allied themselves with the
counter-revolutionary Spanish, who offered freedom to soldiers and
their families, but they refused to join the French Republic despite its
eventual adoption of emancipation for all. They also rounded up
women and children on the plantations and sold them to their
Spanish neighbours.56
Haiti’s first historian, Thomas Madiou, remarked that the concept
of ‘la liberté générale’ was not well developed during the first two years
of the slave uprising, among either the free people of colour or the
insurgents themselves. Then the French commissaire civil (and aboli-
tionist) Léger-Félicité Sonthonax rallied men of all colours to the
cause with his proclamation of 29 August 1793.57 Only at this point
did the forces of black self-liberation and French libertarian ideology
conjoin. Robin Blackburn notes that most slave revolts have been
‘particularistic, seeking freedom for a given person or group’.58
The Caribbean in the Age of Revolution 97

I think this is how we should understand the slave revolt in Saint

Domingue until it was transformed by its alliance with the French
Republic.
Blackburn, Genovese, and Dubois acknowledge this equivocal
stance of the slave insurgents of 1791 but it tends to get obscured in
their interpretations. Blackburn’s statement that, in the negotiations of
December 1791, the slave leaders called for ‘full political rights’, and
Dubois’s suggestion that they used the term ‘general will’ because of
an acquaintance with Enlightenment ideas, are, I believe, mistaken.
They fail to take account of the way free men of colour acting as
intermediaries in those negotiations were arguing their own case as
well as that of the slaves’ leaders.59
More misleading, it seems to me, is Dubois’s frequent use of the
word ‘republican’. Assertions that ‘enslaved revolutionaries . . .
deploy[ed] the language of Republican rights’, used ‘republican
symbols’, or ‘demanded Republican citizenship and racial equality’
appear to derive from his earlier work on Guadeloupe in 1793 but do
not apply to the Saint Domingue slave uprising, in which ostensibly
royalist insurgents used the term ‘les citoyens’ as a smearword to
describe their enemies.60 Even after Sonthonax’s abolition of slavery,
the few ex-slave leaders who at first joined the Republic showed little
interest in republican ideology and continued in correspondence
among themselves to respect the legitimist monarchical principle.61
Far from being driven by ‘democratic ideals’, the revolution that
grew out of the slave uprising was authoritarian from beginning to
end. If, as Dubois states, it ‘created a democratic culture that was later
presented as a gift from Europe’, it was because the gift really did
come from Europe. No doubt the gift was grudging and, as Dubois
shows, subverted by what he calls the ‘Republican racism’ of the mid-
1790s.62 But it is perfectly clear that the succession of gifted ex-slaves
who emerged from the 1791 uprising and later took Saint Domingue
to independence never displayed the slightest regard for democracy.
The politics of Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and
Henry Christophe were unapologetically dictatorial. They were the
heirs of the warlords Jean-François and Biassou, from whom they
broke away after the French republic abolished slavery.
The Haitian Revolution, of course, was never just a slave revolu-
tion, and it is important to distinguish this authoritarian tradition
from that of the free men of colour whose revolt was centred in the
west and south of Saint Domingue and whose politics developed in
the liberal republican mainstream of the Atlantic Revolutions. It is
they who made independent Haiti a republic – but this was in 1806,
98 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

not 1804. Although historians commonly refer to the foundation of

the ‘black republic’ or Republic of Haiti in 1804, the state that
Dessalines created in fact took the name État d’Haïti and was never a
republic. Dessalines arrogated all power to himself – much as had
Toussaint in his 1801 constitution – and took the titles ‘governor-
general for life’, following Toussaint, and then, following Bonaparte,
‘emperor’.
After Dessalines’s assassination in 1806, the general and former
slave Henry Christophe refused to serve as president in the new
republic that his free coloured rivals constructed; its constitution was
the only one of the country’s first six that was not explicitly dictato-
rial.63 Instead, Christophe created a secessionist state in the north that
became a monarchy with an aristocratic court and its own system of
tropico-medieval heraldry. Although it looked to Britain for costume
and protocol, it was an absolute monarchy and African inspiration
cannot be ruled out.The royal police force, recruited from slave ships,
was known as the Dahomets.64
The political scientist David Nicholls warned against reading too
much into constitutional forms in Haiti, and suggested that all Haitian
governments tended to be autocratic.65 Certainly, Alexandre Pétion,
who became the first president under the constitution of 1806, ruled
for several years without his Senate. However, such documents do
help to situate the Haitian Revolution intellectually. The country’s
unique declaration of independence justified secession as an act
necessary to prevent the restoration of slavery but otherwise made no
mention of rights, and prudently informed the colonial powers that
the new state would not seek to abolish slavery elsewhere.66 David
Armitage observes that the declaration was unusual among its nine-
teenth-century counterparts in not taking the US declaration of 1776
as its model, and that it replaced an earlier draft that had done so.67
The text distinguished between Haitians and French in terms of
the latter’s cruelty, colour, and vulnerability to tropical disease, and the
distance that separated their countries. It called for revenge to be
exacted on those French who had remained in the country. Haitian
leaders were divided on this issue, and some secretly helped colonists
to escape, but in the following months several thousands were system-
atically massacred in two waves: men first, women and children after-
wards.68 Later public documents (a proclamation of 28 April 1804
and the 1805 constitution) banned first ‘Europeans’, then ‘white
persons’, from owning land in Haiti.69 Dessalines’s constitution of
1805 further mandated that all Haitians should be designated ‘Noirs’.
And in 1816 Pétion called on persons of African or Amerindian
The Caribbean in the Age of Revolution 99

descent to settle in the country, where they would immediately be

accepted as Haitians.
We find an echo of such bitter, quasi-genocidal tensions in Simón
Bolívar’s guerra a muerte (‘war to the death’) and his 1813 declaration
that he would purge America of Spanish ‘monsters’; perhaps, too, in
the death sentence imposed on its émigrés by the French Republic.70
However, as historian and former president Leslie Manigat observes,
the Haitian Revolution had an ‘ethno-national’ character that made it
unique. It became a symbol of racial equality, because its central issue
was the subjection of black slaves by white owners. Its leaders were
antislavery but not liberals.71 This distinction, very clear to Haitian
scholars, has sometimes been elided in the earnest interpretations of
outsiders.
France’s revolution, of course, also ended in a military dictatorship,
and Latin American colonies similarly produced a monarch or two in
the process of gaining independence.72 The reality of political change
in the American and Spanish American revolutions has also been
hotly debated.Yet none reveals the unselfconsciously autocratic streak
that ran through Haiti’s revolution into the post-independence
period. One is tempted to conclude that, having triumphed over
slavery, the question of citizenship was something of subordinate
importance to those who had made the transition from thing to
person.This is doubtless why Palmer and Godechot were reluctant to
incorporate the Haitian Revolution within their grand narratives of
liberal republican democracy.

***

In the Age of Revolution, several different crises confronted the

Caribbean colonies in an uneven manner that reflected the region’s
fragmented politics and diverse stages of economic development.
Colonial rule went largely unchallenged, yet it was destroyed precisely
where it had been most successful, not by a white settler elite as on the
American mainland, but by the region’s lowliest inhabitants. Although
most of the imperial powers maintained their slave regimes, most of
the regional population had by 1840 escaped from slavery, as a result
of revolution or reform, and begun new lives as peasant smallholders.
While the Spanish West Indies experienced exceptional economic
growth throughout the period, Caribbean dominance of the interna-
tional market for tropical produce peaked, then declined for good.
Most colonies were compelled to abandon the principle of white
supremacy that had underpinned European rule from its beginning.
100 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

The impetus for these changes was similarly diverse. In such a long
colonized region, it was of course to a large degree European, but the
interaction between the different crises, and between colony and
metropole, was complex. Economic decline stemmed mainly from
local factors (soil exhaustion, the disruption caused by revolution and
slave emancipation) and from the strengthening of global competi-
tion, rather than from strictly European developments (sugar beet
cultivation, the weakening of mercantilist protections). Slave emanci-
pation in the British colonies responded primarily to metropolitan
imperatives and followed a metropolitan timetable but the influence
of economic decline and of slave resistance on the process warrants
close examination.The legislating of racial equality owed much more
to local activism and demographic change, but it also was promoted
by the metropolitan antislavery movement.
The Haitian Revolution evolved in symbiosis with the French
Revolution and each shaped the other, but this reciprocity was obvi-
ously uneven.The Haitian Revolution affected little more than colo-
nial policy in the metropolitan revolution, while it is unlikely that any
uprising in Saint Domingue would have developed into a revolution
without the political disruption and ideological ferment caused by the
revolution in France. Sharing the social and political complexity of its
French counterpart, Haiti’s revolution went further than the other
colonial revolutions of the Americas in involving all sectors of society
and in transforming economy, society, and politics. It differed from the
other Atlantic revolutions, however, in that the central pursuit of
freedom came to be construed in the profound but narrow sense of
freedom from slavery rather than as political rights.
6
The Dynamics of History in Africa
and the Atlantic ‘Age of Revolutions’

Joseph C. Miller

The historical processes that European monarchies experienced at the

end of the eighteenth century as an ‘age of (political) revolutions’
were a particular moment in a much broader, long-term global
dynamic of commercialization. Africa was also very much a part of
that dynamic. Europeans who went overseas to seek personal advan-
tage in the accelerating worldwide rush towards global markets found
themselves in disorienting contexts of anonymity and increasingly
isolated from the smaller and more tangible families, guilds, and
parishes of their parents, as well as from theoretically benevolent
monarchical protectors in Europe. Both at home and abroad
Europeans experienced a political crisis of confidence in royal patrons
whom they saw as increasingly remote and overbearing. Feeling aban-
doned, they looked to themselves for salvation in civic terms, as sover-
eign individual citizens. While Europeans around the globe were
creditors in this new world of disengaged commercial competition,
Africans laboured under a burden of debt to it. They financed
commercialization as debtors, with no less profoundly novel experi-
ences of individuation and consumerism, through extraction of
commodities for export and then into slaving; the overwhelming pace
of commercial growth in the Atlantic left no time for them to invest
in mechanized industrial productivity. Africans retained ideological
frameworks and political ethics focused on collective welfare rather
than embracing competitive individualism. This African ‘communal
ethos’ judged individuation as greed rather than as opportunity.
Africans thus accented the human costs of others’ material gains, in
ways not dissimilar to the experiences of other, former Africans
enslaved in the Americas. These African historical dynamics contex-
tualize Europe’s ‘age of revolutions’ in broader global patterns of
commercialization.
101
102 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

This chapter develops Africa’s distinctive position in the commer-

cializing world of the eighteenth-century Atlantic by considering
Africans’ equally distinctive experiences of the process. It emphasizes
not such conventional and Europe-derived abstractions as the ‘impact
of commercialization on Africa’ but the strategies with which Africans
made use of the commercial resources that European merchants
brought to their shores, in the form of the familiar array of textiles,
metalwares, alcohol, beads and shells, and firearms to exchange for
gold, ivory, dyestuffs, other extracted commodities, and ultimately –
and overwhelmingly – captive people.The chapter makes no effort to
provide a history of the entire continent, but instead concentrates on
the sub-Saharan regions most integrated into Atlantic historical
processes, from Senegambia south along the coasts that Europeans
knew as Upper and Lower Guinea to the Kongo-Angola areas of
western central Africa, as far as the Kalahari Desert (modern
Namibia). However, the processes outlined here for Atlantic Africa did
parallel those of other Africans in contact with earlier and contempo-
raneous commercial credit from the Sahara, the Red Sea, and the
Indian Ocean.
As the Atlantic ‘age of revolutions’ emerged as a staple of mid- and
later twentieth-century narratives of the apparent distinctiveness of
‘Western civilization’,Africa remained beyond even the peripheries of
this progressive vision of the era.1 And as the historical discipline
moved on to begin to problematize ‘the rise of the West’ in the 1960s
and 1970s, and recently also into efforts to construe a more balanced
and inclusive ‘world history’, Africa has remained one of its better
kept secrets, in spite of a half century of innovative scholarly inquiry
into the once-dark past of ‘the continent without history’.2 This
chapter elaborates an Africanist’s vision of the broader historical
dynamics, of which the familiar ‘age of revolutions’ in the northern
Atlantic at the end of the eighteenth century was a part, to show
Africa’s alternative experience of the same historical processes of the
era. It views these dynamics in terms of African historical sensibilities
quite different from the surge of whiggish optimism that burst forth
in the late eighteenth-century North Atlantic and coalesced philo-
sophically in the nineteenth century as progressivism.3 As I hope to
suggest, Africans agilely incorporated historical Atlantic commercial-
ization into a restorative historical ideology – called ‘tradition’ by
Europeans – that flexibly absorbed novelty and hence in practice was
anything but static; from their dedication to community, Africans
perceived the downside of commercialization as gluttony, betrayal, and
isolation.
The Dynamics of History in Africa 103

Modern historians of Africa, generally still in recovery from the

racist excesses of the first half of the twentieth century, have bent over
backwards to convince sceptical professional and popular audiences
that – pace Hegel – Africa did indeed have a history. Both Africanist
and world histories have thus tended to celebrate the continent’s
historical past in thoroughly modern ‘imperial’ terms of merchant
trade and military conquest.To that extent, they ignore the distinctly
less militarized or commercialized historical dynamics of the vast
majority of the many distinct communities there. At best, scholars
have acknowledged most of Africa’s history as ‘societies’ contrasted
negatively – and hence in analytically vacuous terms – with recog-
nizable ‘states’ as ‘stateless’.4 In this chapter, I intend not to indulge in
this polarization, which seeks to explain Africa in terms of modern
political abstractions stemming from the Europeans’ ‘age of demo-
cratic revolutions’. Instead, I propose to proceed from a positive and
analytical characterization of what Africans in fact did, in the intellec-
tual contexts in which they did it.
The humanistic and sociological foundations of western historical
thought produce its familiar claims to universality, and hence logically
generate thematic unity around such homogeneous and singular
abstractions as ‘the state’ and, in the era considered here, also ‘empire’.
But what circum-Atlantic and Asian regions shared in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries was not a specific institutional solution, like
‘empire’ or ‘nation’, but highly diverse ways of participating in an
accelerating global process of commercialization, in its initial, partic-
ularly freebooting phases. By the very particular nation-centred stan-
dards of the modern West, from which the historical discipline grew
at the end of the nineteenth century, local and regional specifics other
than those of Europe appear divergent, or at best unrelated. However,
historians properly view the past not through the abstractions of
modern social science but through the regional particularities of how
people experienced this overarching process, each in terms of their
own distinct local historical heritage.These local variations – not the
homogenizing sociological ‘model’ – constitute the historiological
theme of this chapter.5
Arraying this modernist logic of static and homogeneous abstrac-
tions through time, as historians’ commitment to tracking ‘change’
inclines them to do, tends to create a neo-evolutionary succession of
historical stages – for example, between ‘ages’ of monarchical abso-
lutism and liberal democracy, or mercantilism and free trade –
construed in terms of the logic of the historian more than the expe-
riences of their participants.6 According to this structuralist logic, the
104 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

end of the eighteenth century appears to have been transformative,

and distinctive to Europeans. In terms of these same abstractions,
Africa remains no less unproblematically, even paradigmatically,
‘different’. But we can escape the typological contrasts implied by this
schema. We can instead contextualize both regions in a very long-
term global incremental historical process of managing a complex
dialectical engagement of militarized political authority and commer-
cial strategies that depended on that authority in the short run but in
the longer term also undermined it. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century Europe, and particularly on its peripheries, this millennia-
long contest between militarists and merchants was passing through a
phase of consolidating a distinctively singular, monarchical form of
militarized authority; Atlantic Africa was significantly less militarized
and characterized by a multiplicity of strategies of political integration
elaborating principles of complexity and composition rather than the
singularity and homogenization of ‘monarchy’.
This particular African style was one of a great many contempora-
neous, similarly diverse historical political strategies in play around the
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century world.7 In the conventional
social science logic of modernity, which homogenizes in order to
standardize human behaviour, the multiplicity and complexities of
historical sorts of change appear fundamentally incoherent, even
contradictory.They were incoherent also to the historical actors creat-
ing them, or attempting to resist them, since people as historical actors
always confront the unfamiliar – or the as yet even inarticulable –
novelties of their present moments from perspectives necessarily
drawing on the familiar, that is, from their own experience, or from
their pasts. By this historicized notion of change, as human actions
motivated by incompletely understood and increasingly irrelevant
experience, elements of innovation and conservation are always
present simultaneously. Only against backgrounds of assumed typo-
logical homogeneity of the abstract sort that characterizes ‘ages’ do
they stand out as ‘contradictions’. Seen historically instead, they
become intelligibly motivated human initiatives, if also significantly
uncomprehending of the full historical contexts that generate them
and the contextual novelties that they in turn create. Historians, if
they work properly according to the distinctively historical episte-
mology of change, contextualize human efforts motivated by aspects
of the actors’ times and places, rather than trying to define abstract
‘ages’.When they do, they understand change historically: incremen-
tal, partial, dialectical, unpredictable, and – since it often arises from
conservative intentions – all but by definition unintended.
The Dynamics of History in Africa 105

First the familiar: the ‘Age of Revolutions’ in Europe’s longue durée

The late eighteenth-century Atlantic, viewed thus through the eyes of
its creators, can be shorn of the teleology implicit in seeing in it a
transformative ‘age of revolutions’. Instead, the era was an intensely
felt moment in which people in Europe came to terms with a long-
term incremental process of monarchical consolidation of militarized
power as monarchs attempted to capture other, broader processes of
intensifying commercialization through ideologies of overarching,
impersonal government. Africans also integrated commercialization,
but in terms of the personalistic ‘communal ethos’ of their local
communities. Commercialization is thus the integrating historical
theme; the opportunity in examining alternative local and regional
processings of the motivating and enabling gains from commercializa-
tion, in their European as well as in African variations, lies in appre-
ciating the intensity and anxiety of day-to-day engagements with
relative strangers that financial investments emanating from northern
Europe enabled everywhere.
To contextualize and thus appreciate the intensity of these reac-
tions in the northern Atlantic, the historian looks back three centuries
before 1700 to the security of belonging to local communities and
the personalism of authority in late medieval Western Europe.
Europeans lived in familiar communities not unlike what in Africa I
am terming a ‘communal ethos’. Such intimate communities had
been based on ties of residence, religion, skills, and family; often all of
these had coincided in tight little worlds that felt reassuringly
‘known’. On continental Europe’s then-peripheries local warlords in
thirteenth-century England and Scandinavia, then fourteenth-
century Portugal and fifteenth-century Spain, were only beginning to
assert the singularity of overarching authority that lies at the core of
the later notion of monarchical rule. To assert this authority on the
greater scales that they were claiming, in terms of the directness and
personalism as well as affirming the mutual responsibilities of local
power and loyal client at that time, aspirant monarchs had to
propound ideologies of benevolent patronage for the subjects whom
they were thereby also rendering more remote, weaker, poorer, and
thus simultaneously in greater need of the protection of personal
patronage.That is to say that ‘kings’, in the sense that early eighteenth-
century ideologies of absolutism enshrined in subsequent political
ideology, were by no means obvious solutions to anyone’s problems in
those earlier times; in fact, abstract absolutism was all but unthinkable.
Over succeeding centuries the growing costs of maintaining so
106 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

abstract a sort of rule, at first in Christian terms and then in increas-

ingly secular sequels, and the contradiction of attempting to imagine
intimacy comparable to the older experiential personalism, made
sustaining the personalism of monarchical ideology an increasingly
challenging – and costly – proposition.
The gunpowder revolution of the fifteenth century multiplied the
costs of the dynastic conflicts accompanying the expansive strategies
of these aspiring military monarchs. The monarchs’ growing debts
turned them to merchants and bankers for the cash and credits they
needed to keep up. Traders and investors, whose wealth was not
restrained by geography, threatened landed aristocracies within their
military domains at home. Rather than conceding their hard- and
recently won local lands and control over resident populations, and
with the power claimed by the great merchant families in the
‘republics’ of Renaissance northern Italy as examples of the potential
wealth and power of commercial challengers to mere militarism, the
rulers of maritime western Europe looked off into the vast Atlantic as
a field where merchant enterprise might search safely for the bullion
they increasingly needed at home to presume to rule as military over-
lords. In the Atlantic, merchants could even be allowed to move out
beyond the restrictions prevailing within Europe to transacting the
products of aristocratic and ecclesiastical estates and to invest in signif-
icant productive enterprises – mines and plantations – of their own.
And, as firearms made the military geography of continental Europe
more and more confining, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
monarchs there found these effectively empty and even hypothetical
– or at best symbolic – islands and military outposts in and beyond an
ocean safer and cheaper fields in which to pursue their dynastic rival-
ries through proxy wars rather than continuing to attempt land inva-
sions across the increasingly defined boundaries of their consolidated
continental domains.
Commercialization thus gained momentum as a historical strategy
in the sixteenth century not in Europe but on the islands in the
eastern Atlantic off the coast of far-western Africa: Madeira, the
Canaries, and São Tomé. Unlike most of continental Europe, where
military and ecclesiastical authorities held landed domains and tried
to immobilize their resident peasants to the exclusion of commercial
interests growing in central Europe,8 in these uninhabited – or
depopulated – oceanic places the field for commercial investment in
land and labour was effectively open. But this opportune emptiness of
the vast Atlantic also had its costs, multiplied several thousand-fold in
the even vaster and similarly empty – or emptied – Americas. Beyond
The Dynamics of History in Africa 107

the significant windfalls of gold and silver, merchants investing in so

enormous a resource had to come up with funds to develop produc-
tive enterprises, stereotypically agricultural plantations, from scratch.
Theirs was the quintessential challenge of capitalism: finding financ-
ing now, against promises of repayment later, in a future imaginable as
sufficiently predictable to reduce its risks to manageable proportions.
In the sixteenth century, only African gold and then the serendipitous
riches of American silver made much of the American continent a
viable investment, only for Spain, and largely in a precociously
centralized legal framework aimed at supplanting the initial and
potentially uncontrollable military forms of conquest that Cortés and
his successors unleashed on meso-America. Only by the end of the
seventeenth century did the maritime Atlantic become a viable
commercial risk. Until then, merchants and their ships were exposed
to pirates and privateers, including the Dutch West India Company
(1621–1640s), in the politically unregulated areas ‘beyond the line’,
but there they were also free to pursue fortunes beyond the fiscal
grasp of monarchs in distant Europe.
American silver had paid for the unprecedented costs of milita-
rization in Habsburg Spain from the middle of the sixteenth century.
Silver funded Habsburg escalation of millennium-old religiously
defined conflicts with the southern and eastern Mediterranean lands
under Islamic control, recently consolidated by the Ottomans, as well
as against the individualist independence of Protestant merchant
communities in northern Europe. All of these targets of Habsburg
ambition, including England, armed themselves in response.This row
of consolidating seventeenth-century military monarchies, lined up
like dominoes, also tipped continental France towards territorial
consolidation, and then aggrandizement on Atlantic scales at the end
of the seventeenth century. In response, England and the Netherlands,
lacking territories to exploit and thus increasingly minor players on a
European stage dominated by land armies, turned to the growing
resources of Atlantic trade, creating new financial strategies to mobi-
lize the massive investments necessary to operate on transoceanic
scales and investing also in unprecedentedly costly navies.
However, by militarizing the Atlantic, European monarchs then
found themselves facing the further challenges of financing naval and
other military strategies that might fill the vast, semi-defined, highly
competitive political vacuum they were entering.9 As monarchs
conceded privileges and even effective autonomy to planters and
traders in the remote regions of the Atlantic, the costs of developing
naval capacities to seize and defend the resulting claims to distant
108 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

territories raised the fiscal ante and propelled the process of commer-
cial investment forward at accelerating tempos.10 Western Africa was
strategically marginal in the military sense of primary concern to
European monarchies. It was commercially capable, especially around
the sources of the gold that had originally drawn the Portuguese and
then other Europeans to trade there. It was also populous and thus a
potential market for European (but mainly, as it turned out, Asian)
wares.11 It was not a continent where European arms were effective
or even necessary to do business. Therefore, from the perspective of
the financial strains of expansion into the Atlantic, it was the relatively
inexpensive option. As a result, with the exception of an initial
monarchical interest in Africa’s gold, centred in Senegambia (the
French Compagnie des Indes) and the Gold Coast (the English Royal
African Company),Africa attracted mostly minor merchants, and only
about a tenth of European commercial investment in the Atlantic
through the end of the eighteenth century.12
In the seventeenth century, to marshal the personnel and generate
the funds to protect these far-flung, expensive, and increasingly
competitive enterprises, Europe’s military monarchs had to assert
increasingly direct authority over individuals as ‘subjects’, at home and
abroad. These pressures, backed ultimately by military force, set the
stage for the crises of confidence, and also of consciousness, that
erupted at the end of the eighteenth century in the northern Atlantic.
In the Americas European merchants’ successes had attracted new and
heterogeneous human collectivities of strangers, all of them lacking
the reassuring familiarity of the small communities from which they
had come – whether Europeans, Africans, or Native American
survivors of the collapse of their own local communities from slaving,
diseases, and depopulation, if not also from direct assault by European
militias. The Africans there arrived utterly isolated as slaves and
remained subject to recurrent reisolation through sales to realize their
value as collateral for debt financing from Europe.13
Participation in the Europe-initiated commercial economy
provoked a century-long wave of political, and eventually cultural,
adjustments on pan-Atlantic scales. These adjustments first reached
intellectual coherence in the northern Atlantic at the end of the
seventeenth century in the form of enlightened individualism. That
philosophical ideal became a political ideology in the late eighteenth-
century implementation of a civic politics of individual citizens in
North America, and then in the early nineteenth century elsewhere
throughout the Americas.This rolling wave of transoceanic commer-
cial integration, with its ideological formulation as modern civic indi-
The Dynamics of History in Africa 109

vidualism and national citizenship, presented critical challenges to

older, territorially based, military regimes, themselves no less chang-
ing products of a preceding wave of military consolidation as ‘monar-
chies’. And not least in Europe.
Monarchical ideologies of personalistic authority in territorially
consolidated realms were all but irrelevant to Europeans thus scattered
through the remote vastness of the Americas, even more so than for
subjects in Europe caught in the growing political contradictions of
personal monarchical authority in increasingly impersonal royal
domains. At the same time, the growing costs of militarizing on the
enormous scales of the Atlantic required greater and greater and
unprecedentedly direct taxation by the emerging monarchies, at first
at home in Europe. Monarchs styling themselves as patrons were
becoming intrusive, even abusive, rather than protective as they raised
the cash costs of the personal consumption that was coming to define
identities in the formative world of commerce that merchants were
creating in the eighteenth century. Royal ‘liberties’ seemed betrayed,
and people had to make sense of living amidst overwhelming insecu-
rities, by themselves, in half-formed, often disruptively transient,
communities in the Americas.
In the 1760s and the 1770s these anxieties provoked a moral crisis
that erupted in ideological and political forms first in North America,
the region where the largest assemblages of European castaways found
themselves face to face with one another. At least an initial degree of
commonality they discovered in the sense of betrayal they shared.
Rebellious North Americans attempted to restore the integrity of the
eighteenth-century British (no longer even coherently English)
monarchical polity by entrusting sovereignty to themselves, rooting
increasingly civic liberties across the Atlantic, beyond the inherently
limited range of the personalistic ideology of monarchy.The political
crisis was, first, one of perceived perfidy of the ideally personal and
protective monarch,14 and then increasingly popular and participatory
by empowered citizens in the subsequent phases that have captured
the teleological imaginations of the generations of historians focused
on the forward-looking aspects of the so-called ‘age of democratic
revolutions’. However, even the liberal political philosophies of the
time rested on monarchical notions of a singular, integrated, and
comprehensive ‘sovereignty’, the historical result of Europe’s long-
term process of monarchicalization. In the Atlantic the ideal of polit-
ical homogeneity as benevolent, abstracted and popularized in civic
terms as individual ‘equality’, replaced the failed personalism and
paternalism of monarchy militarized on Atlantic scales.
110 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

On the broad analytical scale of these incremental historical

processes of political consolidation on scales that transcended individ-
ual human experience, the so-called ‘revolutions’ through which the
Atlantic world passed at the end of the eighteenth century were
locally varied intellectual and cultural acknowledgements of the inte-
gration of monarchical authority and militarization with commercial
finance, which had been gathering momentum, and momentousness,
since the 1500s in the confines of far-western maritime Europe.
Through three centuries, the foundations of everyone’s personal secu-
rity in a communal ethos of belonging in, and contributing to,
companies of familiars eroded towards the individualized, mobile,
material-consuming ‘self ’ that was consistent with survival by
commercialized engagements with unknown others. Mobile individ-
uals abandoned tried-and-true ancestral integrity to commit them-
selves to dealing with utter strangers in the so-called ‘marketplace’,
alone, or – to no less motivating degrees of intensity and immediacy
– in increasingly civic, or public, contexts.
However, few of the Europeans adrift on the Atlantic – as distinct
from the armchair political economists in Europe15 – had personal
experience of dealing, at arm’s length, with utter strangers on which
they might base sufficient implicit trust in such contingent commer-
cial contacts that they might sleep soundly at night.We modern heirs
to this radical anonymity of ‘the market’ attempt to domesticate its
disconcerting implications of uncertainty and vulnerability at the level
of such collective abstractions as ‘society’ and ‘nation’. These orderly
abstractions are not experienced directly but are ultimately only imag-
ined as secure ideological spaces that somehow provide ‘freedom’ and
‘opportunity’ for individuals who are otherwise profoundly, and defi-
antly proudly, alone. But before so anxious an ambivalence was ration-
alized, violence flared everywhere along the cutting edges of the
process of commercialization. Historians have seldom appreciated the
parallels in the carnage experienced by Native Americans with the
violence of slaving in Africa.16 In Africa as well as in the Americas, the
people dragged through capture into utter isolation, and forcibly
isolated again and again through repeated sales as the human property
of others, were only the most extreme among many examples of
personal vulnerability to the ‘invisible hand’ of the market.

The historical dynamics of commercial capital in Africa

Africa faced the same challenge of domesticating the competitive
chaos and individualistic resort to material consumption that
The Dynamics of History in Africa 111

European political theorists tried to render less threatening by imag-

ining a benevolent, if invisible, guiding hand of the market. However,
Africa had not integrated a unifying universalistic ideology like
European Christianity, and its political systems were composites of
many small components rather than the singular and homogeneous
integrated monarchies there. The historical contexts of Africans’
personal engagements with a commercializing Atlantic thus contrast
with the abstract clichés of ‘empires’ and ‘kingdoms’ that predominate
in the historical literature on the continent.17
Africans were not unfamiliar with trade.Two millennia before the
Portuguese contacted the western Africans living south of the Sahara,
rural communities that specialized in exploiting environmental niches
in areas capable of supporting dense populations along the upper and
middle Niger River, and also artisan families that self-ethnicized like
their agricultural and other producer counterparts, had clustered in
composite towns to provide the products of their complementing
skills to one another, directly, personally.Trade in towns like these did
not depend on specialized merchants and did not require centralized
military power, or the monumental architecture that represented it,
like that which had developed out of similar, earlier similar initiatives
in Asia, and for which the classical Mediterranean and eventually
western Europe had – for millennia – been paying the bills.18
Africans’ alternative community, political, and economic strategies,
like these sustainable towns, were the result not of their isolation, but
of their determination to preserve the personalism of their ‘commu-
nal ethos’. On the Saharan margins and Indian Ocean shores of the
continent others had engaged other maritime commercial worlds
since the Phoenicians and other traders in Mediterranean antiquity
had thrived. Their engagements with merchant capital had become
significantly more intense since the integration of the vast and highly
commercialized Islamic oecumene in the eighth and ninth centuries.
In western Africa, villagers had domesticated even the external
commercial resources that Muslim traders from North Africa intro-
duced from the ninth or tenth centuries. To cite only one example
known well to Africanists, desert-edge farmers there developed
networking strategies to channel regional products to and from the
Saharan region, based on commercial capital provided by Muslim
merchants from the north in search of the region’s gold.19 In an
ethnicized designation characteristic of Africans’ accent on culturally
self-defined communities of producers rather than on their products,
the academic literature has characterized these professional traders as
‘Soninke’. But historians might understand them in terms of the
112 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

historical strategies around which they created themselves as a promi-

nent community, capable of taking initiatives. In these terms, these
Soninke reversed Africa’s producer-centred system of distribution, in
which mobile buyers tended to seek out resident producers, as patrons
to clients, by making novel commercial initiatives based on external
credit. With it, groups of Soninke traders congregated to disperse
southwards with the products of others – the bars of rock salt
emblematic of the desert trade, leather goods and textiles imported
from North Africa, and other wares they provided to consumers in
the populous agricultural region beyond the desert, on credit.Though
their dispersal involved mercantile investments in transportation and
in inventories that might have inclined them towards the sort of
commercial relationships with strangers that the communal ethos
regarded as anathema, they instead worked through familial ties to
maintain cultural coherence and a strong communal ethos of their
own in small communities scattered across hundreds of miles. From
the point of view of the Soninke, and as they are commonly described
in the literature, their dispersed, ethnically distinct villages constituted
a ‘trading diaspora’.20
The dispersed agriculturalist communities among whom these
Soninke settled returned the compliement by using several strategies
to domesticate the merchant-strangers, effectively building perma-
nent, personal connections with them. Notably, they allowed the alien
traders to settle their lands as invited ‘guests’, in villages adjacent to,
but separate from, their own, and then built intimately personal
alliances with them by offering their daughters in marriages. The
traders in turn provided bride wealth and other gifts from their inven-
tories of imported goods. Over time, both sides, landlords and
strangers, raised the children of the other to link the two communi-
ties on a basis structured to endure (literally) through the genera-
tions.21 The permanence and personalism of relationships maintained
through marriage alliances reflected the valuation of continuity in the
communal ethos and also, in effect, created human collateral, wives
and offspring, for the imported goods offered initially – and presum-
ably also on an ongoing basis – on credit. Within the framework of
the communal ethos, indebted communities commonly pledged
members to creditors as collateral. Human pledges like these – known
generally in the literature as ‘pawns’22 – were not abandoned but were
offered as prized tokens of trust among neighbours, with expectations
of indefinite duration, on the condition of responsible guardianship,
enforceable through other links derived from generations of prior
engagements. Even with Muslim capital financing the Soninke – and
The Dynamics of History in Africa 113

eventually other – trading networks in western Africa, the communal

ethos thus prevailed.The tendency to domesticate foreign credit was
consistent throughout the varied strategies sketched here, and in many
more throughout the continent.23
However, external commercial capital rarely reached the remainder
of the continent. There the great majority managed to produce
comfortable surpluses and to distribute them widely without aban-
doning what one might call the domestic political economy of the
‘communal ethos’.24 Villagers along the continent’s Atlantic shoreline
had exploited its marine wealth in salt and fish and circulated them
widely through neighbouring local communities through marriages
and other human relationships without resorting to commercial
contacts with utter strangers, men with goods but without connections
in the small, internally oriented communities in which they lived.
They built their domestic political economies around ongoing
personal relationships among members of face-to-face communities.
These strategies contrasted with commercial societies constructed
around personally advantageous, ad hoc exchanges with strangers to
acquire material goods to hoard, or ‘own’ personally, as well as currency
tokens of value to facilitate future, similarly acquisitive, exchanges.
Africa’s ‘communal ethos’ of mutual accountability resembled life in
Europe’s villages, guilds, parishes, and even monarchical domains
before the seventeenth century more than it depended on the compet-
itive – not to say frequently desperate – individualism on which traders
far from home, often without significant social restraints, had to
depend to prosper in the Americas.25
Other African kin-defined communities clustered in similarly
composite coastal villages and inland towns with populations
numbering in the tens of thousands.26 In the watery mazes of the
delta through which the waters of the Niger River reached the Gulf
of Guinea and along the Congo River system in the forests of equa-
torial Africa, entrepreneurial ‘big men’ traded extensively along the
extended navigable reaches of these vast riverine systems. From the
profits of their canoe ventures they assembled ‘houses’ of retainers, not
through reproduction and kinship but by recruiting traders, artisans,
warriors, and paddlers as personal clients and – as always in Africa –
as participants. They muted the opportunities for personal aggran-
dizement inherent in commercialization by requiring the ‘big men’
who became wealthy to contribute much – or most – of their
personal gains to obtain anonymous positions of responsibility in
‘secret societies’. The ranking members of these guilds, often hiding
their personal identities behind elaborate masks, distributed their
114 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

revenues for the collective welfare of the communities they had

assembled.27 In agricultural areas, where kinship and reproduction
prevailed, bridewealth payments linked the relatives of a reproducing
couple by distributing material assets rather than concentrating them
to endow a presumed autonomous pair, as did European dowries.
Africans thus developed large networks capable of distributing vast
quantities of the products of skilled artisanry through personal rela-
tionships rooted in the strong collective identities of their communal
ethos. All of these arrangements drew on their own, local financial
resources to form and perpetuate relationships with kin, clients, wives,
and fellows.

Atlantic commerce
The flexibility of the communal ethos, in practice infinitely responsive
to the personalities and challenges of many local moments, made it
resilient, an enabling means of pursuing varied historical strategies, as
long as the accessible populations – wives, clients, pawns, and other
dependants – remained adequate to engage the commercial resources
available. That premise failed when Atlantic commerce, growing
massively from the initial modest Portuguese ventures in the 1500s,
overwhelmed this balance in the eighteenth century. Africans had
embraced the Atlantic opportunities they had perceived in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, by and large defusing their disruptively indi-
vidualizing potential through the strategies that their counterparts had
used successfully to absorb earlier commercial credit introduced from
the Islamic mercantile economies bordering the populous sub-Saharan
regions of the continent on both the east and the north.28
This Atlantic era, known to European merchant investors and to
American planters as the era of ‘the slave trade’, Africans experienced
as a tidal wave of commercial capital, as the gradual accumulation of
American specie in Europe, and its translation there into financial
capital, overflowed into Africa. In the view of Africans committed to
communal reciprocities and mutual responsibilities, the Europeans
took voraciously while giving as little as possible and seldom invest-
ing in enduring relationships of reciprocity. These tendencies, which
Africans saw as ‘cannibalistic’,29 came to prevail in the eighteenth-
century North Atlantic, as the so-called ‘age of democratic revolu-
tions’ there eventually recognized, and – perversely – embraced.
Africans first engaged the Portuguese on small scales, and only
incidentally. They had no reason to anticipate that successors to the
Portuguese and other early European merchant-strangers whom they
The Dynamics of History in Africa 115

had had little trouble containing would carry forward an incremental

process of capital accumulation that acquired a momentum of its own
and that would leave their successors enmeshed in immense webs of
debt and violence that none of them, alone, could turn back. Since for
Africans people were the primary form of ‘wealth’, they initially
preferred to sell commodities. Beyond the gold from the part of the
western African coast that Europeans designated for the glittering
prospect it held for them, Africans elsewhere provided ivory,
dyewoods, animal pelts, malagueta ‘pepper’, and other tropical exotica
to attract European commercial investment. Europeans accordingly
named the parts of the coast where they acquired ‘grain’ (Upper
Guinea, modern Sierra Leone, and Liberia, after the malagueta ‘grains
of paradise’ available there) and ‘ivory’ (modern Côte d’Ivoire). In all
of Africa, gold alone exceeded the value of captives sold as slaves until
1700.30 Significantly, all of these commodities were extracted rather
than being products of investment in agriculture or other capitaliza-
tion that might in the long run have increased supplies. Since these
commodities were therefore available only in limited quantities,
growing European demand rapidly exhausted supplies.
From the African perspective, however, they were readily accessible
to anyone, even younger men, guests, and clients without significant
stakes in local communities under the authority of village elders or in
political composites headed by regional chiefs. Marginal members of
the small communities of most of the continent thus found the
Europeans promising lenders of imported goods to finance personal
advances outside the strong and hierarchical, and thus limiting, frame-
works of their lives. European credit, at least in telling part, attracted
a range of new African suppliers not linked to earlier generations of
African trading partners. The opportunity brought by the Europeans
was more like a gold rush than the capital-intensive development of
plantations in the Americas, or – as it turned out – more like plun-
dering than production.
Older communities – around the European castles along the Gold
Coast, known as Fante, to the east the Allada polity trading with
Europeans at Ouidah (Whydah), on beyond the Niger Delta, where
English ships dealt with villages of fishermen, and along the coast to
the east and south – initially waxed in size as they grew in repute
among the traders from Europe. In the process, the chiefs of these
composite polities, who had exercised relatively little personal author-
ity within them but who represented the collectivity to outsiders,
obtained imports from the strangers from the Land of the Dead
beyond the maritime horizons visible from the coast and deployed
116 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

them internally to recruit direct political clients. The men they

recruited most cheaply were not always those with the most inte-
grated and responsible positions within their home communities, the
components of the political composite. That is, the people most
receptive to the lure of European commercial credit were most
marginal to the African communal ethos, less invested in its complex
balances of personal relationships. They were therefore not particu-
larly reluctant to defect to chiefs aiming to stand apart from the
communities in the composites they represented and to aggrandize
themselves personally, at the expense of others. Nor were they partic-
ularly loath, as Europeans competed among themselves by offering
more ‘trust’ to more ambitious potential trading partners, to take
personal advantage of these further opportunities to abandon the
chiefs and to advance themselves independently of the web of rela-
tionships of the communal ethos, by providing whatever the
Europeans wanted, by whatever means they might find necessary,
including violent ones.
Competitive individuation, supported by the Europeans’ commer-
cial credit, turned systematically violent as the growing financial
capacity of the Atlantic economy continued to stimulate it. In the
later decades of the seventeenth century, older political regimes along
the coast, including several that had consolidated around the earlier
phases of Atlantic trading, collapsed into local conflict. Examples
would include Senegambia and the Gold Coast, where gold and other
commodity trades had thrived earlier, and the area around Ouidah
(modern Bénin) that Europeans were already counting on as their
‘Slave Coast’. In western central Africa, a part of the coast that the
Portuguese had claimed since the 1570s as ‘Angola’, major trading
networks developed from four principal points along the coast, a
northern one at Loango, another centred on the mouth of the
Congo/Zaire River, a third at the main Portuguese military base at
Luanda, and the fourth in the far south at Benguela. In the second half
of the seventeenth century, in a replication of the Muslim investment
that had financed the Soninke in western sub-Saharan Africa, Dutch
investments at Loango financed a diaspora of traders who settled well
into the interior, seeking captives. Inland from Benguela and Luanda,
Brazilian traders enlisted Africans as allies in violent assaults on local
communities, and the regional components of the ‘Kongo’ network
along the lower Congo River dissolved into pervasive armed conflicts
that have been termed ‘civil wars’.31
The fires of violence, once ignited, flared ever further inland, with
the considerable costs of larger and more elaborately trained and
The Dynamics of History in Africa 117

equipped armies sustained by the even more rapidly increasing capac-

ity of European merchants to invest commercial credit in Africa.
Africans’ initial sixteenth-century limited extraction of ivory and
other commodities had by the 1670s spawned caravans and canoes
filled with men armed to protect themselves during excursions into
increasingly remote, unfamiliar, and unfriendly territories, all financed
at the enabling margin from the trade goods they obtained on ‘trust’
from Europeans. By the end of the seventeenth century the armed
bands of traders were turning increasingly to fighting one another.
These conflicts, and outright raiding for captives, led to a series of
populist uprisings – in the Senegambian region headed by Muslim
marabouts (Sufi clerics), inland from the Gold Coast by Akan political
authorities in the forests, behind the Slave Coast by war leaders who
were under pressure from both the cavalry forces of the Yoruba polity
of Oyo to the north and the growing slaving near the coast for
captives to sell at Ouidah.
In the same era in western central Africa east of Luanda and
Benguela, the heirs to mercenaries whom the Portuguese had enlisted
in the early seventeenth century had settled in by the eighteenth
century. Their militarized successors as warlords concentrated in the
eastern savanna grasslands at Lunda and at Ovimbundu in the high-
lands inland from Benguela. In terms of the African communal ethos,
all of these warrior polities represented a new and violent order,
assemblages of refugees of the most diverse origins, whose primary
loyalties were to their warrior protectors rather than to kin in the
consensual composites of the older local communities.The relatively
homogeneous political identities they proclaimed accordingly became
the cores of the modern ethnic identities that many of their descen-
dants claim still today. These new ethnicized political communities
emerged at the same time as the similar homogenization of common
subjugation to monarchs in Europe, the neo-ethnicized bases similarly
popularized in the Atlantic ‘age of revolutions’ as ‘nations’.
As this violent frontier of Atlantic investment retreated inland in
violent surges from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries,
new commercially oriented communities consolidated themselves
nearer the African coast by assimilating the survivors, many of them
acquired through slaving. The growing financial capacity of the
Atlantic economy provided the credit through which these special-
ized trading groups acquired their members. These were based in a
string of coastal towns from St Louis near the mouth of the Senegal
River in far western Africa to Benguela in what is now southern
Angola, all filled with captives from increasingly remote parts of the
118 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

interior, retained as the traders’ profits from dealing with the

Europeans. With their European sources of material wealth, external
to the balanced reciprocities of the mainland communities, these
coastal entrepreneurs evaded the social and cultural controls of the
communal ethos and the corresponding compositional strategies of
political integration.
These warily ‘trusted’ partners of the European slavers also tended
to indebt the warrior aristocrats to whom they distributed the wares
they imported, in a shadowy conceptual zone with aspects of what
western economic theory distinguishes as tributes, gifts, and sales.
Over time, the heirs to the generals who had founded the no longer
new warrior polities a generation or two earlier faced growing costs
of consolidating and sustaining the bulky military institutions they
inherited. The political collectivities of isolated refugees whom war
leaders had unified were proliferating into local reproducing commu-
nities built around claims to two or three generations of locally born
descendants. The once-unified subject populations the founding war
leaders had assembled were thereby also disintegrating.The commu-
nal ethos was arising anew, from the ashes of the violent frontier of
slaving.The beleaguered heirs to the warrior-founders of these poli-
ties then turned to the coastal brokers for commercial credit to
finance them. Atlantic commercial credit thus financed militarization
in Africa no less than in Europe.
By the 1750s, the African merchants along the coast had become
strong enough in (African) terms of the personnel they had accumu-
lated through slaving, and their credits had indebted their warlord
trading partners sufficiently in commercial Atlantic terms, that the
bills began to come due. The accommodations reached, since the
African warlords were effectively bankrupt, involved liquidation of
the human assets they had accumulated through sales of people to
Europeans and eventually provoked take-overs by the commercial
suppliers on the coast. The ensuing transitions from militarism to
mercantile-oriented political control proceeded, one by one, from the
late eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries in many particular
ways, in the many separate historical spaces on a continent that was
not the unitary ‘country’ that it still appears to some modern
observers to have been. An early example occurred in Loango, where
the Dutch had financed diasporic traders in the early eighteenth
century. Inland from Luanda, control of the warrior Imbangala polity
at Kasanje, the main direct supplier of captives to the Portuguese at
Luanda, in the 1750s fell to a representative of the principal local
Angolan trading diaspora financed by Atlantic capital.As oral tradition
The Dynamics of History in Africa 119

later recalled this profound moment, in characteristically personalized

and concrete images, this ‘king was the first one who kept his trade
goods in his compound’, as opposed to distributing imports through
the networks of relationships to form a composite polity, still in this
era characteristic throughout Africa.32 Similarly, African traders who
were by then working through the cavalry regime at Oyo inland from
the Slave Coast in the 1770s joined with royal slaves conducting the
burgeoning trade to the north at the time to execute a palace coup
against the last of the warrior successors of the regime’s original
rulers.33 The community of Brazil-oriented merchants at Ouidah –
under the famous Francisco Felix de Sousa – took advantage of with-
drawal of English and French competitors after 1808, in the Atlantic
age of abolition, to engineer the succession of a ruler in Dahomey,
who appointed de Sousa as ambassador to the European traders of the
1830s.34 In parts of the continent more remote from the coast, there
were similar scattered moments of what can, in slightly obsolescent
terms of European historiography, be called a ‘bourgeois revolution’.

The historical dynamics of debt

Africa thus paralleled the experience of western Europe in substance,
in sequence, and in timing along an intricate dialectical process of mili-
tarization, commercialization, and assemblage of populations of
unprecedentedly diverse backgrounds in new political collectivities.
However, in contrast to Europe, the African historical dynamics
emanating from the Atlantic in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries
proceeded at inflationary rates, forced by the rapidity with which
European commercial capacity increased.Atlantic capitalism grew faster
than Africans could boost the productive capacities of their domestic
economies, reliant as they were primarily on human reproduction, and
production for internal consumption.These were the economic impli-
cations of the continent’s ‘communal ethos’. Under pressure already in
the sixteenth century to keep up with commercial demand for exports,
individuals in Africa turned first to extraction of commodities. In the
later seventeenth century, escalating competition financed by growing
European credit turned violent, and the violence became the vehicle
through which African slavers extended the general strategy of extrac-
tion to capturing people. By the early eighteenth century, slaving had
become the principal African means of achieving and then defending
radically individuated power, primarily by acquiring and retaining
people in Africa, with sales of as few as possible to European slavers as
Atlantic means to African ends of accumulating dependants.
120 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

However, on Atlantic scales, the European credit that financed this

African historical dynamic was not unlimited. As Africa never
absorbed more than about 10 per cent of the commercial assets that
European financiers invested around the Atlantic, the slaves attracted
relatively little interest from the principal investors in Europe’s emerg-
ing financial capitals in London, Paris, and Amsterdam, or even
Bordeaux or Lisbon. Wealthy European merchants in these centres
enjoyed less risky opportunities much closer to home and in the
Atlantic concentrated their investments in the Americas, within
increasingly dense legal frameworks created by their own monarchs.
In England’s mainland colonies in America, Boston, New York, and
Philadelphia had bigger fish to fry, cod among them, leaving slaving
there to small towns in Rhode Island.35 This larger Atlantic context
of financial strategizing consigned Africa to marginal, less well
financed, often somewhat desperate merchant investors in Europe,
who had limited opportunities to engage in less dirty forms of
business.36
Nonetheless, by African scales, the hundreds of slaving captains
competing each year to do business in Africa through debt-based
strategies – as well, of course, as through other, more violent, tactics
spurred on by rivalries among a half dozen or more European
monarchs engaged in Atlantic-scale conflicts by the eighteenth
century – poured commercial credit into African economies. This
financing escalated competition among their African suppliers at the
very time that the natural endowments of resources they were
extracting as commodities dwindled. African players, marginal to
begin with in their local communities, resorted to violence to cover
speculative investments in shrinking supplies. Without prior elabora-
tion of ideologies of individualism or commercial institutions and
burdened by investments transcending the internal focus of their small
communities, African strangers whom Atlantic commerce drew into
intensifying competition with one another had few ways to resolve
disputes among themselves. Further, no international law bridged the
commercial economy of the Atlantic and the communal economies
of Africa to guarantee repayment of the credits Europeans extended.37
One can only speculate at the extent of the working misunderstand-
ings that facilitated transactions along African coasts that Europeans
understood as individually contracted, repayable debt, but that
Africans interpreted through their ethos of communal relationality as
the largesse of patron-like figures investing in relationships of obliga-
tion meant to be maintained.
The Dynamics of History in Africa 121

Parallel historical dynamics of the eighteenth-century Atlantic

As commercialization pervaded the lives of North Atlantic
consumers in the second half of the eighteenth century, Africans
deploying the goods they obtained from Europeans to assemble
significant and growing numbers of people, through slaving, were
proceeding along lines closely parallel to the Euro-American accu-
mulation of other Africans in the Americas, also through slaving. By
the middle third of the eighteenth century, African military rulers,
who sustained themselves primarily by the plunder of continuing
conquests, including captives, simultaneously reached the logistical
limits of political integration through violence; their costs of main-
taining their military capacities exceeded the gains from capturing.
The commercial enterprises that organized transportation to and
from coastal entrepôts over longer and longer distances were absorb-
ing newcomers brought in through ongoing slaving. As a result, and
again in instances as many and as varied as the dozens of local histor-
ical contexts along Africa’s Atlantic coasts, the merchant interests
married in or otherwise gained control of the central positions in the
old warrior polities.
This African ‘frontier’ of slaving followed a violent historical
dynamic recurrent throughout the world’s history, including the
contemporaneous northern Atlantic. Everywhere, the initially low
costs of violent military methods of seizing political control became
unsustainable as they rose in the longer term. Since merchants pros-
pered far beyond the ranges where mounted warriors could ride or
troops could march, heirs to merchants who had initially sustained
struggling formative military regimes tended to profit sufficiently
from their investments to intrude on the power of their former spon-
sors. Militarists sustained themselves primarily in circumstances of
renewed threat, creating enemies when necessary to do so, and (or)
excluding merchants from monarchical domains. In the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries in maritime Western Europe this contested
and violent dynamic of commercialization and escalating militarism
gained unique momentum owing to the low entry costs of exploit-
ing the then all but empty Atlantic and the depopulated Americas.
With the late seventeenth-century ‘financial revolution’ in England,
the bullion bought in Africa and looted and then mined from meso-
America accelerated the nascent commercialization of the Atlantic to
levels of capitalization in Europe that were self-sustaining. Africa, on
the other hand, experienced this commercialization in compressed,
indebted, and ultimately tragic ways. That is, European commercial
122 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

investments in Africa stimulated in stark form, and in hardly more

than a century between the descent into pervasive violence after the
1670s and the wave of commercial seizures of the military power of
African polities at the end of the eighteenth century, a historical
process of ebbs and flows of military initiatives and commercial inte-
gration that Eurasian regions had sustained over nearly five millennia
– though at ever-escalating costs.
The initially defensive and relatively homogeneous political
communities in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries
that the exigencies of violence in Africa enabled skilled warriors to
form paralleled the unique and direct personal authority that landed
lords in late-medieval Europe were then also claiming as monarchs.
The most successful of these warrior-kings in Europe went on to
establish this personalized and comprehensive authority as ‘early-
modern’ monarchies. That is to say, unlike the externally oriented
guardians at the cores of contemporaneous composite polities in
Africa (of which Europe also earlier had had its religious equivalents),
European monarchs attempted to assert direct and personal power
over everyone living within territorially defined domains, claiming
nominally protective roles for themselves but becoming as brutal –
and ultimately as expensive – in practice as circumstances might
necessitate. Africa’s equivalent cohort of early eighteenth-century
‘kings’, the warlords who asserted unified and direct control over the
refugees and slaves isolated by spreading violence, emerged at the
same time as, and out of commercializing processes parallel to, the
consolidation of absolute monarchy in Europe.
The parallels continue. In Africa, the merchant groups supported
by European credit helped the warlords to cover the costs of their
expensive military overheads to the point that these commercial
interests prospered sufficiently to move into the centres of their poli-
ties. In western Europe the specie and other revenues from the remote
Atlantic intensified the dynastic contests within Europe to the level of
impasse in the seventeenth century. The military monarchies on the
Atlantic fringes of the continent then turned to commercial
resources, especially in the Atlantic, to pay for continuing pursuit of
their military ambitions at home. But the initial complementing
phases of these endeavours became competitive in the later eighteenth
century when the consolidating military monarchies attempted to
bring the growing transatlantic economy under fiscal control. Liberal
ideologies of commerce, and their ‘democratic’ counterparts in the
sphere of civic politics, provided the ideological coherence that justi-
fied revolt in the Americas, as well as in Paris.
The Dynamics of History in Africa 123

However,Africa’s ‘restorative’ historical vision contained the parallels

to what westerners thus experienced as radical change within the
conceptual framework of the ‘communal ethos’. Africans saw continu-
ity rather than change.38 Owing to the violence-inducing rapidity with
which European credit had drawn Africa into the commercializing
world of the Atlantic, most Africans turned towards their communities
in search of refuge and security.They tried to tap local resources of rela-
tionality to assimilate external debt, and they were trying to contain
individualism at home. European merchants abroad, on the other hand,
were riding a wave of commercialization rooted in centuries of incre-
mental innovations in Asia and Europe, far from the residues of the
comparable ethic of personalism and social responsibility in Europe.
There, the moral terms of community integrity had troubled only a
few of the people that commercialization displaced from older protec-
tions of patronage. Most, particularly in the Atlantic, saw opportunity,
and in the eighteenth century they embraced individual autonomy and
asserted personal ‘rights’ in polities construed in civic terms.
The new civic sovereignties asserted at the end of the eighteenth
century became ‘national’ only subsequently, in the sense of a
presumed, naturalized, trustworthy political community – and very,
and often agonizingly, gradually.39 The coalitions of leaders of the new
republican states, initially united primarily against the kings, in Britain,
France, and Spain, soon fractured in varying ways over the subsequent
challenges of blending the highly diverse populations for whom they
claimed responsibility into theoretically homogeneous national
communities. In the longue durée of global historical dynamics, evident
also in Africa, the era’s political rhetoric of popular ‘equality’ before the
institutions of a civic state attempted to reclaim the betrayed protec-
tions of monarchical subjects by asserting an imagined participatory
consensus, a sense of direct, personal, civic belonging equivalent to the
‘communal ethos’ that Africans managed to maintain.
The people whom Africans had sold as slaves, however, recalled the
experience we depict as ‘capture’, in characteristically modern terms
of violated personal and bodily dignity, less optimistically. Their
descendants in the southern United States recalled the stories their
grandparents had told in characteristically African terms of relational-
ity, as ‘betrayal’.40 The perpetrators who disrupted the mutually
supportive communal ethos were perceived by Africans as a plague of
greedy witches, as vultures picking at the bodies of the socially dead,
as anyone in a communal ethos that constituted being as belonging in
fact was.41 Africans responded with increasingly desperate strategies to
restore the integrity of their disintegrating communities, but through
124 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

self-defeating resort to assembling outsiders through the slaving to

which they had been reduced in order to keep up with the pace of
commercial disintegration. Like Europeans scattered in the Americas
asserting themselves as civic ‘nations’ to recover the security their
formerly benevolent monarchs had betrayed by taxing and intruding,
Africans created an approximation – however hollow – of what they
had lost by covering these aggregates of strangers with the inclusive
language of their communal ethos.42
The small communities in Africa’s composite polities became
contenders for the singular power of direct monarchical-style hierarchi-
cal authority rather than continuing in the modes of collaborators
sustaining a form of authority in which all participated. Africans thus
drew their communities ever more tightly together, in a moral climate
of suspicion and latent disorder. By the logic of the communal ethos,
the only perpetrators whom they could imagine within were, of course,
themselves, and they thus expelled members of their own communities
as ‘witches’, many of whom ended up sold away to Europeans, being far
too dangerous for others in Africa to retain. Thus Africans looked
inward rather than seeking public and political responses to the personal
crises of commercialism, while Europeans looked outward, exaggerating
their moment of recognition of a centuries-long series of incremental
extensions of seemingly familiar ways as a transformative contrast.
The survivors of enslavement in the Americas, innocent of course,
then remembered their expulsions as betrayals by those whom they
had believed they could trust. Their feelings of abandonment, too,
were the African counterparts of the intense resentments of American
rebels who began as loyalists to monarchs in Europe stressed by the
costs of the pan-Atlantic enterprises on which they had embarked.
The African explicit accent on the personal isolation and social costs
of commercialized – or ‘capitalist’ – modernity thus highlights chal-
lenges that the conventional discipline of history struggles to compre-
hend directly, because it is – or has been, up to now – quintessentially
modernist, built on the very conceptual premises that anchor the
modern abstractions of the social sciences, nationalism, and other
intellectual conceits logically incapable of generating critiques of
themselves. Africans’ perceptions of Atlantic commercialization in
terms of its costs in human relationships thus have as much to teach
us about the late eighteenth-century ideological crystallization
affirmed in Europe and America as ‘democratic revolutions’ as our
understanding of commercialized encounters with strangers teaches
us about Africans’ intense devotion to their communities and the
Atlantic historical processes that corroded them.
7
Playing Muslim: Bonaparte’s Army of
the Orient and Euro-Muslim
Creolization

Juan Cole

Arab Muslim civilization was a multivalent cultural symbol for the

French of the Enlightenment and revolutionary eras. Muslims were
made to stand for both Self and Other, were deployed as both icons
of enlightenment and symbols of hidebound rigidity.The most thor-
ough experience the French of the Revolutionary era had with
Muslims came during Napoleon Bonaparte’s conquest and occupa-
tion of Egypt. How did the French construct this religion that was so
alien to them? What differences were there among them in this
regard? My question is not ‘what did Islam mean to them?’ in a
unitary sense, but ‘what were the various sorts of things they used
Islam to symbolize?’ More interestingly, how did they see the inter-
play of identity between Egyptian Muslims and French Deists? The
other side of the coin is the question of how Egyptian intellectuals
invoked French cultural symbols for their own, internal purposes.
The French invasion created new possibilities for cultural mixing,
as both the French and Egyptians deployed key symbols of the Other
for the purposes of the Self. It is this sense in which I use the term
‘creolization’ here. As Feo Rodrigues writes,

The process of creolization . . . is not merely an encounter between two

or more cultures that results over time in the formation of a new culture
with its own internal logic and coherence. Creolization is here defined as
a creative process crafted from the tensions of colonial societies, subvert-
ing the daily practice of colonialism in many social domains. It is also a
process that cuts across structures of inequality, transforming both colo-
nizer and colonized.This process is hardly ever homogeneous and perva-
sive through time.1

125
126 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

Just as biological mixing (métissage) challenged conceptions of

essential races, so cultural mixing produced areas of liminality or
scandal. The term as deployed here does not assume a homogeneity
of either French or Egyptian culture, and is attentive to gradations of
admixture, which can support or defy colonial authority.2 Bonaparte’s
dalliance with Islam, so controversial with the stricter partisans of the
Enlightenment, was only one such outrage. Mixing of cultural and
institutional forms was typical of the late eighteenth-century renewed
European onslaught on the global south. In Madras in that period,
British administrator Lionel Place ‘is reported to have adopted the
role of an indigenous king, when . . . he was appointed the collector
of the Jagir, the district surrounding Madras city’.3 Anthropologist
Mattison Mines remarks of this sort of institutional creolization
(which he refers to as ‘hybrid’):

Acting as he did, Place conjoined British Company officer and kingly

Indian big-man in his self-representation, indicating that he understood
his role as the administrator of the Jagir as a dual one, playing the part of
a local ruler as well as that of a Company officer. Not surprisingly, British
regulations and bureaucratic procedures in Madras provided little control
over the pragmatics of personal loyalties and enmities, which this oppor-
tunistic society based on personal alliances engendered.4

Mines thus points to another element in creolization, its ad hoc and

personalistic character. Creolization is characteristic of preindustrial
colonialism, before the European marginal superiority in arms,
productivity, and organization permitted a more thoroughgoing
imposition of cultural and institutional forms on the colonized –
though new kinds of mixing emerged in later centuries. An impor-
tant characteristic of creolization is that it is seen as illegitimate by the
strongest representatives of the traditions it mixes together, just as
mulattos had a marginal position in society.
C. A. Bayly has noted the irony that the French Revolution was
experienced in Afro-Asia not as liberating but as a new Christian
crusade, given that the revolution impelled colonialism in Egypt and
the East Indies.The democratization of warfare through conscription
allowed the deployment of bigger armies than ever before, and the
industrialization of warfare gave European armies marginal advan-
tages over Afro-Asian ones. European imperial conquests provoked
Afro-Asian counter-revolutions, whether from the top by moderniz-
ing elites or from the bottom by increasingly networked clerics and
by millenarian peasants and townsmen. At the level of culture and
Playing Muslim 127

ideology, creolization, or the mixing of civilizational ideas, gave tools

to European scientists, explorers, and military men thrust into a glob-
alizing environment, as well as to Afro-Asians negotiating new roles in
colonial environments.5

***

Eighteenth-century Egypt was a vassal state of the ramshackle

Ottoman Empire, which had begun regularly losing wars to Austria in
Europe and which had decentralized the administration of its far-
flung Middle Eastern provinces as a result. The Ottomans, like many
of their Muslim predecessors, maintained slave-soldiers.The Janissary
infantry had its origins in a form of slavery, wherein mainly Christian
boys in the Balkans were taken by the sultan and converted to Islam
and trained in martial arts. The expense of bureaucratic standing
armies and the importance of tribal levies in the arid Middle East
contributed to the rise of slave-soldiery. In arid and semi-arid ecolo-
gies, pastoral nomads specialize in using land too dry for farming for
occasional pasturage and animal husbandry, which can only be
accomplished if the pastoralists are mobile.Tribal kinship organization
and the skills of horsemanship and camel use made the pastoralists a
formidable natural cavalry. Overdependence on tribes, however, posed
dangers for rulers, since pastoralists’ primary loyalty was to their own
chieftains, and tribal coups against the state were frequent in Middle
Eastern history.
Since slavery is a form of social death, in which slaves are cut off
from their previous lives and families, they were theoretically more
likely to give their complete loyalty to the ruler than were tribesmen,
and rulers often packed barracks with such slaves or former slaves. In
fact, Ottoman slave-soldiers in Egypt organized themselves by ‘house’
and established forms of fictive kinship, giving them a corporate soli-
darity that under some circumstances allowed them to come to power
and to overshadow the weak, frequently rotated, Ottoman governor.
The Egypt that Bonaparte set out to conquer was thus ruled by beys
who had earlier in life been young slave-boys, owned by officers who
trained them in horsemanship and sword- and gunplay. Typically the
young slave-soldier would be manumitted when he grew a full beard,
and would become a junior officer in the ‘house’ of his former master.
Most slave-soldiers came from the Caucasus, but at the top one saw a
shift from Circassian beys to Georgian ones in the late eighteenth
century.6 In 1798, Egypt was ruled by a duumvirate, consisting of
Ibrahim Bey and Murad Bey. Although theoretically vassals of the
128 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

Ottoman sultan, Selim III, these two beys seldom sent tribute to
Istanbul, and Bonaparte made the case that they were de jure in rebel-
lion against their empire, such that his deposition of them was a favour
to Selim III. Istanbul did not see the matter in that light.
Beneath the beys and their slave-soldiers (kol in Turkish, mamluk in
Arabic) were Egyptian notables. Some were large landowners, others
had managed to become administrators despite their native Egyptian
rather than Caucasian heritage. More often, they were great
merchants, Muslim clergymen, and Coptic Christian shopkeepers and
bureaucrats. Eighteenth-century Egypt came in portions of one-
tenth. It was perhaps 10 per cent urban, 10 per cent pastoralist, and 10
per cent Christian. Most Egyptians, of course, were Muslim peasants.
Bonaparte’s strategy was to attract to himself the Egyptian notables
and middle strata, including the Muslim clergy (however unlikely that
prospect), and to replace the deposed beys and slave-soldiers with
them.
On his invasion of July 1798, Bonaparte vainly sought to quiet
apprehensions of Egyptians with his Islam policy.7 He sought the
imprimatur of both formal Islam and Egyptian popular religion for
his rule.The first portion of the proclamation he issued on arriving in
Egypt went something like this, as translated from the Arabic version
rather than the French:

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.There is no god

but God, who has no son, nor any partner in His dominion. From the
French Republic, which is based upon the foundation of being free and
socially levelled:The great General Bonaparte, commander of the French
armies, informs all the people of Egypt that for an extended period of
time the regiments that dominate Egypt have acted towards the French
community with scorn and contempt. Now has arrived their hour of
punishment.What a pity it is! For a period of long centuries, this gang of
slave-soldiers from the lands of Abaza and Georgia has been wreaking
corruption in the most beautiful of climes, the like of which does not
exist anywhere else on the entire earth. As for the lord of the worlds,
Who is omnipotent, He has decreed the extinction of their government.
Egyptians! They may say to you that I have only arrived in this region
with the intention of wiping out your religion.That is a transparent lie.
Do not believe it. Say to the slanderers: I only came to you in order to
rescue your religion and your rights from the hand of tyrants. I am more
than the slave-soldiers worshipping God, may He be praised and exalted.
And I respect His prophet, Muhammad, and the glorious Qur’an. Say
also that all the people are equal before God.The thing that distinguishes
them one from another is only intellect, virtues, and knowledge. Among
the slave-soldiers, what intellect, virtues, and knowledge distinguish them
Playing Muslim 129

from others, or require that they monopolize all those things that make
life in this world sweet? Wherever there is fertile land, it belongs to the
slave-soldiers, and likewise wherever there are beautiful slave-girls, the
best horses, the most opulent dwellings, all these belong to them alone. If
the land of Egypt is the fief of the slave-soldiers, let them display for all
to see the title to it that God wrote out for them! He is kind and just to
human beings by his succour, may he be exalted. From this day and
henceforth, no one from among the people of Egypt shall be excluded
from high office or from acquiring exalted rank.The wise, the virtuous,
the learned shall direct affairs.Thus, the condition of the entire commu-
nity will be reformed. In Egypt’s past, the cities were great, the bodies of
water were wide, and commerce flourished. All this would have contin-
ued had it not been for the greed of the slave-soldiers.
Judges, clerics and prayer leaders, city officials, and town notables: Say
to your community that the French are also pure muslims. As proof of
this, they descended on Rome the grand and destroyed therein the
throne of the Pope, who used always to encourage Christians to make
war on Islam. Then they set out for the island of Malta, and expelled
from it the knights who used to assert that God requires them to make
war on the Muslims. In the meantime, the French at every moment were
the most sincere lovers of his majesty, the Ottoman sultan, and the
enemies of his enemies, may God prolong his rule.8

Bonaparte’s assertion that the French were Muslims seems absurd, but
it is not as absurd as the English rendering makes it appear, since in
Arabic the word muslim could simply mean anyone who had submit-
ted to the one God, and non-Muslims are represented in the Qur’an
as calling themselves ‘muslim’ in this sense. Bonaparte attempted to
co-opt the Muslim clerical class as allies from the indigenous middle
stratum against the Mamluks.
The prominent cleric at al-Azhar Seminary in Cairo, ‘Abd al-
Rahman al-Jabarti, wrote a polemical commentary on this proclama-
tion.9 The term ‘liberty’ posed a special problem for the al-Azhar
cleric. In Arabic, there was at that time no conception of political
liberty in the French, British, and American sense (just as there was no
practical experience with the idea in most of Europe outside the
North Atlantic powers). In the Middle East, absolute, divine-right
monarchy was the only known political system, so that the idea of
voting for members of parliament was an alien one. The word
‘freedom’ or hurriya denoted the state of being a free person as
opposed to being a slave. Since Bonaparte devoted so much of his
proclamation to attacking the Ottoman-Egyptians, slave-rulers, al-
Jabarti wondered if he meant to boast that he, unlike them, was a
freeman and had no slave origins. The chronicler inadvertently
130 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

demonstrated that Bonaparte’s proclamation, intended to introduce

Egyptians to key political ideas of the French Republic, was using a
neologism that could not easily be fathomed.Tellingly, when al-Jabarti
revised his commentary in later years, he took out this speculation,
since by then he had gained an understanding, at least, of what they
meant by the word.
Coming to the statement that the French had destroyed the throne
of the Pope, al-Jabarti wrote that in doing so, they had opposed the
Christians. ‘This people has opposed the Christians and the Muslims’,
he maintained,‘and has followed none of the religions.We see them as
atheist materialists who reject the Resurrection and deny prophecy and
revelation.’ He added that they ‘assert that the world has always existed’,
rather than having been created, as the scriptures taught. He bizarrely
accused them of believing in astrology, such that the position of the
stars dictates the rise and fall of nations, and of believing in reincarna-
tion, using that to explain why they did not ritually sacrifice animals.
These alleged French beliefs are actually just themes drawn from
medieval Muslim descriptions of heresies and foreign beliefs (some of
them obviously Indian), and al-Jabarti in speaking this way about the
French was propagandizing against them to the other literate Muslims
in the capital. His polemic enshrined a form of creolization, insofar as
he assimilated the non-standard beliefs of the French revolutionaries to
those of the Hindus whom Muslims had encountered in the medieval
period, whose beliefs were similarly alien to the Abrahamic traditions
with which most Muslim thinkers felt comfortable.
We may deduce that al-Jabarti viewed religions as composed of a
theology, a prophetology, a religious Law, and a set of distinctive
customs. That he saw religion as having this fourfold character made
it impossible for him to accept Bonaparte’s attempt to liken
Enlightenment Deism to Islam.The republican French posed a puzzle
to the Muslim scholar. Theologically, they were Unitarians, like
Muslims; but in their social customs they resembled other Christians,
and they rejected any theory of divinely inspired prophecy or the
revelation of religious Law, which for al-Jabarti was the core of reli-
gion. Bonaparte made the typically Western error of thinking about
Islam primarily as a doctrine, whereas for a Middle Easterner such as
al-Jabarti, it was a way of life. Further, consider the five pillars of Islam.
For most Muslims such as the Egyptian cleric, Islam lay in the five
pillars of recognizing the uniqueness of God and the prophethood of
Muhammad, praying five times a day, fasting in the month of
Ramadan, giving alms to the poor, and going on pilgrimage to Mecca
at least once in a lifetime. Bonaparte had nothing to say about any of
Playing Muslim 131

these pillars except for half of the first one (monotheism). From al-
Jabarti’s perspective, the concordance of mere doctrine said little
about how alike two religious systems might be (otherwise Judaism
and Islam could easily be conflated). All this is not to say that the
proclamation had no effect. Literate peasants read it differently than
the Cairene patrician, apparently, for he reported that in the country-
side Bonaparte’s claim to be acting on behalf of the Ottoman sultan
was believed by some. Although al-Jabarti in his writings about the
French adopted a tone of high dudgeon, in the later of them he was
covering for his years of collaboration with the French. He served on
the French Diwan or Directory, helping the French to run the
country. He functioned for three years in essence as a senator of the
French Republic of Egypt (i.e. the hybrid government of French offi-
cers overseeing governing councils consisting of Egyptian notables,
now independent of the Ottoman sultan).10
Pierre Amedée Jaubert, an Orientalist, compared Bonaparte’s
proclamation, which called on the Egyptian middle strata and little
people to welcome French rule as a liberation from the grasping
Ottoman-Egyptian beys, to the slogan used by the early revolutionar-
ies, which represented them as being on the side of the ordinary folk:
‘War to palaces! Peace to cottages!’11 He implied that Bonaparte’s
proclamation was of a similar tenor and likely to be just as successful.
Bonaparte pursued his Islam policy vigorously. General Desvernois
observed of Bonaparte in August 1798 that ‘[a]ssociating himself with
their national festivals, appearing to interest himself in whatever they
were interested in, he benevolently welcomed their shaykhs and
prayer leaders, conversed frequently with them, seeking to be
instructed in the needs of the country and the means of making it
prosper. Sometimes, even, in order to flatter their religious prejudices,
he let them entertain the expectation that the republican army was
not far from embracing the faith of Muhammad.’12 In late August, he
corresponded with the prominent Muslim cleric of Alexandria,
Sheikh al-Masiri, whom he had met on taking the city.‘You know the
particular esteem’, he wrote, ‘that I conceived for you at the first
instant I met you.’ He expressed a hope of meeting soon with ‘all the
wise and learned men of the country’ to establish ‘a uniform regime,
founded on the principles of the Quran, which are the only true ones,
and which can alone ensure the wellbeing of men’.13 These breath-
taking phrases not only enticed al-Masiri with an offer of high office
but also pledged to establish rule by shariah or Islamic canon law.
Bonaparte may not have realized how novel the offer was within the
context of Ottoman statecraft.The Ottoman Empire, despite being a
132 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

Muslim state, did not always implement Islamic canon law as it was
interpreted by the clerics. The Ottoman sultans, with their Mongol
and Turkish cultural background, inherited a Central Asian concep-
tion of the ruler as heaven-favoured legislator in his own right. The
kanun or law code of Suleiman the Magnificent, and the whims of
viceroys and governors, were often more important in Ottoman
administration than the precise rulings of the Muslim jurists. In
premodern times, Islamic law courts were only one of a number of
judicial institutions in the empire. They specialized in personal status
law (marriage, divorce, and inheritance). Businessmen had the option
of taking disputes to the qadi or Islamic-law judge, but they might
well prefer to have an Ottoman official decide the case on pragmatic
grounds instead. Ottoman officials could be disdainful of the clerics as
narrow-minded or fixated on unhelpful minutiae. Ironically,
Bonaparte was more favourable to this group than their own govern-
ment sometimes was.
Moiret wrote that ‘the politicians’ argued that speaking well of
Islam and hinting that the French might convert were necessary to
safeguard the army. They instanced the Roman emperors, who, they
said, allowed the peoples they conquered to retain their laws and reli-
gions for the most part. ‘Rather than forcing them to adopt the gods
of the capital, they placed there the gods of Athens and Carthage.’The
idea of the Muslim Allah as simply another idol, like Zeus in Athens
or Baal in Carthage, which could be added to some deities’ hall of
honour in Paris along with the gods of other vanquished peoples, fails
to reckon with both Muslim universalism and Muslim particularism.
The Egyptian chronicler al-Jabarti makes this point when he argues
that the deism of the French no more made them Muslim than the
monotheism of the Jews did. Much later, on his return from his failed
attempt to take Palestine, Bonaparte circulated an Arabic pamphlet in
which he misrepresented the campaign as a glorious victory,‘promis-
ing to the Egyptians that he would build a mosque at Cairo that
would have no equal in the entire world, and that he would adopt the
Muslim religion’.14
If the French were sometimes willing to accommodate Islam, they
hoped the ulema would take a step towards their values, as well.
Moiret describes the first festival celebrating the revolution in Egypt,
around September 1798, thus: ‘The Diwan, the principal officials of
each province, and the first magistrates of each village, were invited to
the celebration and attended a dinner given by Bonaparte. This was
the first time one saw the French colours united with Ottoman ones,
the turban associated with the bonnet of liberty, the Declaration of
Playing Muslim 133

the Rights of Man with the Koran, the circumcised and uncircum-
cised at the same banquet, with the difference that the former took
sherbets and other beverages, while the other took [wines].’15 This
passage uses the technique of parallelism to suggest that the banquet
was a site of creolization.
The hopes placed by some of the French in the ulema appear to
have been based on analogy. They were, for all their religious trap-
pings, the social stratum closest to the French intelligentsia them-
selves. Many in the officer corps had been initially schooled by local
abbés and some, like Captain Moiret, had even spent time in seminary.
To hope that the Egyptian clergy might take the one step towards
Enlightenment deism that would be necessary to make intellectuals of
them did not seem utopian in this light. Their evident interest in
printing and other engines of modernity also betrayed a practical side
to this group.
The militant partisans of the Enlightenment, on the other hand,
tended to view Islam as a crucible of superstition. They often saw
first-hand evidence of popular religious enthusiasm, involving what to
them seemed like bizarre and barbarous rites. Of course, the formally
trained Muslim clergy or ulema would have denied that such prac-
tices had anything to do with Islam. Ironically, bilingual Egyptians of
the middle strata were probably the chief interpreters to the French
of the meaning of popular religious practices, and some of their own
disgust with them was probably transmitted to the Europeans.That is,
the representation of one Egyptian social stratum by another as
indigenous practice now becomes part of the basis for a transnational
Orientalism.
An irony is that some of the more rationalist memoirists, who
thought they were condemning Islam and all religion as superstition,
actually reproduced the critique of popular religion common among
the Muslim clerics themselves. In response to soothsayers’ predictions
that the French would adopt Islam, Captain Moiret remarks that the
partisans of the Enlightenment either satirized these predictions or
became indignant. They protested that they ‘had not shaken up the
superstitions of Europe so as to adopt those of the Orient, and that
one should never speak anything but the truth to the people’.16 The
implication is that the secularists were primarily influential among the
civilian scholars and scientists that Bonaparte had brought along to
study Egypt, and their militant antireligious stance had little support
among the troops, who were often hostile to the savants. (Enlisted
men often blamed the savants for having dragged them to Egypt, and
affectionately named their donkeys ‘Savant’.)
134 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

François Bernoyer, a committed Republican in charge of design-

ing and overseeing the production of uniforms for the soldiers in
Egypt, was one such philosophically minded civilian. He described a
ceremony conducted by mystical Sufis, which he witnessed during
the celebration of the rising of the Nile. Bernoyer dismissed the Sufi
leaders as charlatans who fooled the people. He compared their dress
to that of monks, and described the prostration of disciples to the
mystic sheikh.Then he told in some horror how the sheikh spit into
the mouth of one of them, sending him into a seizure during which
he shrieked and his joints cracked.The sheikh brought the ceremony
to an end, he said, by bringing from his robe a sack of snakes and
letting them crawl all over the postulant. Bernoyer knew too much
of the particulars of what he saw to have been interpreting it solely
for himself, and it seems likely that his Egyptian translator was telling
him the significance of these various gestures. It seems likely, as well,
that his interpreter was instrumental in encouraging his disgust with
this performance. Bernoyer also reported that he witnessed the scene
of a nude old woman riding a fine mare through the streets of Cairo.
As she visited each house along the way, the residents showed her
reverence. ‘They touched her buttocks with the tips of their fingers
and brought them back to their lips.’17 In Egyptian folk Islam, bless-
ings or baraka were thought to inhere in particular trees, shrines, or
persons. The reversals of the crone (nakedness, a female on a horse)
endowed her with supernatural powers in the eyes of the people.Yet
Bernoyer’s puzzlement and disapproval were not French attitudes,
but those of the literate middle class, and were shared even by
Egyptian clerics.
The chronicler ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti also told her story, as a
‘God-intoxicated’ female mystic of the people. He shared Bernoyer’s
disdain for popular religious practices. Dervishes or Sufi mystics
routinely went naked in public in late eighteenth-century Egypt,
apparently to underline their achievement of a state transcending
conventional society. In his chronicle of the eighteenth century, the
historian al-Jabarti confirmed the old woman’s importance in Cairo
folk culture. He reported that she had been a disciple of an ecstatic
wandering mystic or dervish, named Sheikh ‘Ali al-Bakri, beginning
in the mid-1780s. He had shaved his beard and often wandered about
in the nude, though at other times he wore a long tunic and a skull-
cap. Al-Jabarti said that ‘it was rumoured that the sheikh had cast a
glance at her and “attracted” her so that she became a “holy person”’.
As her flights of mystical ecstasy and feelings of unity with the
godhead increased, he reports, the Sheikha began going about
Playing Muslim 135

unveiled and dressing in men’s clothing.The two of them attracted a

following of idle young men, vagabonds, and petty thieves, and the
latter began pilfering goods in the market.The two mystics provoked
uproar wherever they went, with throngs jostling to get a glance of
Sheikh ‘Ali. Al-Jabarti recalled, ‘The woman would climb onto a
bench or some elevated spot, utter indecencies in Arabic or Turkish,
and the people would listen to her and try to kiss her hand and so
participate in something of her barakah.’ The Sheikha herself
attracted a loyal following among women, who gave her gifts of
money and clothing. In 1786 the two mystics tried to live in Bayt al-
Qadi Lane, but attracted the baleful attention of a soldier, who
arrested them and their acolytes. He at length released Sheikh ‘Ali,
but gave his disciples a thrashing, letting them go only once they
agreed to wear clothing and to ‘sober up’. He then despatched the
Sheikha to a hospital for the insane, having her clapped in irons. She,
however, at length gained her freedom and continued her career as a
female dervish or Sheikha.‘Men and women believed in her, and she
became the centre of gatherings’ and celebrations of the birthdays
of saints.18 Twelve years later, she was still at it, to Bernoyer’s
astonishment.
The story of how the Mamluk soldier intervened against the
lower-class Sufis demonstrated that some upper-class Egyptians
shared Bernoyer’s hostility to irrational beliefs and practices. Al-
Jabarti, the highly educated son of a great merchant, made it clear
that Muslims of the class who attended the Sufi spectacle were
‘nobody’, along with the Christians. Additionally, that the Sheikha
was a lower-class woman and was clearly employing mystical reli-
gion as a means of gaining power in a highly masculine society prob-
ably offended both men. Since ordinary women in both societies
tended to be illiterate, magical ways of thinking, and the appeal to
the supernatural to redress grievances, especially appealed to them.
Muslim thinkers and French revolutionaries both stressed the value
of brotherhood or fraternity, as a way both of emphasizing equality
of rights among males and of excluding women from the public
sphere. Bernoyer had more in common with al-Jabarti and some of
his Mamluk patrons than he might have imagined, insofar as
condemnation of superstition was often rooted in gender and class
differences.
Al-Jabarti told the story of how, some months later, the supervi-
sor of the pious endowment that supported the huge al-Husayn
mosque near al-Azhar sponsored a celebration of the birthday of
Husayn, the Prophet’s grandson, and received the support of the
136 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

local French officer in charge of that district. Al-Jabarti represented

this festival as an innovation, perhaps disapproving of it because it
sounds more like a Shi‘ite than a Sunni holy day. Shi‘ite Islam espe-
cially honours the immediate family of the Prophet. In Egyptian
folk Islam, however, there was nothing out of the ordinary in such
a celebration, since it, too, seeks blessings from holy figures related
to Muhammad. Al-Jabarti said that the sponsor, Sayyid Badawi ibn
Fatih, had contracted the ‘European disease of love’ (syphilis), but
had recovered from it and so vowed to promote the festival. He paid
for the clerics to recite pious verses. Then, al-Jabarti complained,
things got out of hand when the Sufis showed up inside the mosque.
These, he said, followed medieval mystical thinkers such as the
Andalusian Muhyi al-Din Ibn al-‘Arabi and others (clerics such as
al-Jabarti typically considered them heretics and advocates of irra-
tionality). They ‘formed a circle’ and recited mystical poetry incor-
rectly. Other attendees in the streets declaimed secular poetry and
popular ditties. Some Sufis sat in a line reciting a famous ode in
praise of the Prophet, while others sat opposite them and interjected
a refrain. This practice, he said, was especially characteristic of the
Isawiya Sufi order, which combined North Africans with lower-class
Egyptians in its membership. ‘They had in their hands drums and
tambourines on which they beat loudly along with the music, and
they raised their voices.’ The Sufis began moving together and
hyperventilating.Then the Sufi banner carriers from various districts
arrived, with more celebrants, carrying lamps, candles, drums, and
pipes. Al-Jabarti objected to the din they created in the grand
mosque, these ‘groups of poor people, each of which belonged to a
different Sufi order with its own rituals that differed from the
others’. The carnival festival so invaded the mosque that many
common people just loitered in its corners, talking and telling
stories and laughing.Yet more ordinary folk arrived, from the more
distant districts of Cairo, chanting in ungrammatical Arabic what
they imagined to be holy verses. (Such Sufi recitation is called
‘remembrance’ or dhikr, but al-Jabarti clearly did not approve of it.)
He said that they accused anyone who disagreed with them of
adhering to some medieval Muslim heresy such as that of the ratio-
nalist Mu‘tazilites (who said that God must be good as humans
conceive of the good), or of being a fanatical Kharijite (a sect that
excommunicated other Muslims if it found them insufficiently
moral in their daily lives), or of being an atheist. ‘Most of them are
guildsmen and practitioners of low trades, and persons who do not
so much as have food for supper.’19 Al-Jabarti’s discourse about the
Playing Muslim 137

Sufis resembles in important ways that of Bernoyer. He disdained

their ritual movements, their hyperventilation, their fanaticism, and
their irrationality. Although he condemned them in the name of a
more sober, more literate form of Islam, while Bernoyer disdained
them in the name of Enlightenment Deism, both valued the reason-
ing of an educated man over the enthusiastic mysticism of the little
people.
Elsewhere in his chronicle, al-Jabarti told an anecdote about high
notable Yusuf Bey al-Kabir, who despised Muslim clergymen and
laughed at their belief in the supernatural. He dismissed a minor cler-
gyman, Sheikh Hasan al-Kafrawi, from his post as a religious jurist
because of his beliefs. Sheikh Hasan, despite being a cleric, had
followed a magician, who made phallic amulets and kept them in his
house. These he sold to slave-girls in the homes of the wealthy who
wished to find a means of attracting their masters’ romantic interest.
Yusuf Bey ordered the wizard put to death by drowning and confis-
cated the amulets, which he showed to the other beys.They all had a
good laugh at the superstitions of the clergy.20 Some of the attitudes
here discussed, therefore, have less to do with a supposed divide
between rationalist Europeans and superstitious Orientals than with
occupational attitudes. Hardened, pragmatic officers on both sides
often had little patience with the magical, which was about playing
on the unrealistic hopes of the little people. It would be easy to tell a
story of Jacobin French modernists appalled at traditional Egyptian
religious practices, as a sort of clash of civilizations. But in fact,
educated upper-class disapproval of folk religion was something
Bernoyer, al-Jabarti, and many Mamluk officers held in common.
Even anticlericalism and dislike for formal, high Islam was not
unknown among the worldly Ottoman-Egyptian pashas and beys.
Bernoyer’s cynicism about religion, and especially about lower-class
practices, had its analogues among elite Egyptians. The dichotomy
here was not between West and East, but between the literate and the
illiterate across cultures.
Bernoyer also ridiculed the Egyptians for their ‘fanaticism’ – ‘the
most forceful in the Orient’ – in following an Ottoman-backed
Mahdi or messianic figure who attempted to raise a millenarian
peasant revolt against the French in the Delta.21 The Mahdi, reports
another French observer, Jean-Gabriel de Niello-Sargy, claimed to be
invulnerable to French gunfire and to be able to deflect it by throw-
ing sand in the air.When he was finally defeated and killed by the very
French firearms he had disdained, his ‘followers said he had ascended
into heaven’.22 The latter memoirist does not condemn Muslim
138 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

superstition and fanaticism in so many words, allowing the stark

reportage of the Mahdist beliefs to convey this impression to his audi-
ence. General Doguereau describes the Mahdi as a man from ‘the
depths of Africa’, though it is possible that he meant by this that he
was from the far west of the continent, i.e. Morocco. He notes that his
immediate followers were ‘200 North Africans [maghrebins]’ who
happened to arrive a few days after he made his claim, and who
ranged themselves under his banner. He describes his claim as that of
being an ‘angel’ predicted in the Qur’an. He is said to have eschewed
most nourishment, but occasionally dipped his fingers in a bowl of
milk and moistened his lips with it. Doguereau describes a battle in
April or May 1799, between ‘the angel’s fanatics’ and a French unit
employing artillery. He says the Mahdists kept throwing themselves
against the French position, not stopping to reckon their casualties till
nightfall, when they discovered a thousand dead ‘and understood that
God no longer performs miracles’.23 Doguereau describes the
wounded Mahdi’s subsequent taking of refuge in the desert with
followers as a ‘bizarre scene’.
The North African messiah of the desert stands not only as an
embodiment of a violent fanaticism and credulity. He is said to orig-
inate du fond de l’Afrique, his very origins placing him territorially and
culturally even further away from Europe than Egypt. His movement
also stood proof of the disjuncture in epoch between the modern
French and the medieval Muslims. The revolutionary French appear
to have conceived themselves as moving in a different time-stream
from the Egyptians. Having superseded the age of theology, the offi-
cers of the Enlightenment and revolution know that ‘God no longer
performs miracles’. Their revolutionary time is one of superior
firearms and human ingenuity, not of supernatural marvels. It is this
superiority of the deist over the naive believer that allows on the one
hand Bonaparte’s instrumental use of Islam for his own purposes and
on the other the destruction of religiously based uprisings by clever
French tactics and by superior artillery. Ironically, of course, there is a
resemblance between Bonaparte’s insistence that he was sent on a
divine mission to Egypt, prophesied in numerous passages in the
Qur’an, and the Mahdi’s own discourse about his purposes. It is often
clear that in criticizing Islamic superstition, the more philosophically
minded were also criticizing the religious policy of the army gener-
als.That is, the critique of the Muslim Other, as Rebecca Joubin has
shown, is very often employed by eighteenth-century French thinkers
to critique the Self, which is to say reactionary tendencies among the
French themselves.24
Playing Muslim 139

For their part, the Egyptian clergy used French Enlightenment

rationalism to symbolize their own internal methodological debates
about the permissibility of deploying Greek tools of reasoning in
Muslim theology and law. Sheikh Abdullah al-Sharqawi, the president
of the Cairo Diwan, later described the French in a book on Egyptian
history. He wrote, ‘The reality of the French who came to Egypt is
that they were materialist, libertine philosophers.’ He said that
although to outward seeming they were Catholic Christians, in fact,
‘they deny the Resurrection, and the afterlife, and God’s dispatching
of prophets of messengers’. Although they did believe in only one
god, he complained, they had only arrived at this conclusion ‘by
means of argumentation’ (i.e. rather than faith).They ‘make reason the
ruler and make some among them managers of the regulations that
they legislate by using their reason, which they call “laws”’. Al-
Sharqawi here underlines the difference between the revealed Law
(shariah) and the civil laws (al-ahkam) promulgated by sultans and
governors. Al-Sharqawi maintained that the French substituted civil
law for the sacred. They hold, he alleged, that God’s envoys, such as
Muhammad, Jesus, and Moses, ‘were a group of sages, and that the
codes of religious law attributed to them are indirect expressions of
civil law that they legislated by virtue of their reason, which was
appropriate to their contemporaries’.25
Al-Sharqawi engaged in his own forms of creolization here, amal-
gamating French deism to ancient Greek philosophy, over the place of
which in Muslim learning medieval clerics had waged epochal battles.
The Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid had established a translation
institute in Baghdad that rendered scientific and philosophical works
of the Hellenistic world into Arabic. Other scholars brought into
Arabic Persian and Sanskrit learning. Early Muslim civilization was
heir to all the great preceding civilizations of the Hellenistic world,
Persia, and India. A few Muslim thinkers, such as Avicenna (Ibn Sina)
and Averröes (Ibn Rushd), so closely followed Greek sages such as
Aristotle that they adopted into their theologies ideas that were at
odds with mainstream Islam. Thus, they asserted the eternity of the
world, while most Muslim theologians, like their Christian and Jewish
colleagues, believed in the creation story in Genesis. Averröes argued
that the prophets were actually philosophers who derived their teach-
ings from reason, but who then turned around and expressed their
conclusions with symbols such as heaven and hell, since that is what
the common people would accept. Orthodox Muslim clerics viewed
this theory as implying that there actually is no such thing as revela-
tion or prophecy, and they wrote angry attempts at refuting the works
140 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

of the Muslim philosophers. There were episodes of book burning

and persecution.26
Greek learning was brought into Islam so thoroughly in the early
years that an engagement with it continued to be common among
most theologians, even if they rejected some of the metaphysical
doctrines associated with it. Particularly in the East, in Iran and India,
Greek-inspired Islamic philosophy, mixed with theology and mysti-
cism, remained a vital tradition into the nineteenth century. In the
eighteenth century, the study of Greek-inspired Islamic philosophy
became a vogue among some scholars at al-Azhar Seminary, in part
under the influence of visiting Indian Muslims. This group included
Hasan al-Jabarti, the father of the chronicler ‘Abd al-Rahman al-
Jabarti. They taught philosophy (al-hikmah) in the evenings, outside
the regular curriculum of al-Azhar, and wrote commentaries on
Aristotle’s Categories, on Porphyry’s Neoplatonic version of the same
work, and on a scholastic Muslim encyclopaedia of philosophy, The
Guidance of Wisdom. Most al-Azhar clerics were more wedded to the
study of the sayings and doings of the Prophet Muhammad or other
strictly Islamic subjects, and many viewed the study of Graeco-Islamic
philosophy with deep suspicion.27 Al-Sharqawi was not only reacting
against the actual Deism of the French, he was also painting them as
having ideas similar to those of the philosophers in Islamic history.
The controversy over philosophy and Greek reason had been revived
among scholastics in eighteenth-century Egypt well before the
Europeans invaded.The chronicler al-Jabarti, when he wrote his own
father’s biography, was clearly responding to charges of unorthodoxy,
and defended him strongly as a ‘philosopher’. Al-Sharqawi had
presumably been among those who viewed the study of philosophy
dimly.That is, he was lashing out both at French Deism and at ratio-
nalist approaches to metaphysics among his own colleagues, some of
whom proved more genuinely interested in French science and
culture than he. Ironically, despite his later critique of French rule, al-
Sharqawi served as the president of the Diwan or Directory of native
Egyptians established by Bonaparte, met regularly with the latter to
discuss policy, and functioned for all the world like an Egyptian
Talleyrand (the latter also later proved a critic of Bonaparte). His
quibbles over the revival of Greek rationalism in some ways served as
a screen to hide the extent of his collaboration and creolization in
1798–1801.
Playing Muslim 141

Conclusion
Cultural creolization in the French Republic of Egypt was not of a
dialectical form, whereby culture A and culture B intermingled to
produce culture C. Instead, creolization was a creative movement
deployed by individuals for the purposes of bridging authority struc-
tures (as when Bonaparte intimated that he was a proto-Muslim ‘great
Sultan’ in order to attract Egyptians’ loyalties) or with the object of
subverting them (as when al-Sharqawi rejected Enlightenment Deism
as a mere recrudescence of heretical Greek philosophy). Bonaparte
deeply feared being tagged with the essentialist tropes that Muslim
thinkers had developed to characterize European aggression, espe-
cially that of the Crusades. His rhetorical strategy was to seek a creole
common ground between revolutionary ideology and classical Islam,
so as to obviate difference and naturalize the invaders as a form of
Self. His strategy was reinvented in other ways by a cloud of European
administrators in Afro-Asia during the period of imperial expansion
from 1780, as when Lionel Place took on the role of the south Indian
minor king in presiding over the Jagir outside Madras. Nor would al-
Jabarti and al-Sharqawi be the only local notables to serve at the same
time as collaborators with a colonial presence and as profound critics
of its social and cultural practices. Selective creolization, in one sphere
of life, appeared to allow or perhaps even enable claims of essential
identity in another. Elsewhere, we see a process of convergence,
whereby literate, middle strata condemnations of popular religious
practices on the part of both savants and ulema are virtually indistin-
guishable. In Muslim cultures in particular, the long history of inter-
action with European texts allowed eighteenth-century thinkers to
refight culture wars, as with the conflict between occasionalism and
rationalism, which was fought out centuries earlier on the terrain of
Athens and Baghdad, but now was refought on that of Paris and
Cairo. The hard-nosed realism of some Ottoman-Egyptian adminis-
trators and the anti-Sufi, anti-superstition rationalism of some
reformist clergymen approximated some of the rationalist and even
clerical attitudes common in Enlightentment France. Such home-
grown rationalists, or at least pragmatic realists, were a minority but
not insignificant strand of eighteenth-century Egyptian culture, possi-
bly influenced by trends in Istanbul that grew out of the impact of
printing and other changing technology.
Three major attitudes to Islam emerge in the memoirs of the
French officers and civilians on the invasion force.The first, associated
142 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

with Bonaparte and the interests of the army, was pragmatic, instru-
mental, and even flattering, drawing upon a kind of Romantic view
of the religion. Islam was praised, intimations were given out that the
deist French Republicans were anyway crypto-Muslims, and that they
might undergo a full conversion with time. A second common atti-
tude, associated with the savants and their supporters, depicted Islam
as just another religion and assumed that all religions consisted of a
kind of fraud and chicanery made possible by the ignorance and
superstition of people. A third point of view remained generally crit-
ical of Islam, but was willing to acknowledge virtues in Arab-Muslim
civilization and in its representatives, the ulema, whom Bonaparte
promoted as indigenous leaders. These three ways of thinking some-
times overlapped, of course, and all had roots in eighteenth-century
French thinking on the Orient. But the first two often resulted in
antithetical policy prescriptions in French Egypt, and were in severe
conflict with one another.
The Corsican general’s conceit of being an Enlightenment proto-
Muslim is in part a purely instrumental piece of propaganda. But to
say that it was instrumental is only to identify a motive.The substance
of the proclamations he issued in this regard derived from his new
social context as ruler of a Muslim Arab realm. He was shaped by that
context just as he attempted to shape it. Just as genre in literature is a
set of audience expectations, so forms of creolization play to audience
expectations in Self and Other, even as they subvert simple binary
oppositions.
One clear sign of creolization in the French Republic of Egypt was
that it became a site of controversy and denial when the episode was
over. Bonaparte and his partisans were later at pains to deny that he
had become a Muslim in Egypt, while al-Jabarti and other ulema
wrote virulent denunciations of the French after the Ottoman
restoration to clear themselves of charges of collaboration. The
varying cultural strategies used by the French and the Egyptians to
make sense of their encounter produced more irony than binaries.
Bonaparte played at being ‘Muslim’, and offered to create the first
Islamic republic, but no one was more brutal in crushing the ulema
when they opposed him. In sometimes snubbing and marginalizing
them, Bonaparte unwittingly reproduced the social control tech-
niques common among Ottoman and Ottoman-Egyptian lay elites.
The French showed disdain for the pretensions of the Mahdi of
Damanhour, but Bonaparte himself adopted the cosmic diction of the
Mahdi in his own proclamations after the Cairo Revolt, drawing from
al-Jabarti the same sort of rationalist disgust as Desvernois displayed
Playing Muslim 143

towards the desert messiah who opposed the French. Bernoyer

thought his litany of Muslim acts of fanaticism a condemnation of
that and of all religion, but many of his more trenchant critiques were
echoed by the great al-Azhar cleric ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti. The
French savants, with their strong sense of division between the
medieval and the modern, appear to have been unaware that their
discourse helped to revive controversies at al-Azhar about the permis-
sibility of appealing to the tools of Greek rationalism, such as the
syllogism and Aristotelian premises. Whether they played at each
adopting the role of the other, or pretended to be utterly different,
both mimesis and difference locked them in an unwilling embrace.
8
Imperial Revolutions and Global
Repercussions: South Asia and the
World, c.1750–1850

Robert Travers

Imperial revolutions and early modern state formation in South

Asia
In Eric Hobsbawm’s rendering of the Age of Revolution (first published
in 1962),‘the world revolution spread outward from the double crater
of England and France’.The dual revolution that underlay this global
eruption comprised the French political revolution and the British
industrial revolution, and these together launched the lava-streams of
European imperialism. In this model, Europe was situated broadly
speaking on the supply side of modernity, and India (as part of the
non-West) on the demand side. ‘Before the merchants, the steam-
engines, the ships and the guns of the West – and before its ideas – the
age old-civilizations and empires of the world capitulated and
collapsed.’1
Hobsbawm’s impressively sweeping and vigorous narrative
contained certain counter-currents to the prevailing message of
European agency and domination. His account of British industrial-
ization, for example, emphasized not only the ‘capitalist conditions’ of
internal regimes of property, but also the economic conjuncture
between ‘the cotton industry, and colonial expansion’.The growth of
the British cotton industry, in this view, was a ‘by-product of overseas
trade, which produced its raw material, and the Indian cotton goods’,
which spurred domestic emulation and import substitution.2
Hobsbawm was also conscious that the grounds of modern history
were rapidly shifting in a new age of twentieth-century revolutions,
which he described as a ‘world-wide revolt against the west’. It was
144
Imperial Revolutions and Global Repercussions 145

now evident, he argued, that the European ‘domination of the entire

world’ in the four centuries of ‘the age of Vasco da Gama’ was
‘complete’ but also ‘temporary’.3 Nonetheless, even the dialectical
erosion of European domination in the twentieth century confirmed
the fundamentally European origins of modernity. It was, after all, the
dual revolution of Europe that eventually provided ‘the non-
European world with the conditions and equipment for its eventual
counter-attack’.4
Hobsbawm’s Marxist inflected account cannot be taken as repre-
sentative of the state of world history in the 1960s, but its emphasis
on the exclusively European motors of modernity did reflect a
broader inheritance from the grand narratives of the age of European
empires in the nineteenth century. Now, forty years later, his notion
of four centuries of complete European ‘domination of the entire
world’ appears to have been conjured up by a number of historical
sleights of hand.
To consider his references to India, for example, Hobsbawm
compressed the long drawn out, hundred-year, British conquest of the
Indian subcontinent into the conquest of Bengal in the 1750s, ‘a step
that would lead them in our period to become ruler and administra-
tors of all India’.5 He tended to assume a vast technological and mili-
tary superiority for the British as far back as the mid-eighteenth
century, even though, as David Washbrook has recently written, British
conquerors ‘sailed in wooden ships and carried muzzle-loading muskets
which were frequently fired back at them’.6 Hobsbawm’s narrative co-
opted any signs of ‘Westernization’ in India into his model of the dual
European revolution. Thus, he described the Bengali reformer
Rammohan Roy as an Indian-style French revolutionary, ignoring
Roy’s intellectual training in Indo-Persian and Sanskritic forms of
scholarship.7 And by a trick of temporal displacement, Hobsbawm
described popular resistance to European imperialism, for example the
Indian mutiny/rebellion of 1857, as medieval or ‘Homeric’ if it did not
conform to a ‘Western’ style of revolutionary nationalism.8
South Asia plays a different role in C. A. Bayly’s recent account of
the age of revolutions in his Birth of the Modern World. Bayly is
concerned to explore the ‘interconnectedness and interdependence of
political and social changes across the world well before the supposed
onset of the contemporary phase of globalization’, and to frame this
interconnectedness as polycentric rather than Eurocentric. Bayly also
wants to blur the lines between the early modern and the modern; in
this view, modern states that emerged from the crises of the age of
revolutions were always deeply intertwined with older forms of
146 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

power and order, so that ‘passages to modernity’ overlaid rather than

simply erased ‘old regimes’.9
According to Bayly, the first cracks in the old regimes of a
connected early modern world appeared not in Europe but ‘in the
Middle East and South Asia’, in the weakening frames of the great
Islamic empires of the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Mughals. But
these cracks were less the result of enfeebled Oriental tradition than
of processes of commercialization, militarization, and the crystalliza-
tion of new social forms that were at least comparable, though not
identical, to similar trajectories in Europe. The confluence of
commercialization, social crisis, and military conflict in Asian land
empires as well as in European sea-borne empires gave the age of
revolutions its global character, as the force of revolutionary events
‘ricocheted around the globe’.10
Thus, Bayly pushes the age of ‘converging revolutions’ back from
1776 or 1789 to the decline of the Safavids and the Mughals in the
late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In South Asia, the
invasion and plunder of the Mughal imperial heartlands by the
Persian warrior-prince Nadir Shah in 1738–9 marked a point of no
return for the emperors in Delhi; further invasions followed from
Afghans in the north-west, and Marathas from the south-west.11
These shocks to the system of the Mughal empire in turn sparked a
further intensification of intra-European competition for trade, land
and national glory in the Indian Ocean. Armed companies of
European traders, powerful at sea but chafing against military weak-
ness on land, made strategic alliances with warring Indian states, using
their impressive cash resources to recruit land-armies, and forcibly
subordinating fertile and commercialized regions such as Bengal to
the authority of extensive commercial bureaucracies. By invading and
manipulating indigenous systems of trade, finance, and state forma-
tion, the British defeated French pretensions to a stronger foothold in
South Asia, laying the initial groundwork for a new style of territorial
imperialism in the East.12
Following Bayly, therefore, and adapting Jeremy Adelman’s notion
of ‘imperial revolutions’ from the Atlantic world, we might argue that
there were two extended moments of imperial revolution in South
Asia, neither of them explicable solely in terms of ‘the rise of
Europe’.13 The first, dating perhaps from the death of the Emperor
Aurangzeb in 1707, and the subsequent factionalism in the Mughal
court, combined with provincial rebellions and external invasions, led
to a broad process of political decentralization and regional state
formation.At the same time, however, Mughal bureaucratic, fiscal, and
Imperial Revolutions and Global Repercussions 147

military techniques, as well as the overarching prestige of Mughal

imperial authority, continued to influence regional power-brokers.
The second phase of imperial revolution was predicated on this earlier
moment of competitive regional state formation: it followed from
Anglo-French conflict in southern India in the 1740s and 1750s,
proceeded through the English East India Company’s conquest of
Bengal in the 1750s and 1760s, and reached its culmination in the
extensive ‘paramountcy’ claimed by the British Empire in India by the
1820s. Even then, however, the British Empire, acting through the
East India Company, continued to acknowledge at least what Sudipta
Sen has called ‘the nominal regality’ of the erstwhile Mughals.14
In the ‘ricochet’ effect described by Bayly, British expansion in
India was connected not just to imperial crises and regional conflicts
within South Asia, but also to the global war between Britain and
post-revolutionary France. Fears of the French threat to India were
used in the 1790s to justify a new assault on hostile Indian rulers such
as Tipu Sultan of Mysore.15 Tipu, the Maratha confederacy, and later
Ranjit Singh of the Punjab showed that Indian regional states were
not simply passive victims of European expansionism.They employed
new military technologies and styles of rule, and developed more
centralized systems of taxation and debt-financing to pay for growing
armies. Nonetheless, over the long term such relatively confined terri-
torial states were gradually tamed by the sheer scale of British impe-
rialism, which drew on a unique combination of maritime and
territorial strength.16
Contemporary observers often remarked on the ‘revolutionary’
character of these imperial transformations. By the early 1760s, British
East India Company officials were writing memoirs about the ‘revo-
lution’ in Bengal, as the Company propped up, then overturned a
succession of provincial governors (nawabs), gradually appropriating
the trappings of Mughal imperial sovereignty for itself.17 The great
parliamentarian Edmund Burke, reflecting on the decline of the
Mughal Empire, referred to the ‘stupendous revolutions that have
happened in our age of wonders’; this was in 1783, six years before
the revolution in France.18 Similarly, Indian scholar-administrators
trained in the Persianate idioms of Mughal and post-Mughal gover-
nance often used the Arabic/Persian term inqilab, implying a revolu-
tion in the literal sense of overturning, to describe the subversion of
Mughal authority by regional rebels, regional pro-consuls and
European traders.19 The rise of European traders was especially bewil-
dering to many of these Indian authors, given common assumptions
about the relatively lowly political status of merchants, and also the
148 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

difficulty of comprehending the distant politics of European

commerce and state formation.20
Many Indian scholars and scribes experienced the imperial revolu-
tions of eighteenth-century South Asia as a crisis that seemed to
disturb established moral and political communities. A high official of
the Mughal successor state of Arcot in south-eastern India, writing in
the 1780s, looked back in amazement to the great buildings erected
by earlier Indian rulers; he described his own era, when the nawabs of
Arcot were reduced to virtual pensioners of the English, as ‘days of
dilapidation and ruin’ in which ‘construction of a building of equal
beauty is beyond human power’.21 Another Persian history, written
also in the 1780s but by a member of the Mughal gentry from Bihar
in the north-east, took a similarly melancholic view of his own age:
‘the earth’, he wrote, ‘is totally overwhelmed by an everlasting dark-
ness’.22 The author, Ghulam Husain Khan Tabataba’i Husaini, diag-
nosed a crisis with deep roots in a Mughal imperial service corrupted
by greed, bribery, and the leasing out of offices to unqualified officials.
But he also laid substantial blame on the alien style of rule introduced
by foreign merchants, on their habits of commercial monopoly, on
their ignorance of local manners and customs, and on ‘the aversion
which the English openly show for the company of natives’.23
Perhaps surprisingly, such fears about traditional imperial virtues
trampled by a potent modern mixture of commerce and conquest
were also shared by many British observers of the revolutions in
South Asia. The East India Company’s military adventurism led to
repeated financial crises and prolonged conflicts with the British state
over the rights to new territorial revenues. Meanwhile, Asian
conquests and massive standing armies challenged British views of
their own empire as an empire of liberty by contrast with the suppos-
edly more tyrannical empires of Spain or Portugal.24 Edmund Burke,
for example, one of the sharpest British observers of the South Asian
revolutions, shared with some of the dispossessed Mughal gentry a
powerful sense that British mercantile conquerors had overturned
established norms and hierarchies through a combination of greed
and ignorance, laying low the old princes and landlords in favour of a
rampant British and Indian monied interest. He feared the revolu-
tionary implications for Britain itself of this new accretion of military
and monetary power, insidiously seeping back into the landed inter-
est in Britain, and corrupting its wives and daughters and with them
its virtue.25 After 1789, Burke suggested that Indianism and
Jacobinism were two sides of the same devalued coin of modern spec-
ulative revolutions.26
Imperial Revolutions and Global Repercussions 149

Even the East India Company’s own high officials were concerned
at the corrupting effects of their rule in South Asia.Warren Hastings,
Burke’s great rival and Governor of Bengal from 1772 to 1785,
bemoaned the ‘Exclusion of old and experienced Muttasseddies
[revenue officials] from Employment and Confidence, and the trust
reposed in Servants of the English gentlemen’.27 Hastings framed
many of his state-building measures as efforts to restore the glory days
of an earlier period of Mughal imperial order. Invoking an ‘ancient
constitution’ of empire in India in urgent need of repair, Hastings and
others adapted the Mughal discourse of imperial corruption to their
own ideological advantage.28
Thus, imperial revolutions led to a period of intense ideological
instability, as established elites came to terms with new circumstances,
and the new British conquerors cast around desperately for concep-
tual frames to understand their novel form of empire. By the 1790s,
however, in the context of the wars with revolutionary France, a more
confident and unified British imperialism in India was announcing
itself as a sharp break from an imagined history of ‘Asiatic despotism’.
Embracing conquest as a vehicle for a new style of enlightened, regu-
lated, and bureaucratic despotism, symbolized by the compilation,
publication, and translation of elaborate codes of administrative law,
the British Empire in India settled into a long complacency rooted in
an increasingly racialized doctrine of corruption.29 British imperial
officials, once suspected as rapacious speculators, were now apparently
rendered uncorrupt by the combined effects of rule-books, breeding,
and the colour of their skin. At the same time, Indian officials were
more rigorously excluded from high office in directly ruled territo-
ries.30 Hardening racial distinctions were also linked to constructions
of religious difference as a form of ethnicity, as some British oriental-
ist scholarship valorized a newly discovered ancient Hindu civilization
(with deep linguistic connections to ancient civilization in Europe),
while deploring the alleged effects of Islamic conquests.31
Meanwhile, published codes of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Islamic’ law may have
encouraged more unified, classicized conceptions of religious practice
as a form of social identity.32
The concept of imperial revolutions may help to situate South Asia
within a broader global complex of revolution and world crisis in the
long eighteenth century.Yet, for historians of South Asia, the imperial
frame delineated by ‘Mughal decline’ or ‘the rise of the British’ has
also come to seem unnecessarily confining and inadequate. Some
historians of the late Mughal Empire have questioned the idea of a
sudden decline in a centralized imperial bureaucracy leading to a
150 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

broader social and economic malaise; they have argued instead that
Mughal authority had always rested on a complex system of alliance-
forming and alliance breaking with regional power-holders.33
Similarly, a revisionist school of colonial historians questioned the idea
of a colonial ‘revolution’ in governance and social relations, empha-
sizing the limited and cautious character of early colonial rule, and its
reliance on various forms of indigenous ‘agency’. In a landmark essay
from 1973, Eric Stokes suggested that the first century of British rule
was an era of social ‘stagnation’ rather than social ‘revolution’, marked
less by the onset of ‘modernization’ than by the colonial exploitation
of pre-existing social forms.34
Revisionism in colonial Indian history also spawned counter-revi-
sionism. As revisionists developed an argument for certain lines of
continuity across the precolonial/colonial divide, they were criticized
for underestimating the dramatic ruptures of colonial invasions, the
unprecedented coercive force exercised by colonial armies, and the
social and cultural dislocations that followed from colonial strategies of
extraction and domination.35 The dust has not yet settled on argu-
ments about continuity or change, collaboration or resistance, agency
or domination. Yet beneath the clouds of polemic, historical under-
standings of the ‘early modern’ period in South Asia have been trans-
formed. In particular, the concept of state formation has gradually
broadened out beyond what Frank Perlin (a pioneer in the new history
of state formation) called ‘functionalist’ or ‘regime-centred’ accounts
focused on relatively static systems of official hierarchies, to consider
the wider contexts and infrastructures in which power operated.36
New work on state formation has revealed forms of political
culture that can be neither separated from, nor entirely subsumed
within, narratives of the rise and fall of empires. Historians are increas-
ingly pushing beyond, or between the lines of, the imperial archives
of Persian or English administrative records, exploring the connected
articulation of historical memory, political authority, and social groups
within different regions and vernacular languages.37 One of the
effects of this work has been to challenge the generalizations of
‘Indian’ history with the varied patterns of state-making in the diverse
regions of the subcontinent. Subrahmanyam writes of a ‘panorama’ of
state forms taking shape in the ‘penumbral regions’ of eighteenth-
century South India, with varied strategies of expansionism and
survival depending on local political ecologies, and also on the chang-
ing commercial relations between agrarian hinterlands and coastal
regions.38 Similarly, Frank Perlin notes the ‘paradoxically decentral-
ized’ forms of political centralization in the western Deccan region,
Imperial Revolutions and Global Repercussions 151

where great royal courts, little kings, noble households, and village
level entrepreneurs interacted in sometimes symbiotic, sometimes
contradictory ways.39 Historians are also coming to grips with the
varied configurations of colonialism itself, which struck different
regions at different historical moments, and with widely differing
institutional configurations.
If this work challenges us to think beyond the homogenizing
effects of old imperial narratives, it is also crystallizing certain new
themes that suggest a varied but also interconnected set of transfor-
mations. These include: monetization as a technology of both
commerce and sovereignty; the growing political prominence of
commercial and banking groups; the role of highly mobile cadres of
scribal experts in spreading administrative technologies and termi-
nologies; and the importance of different types of historical narratives
in authenticating claims to rights, perquisites, and political authority.
Prominent myths, residues of colonial ‘orientalist’ scholarship, such as
the unchanging rigidity of caste, or the absence of any ‘historical’
forms of knowledge in precolonial South Asia, or the absence of
corporate or intermediary groups intervening between all-powerful
rulers and peasants, are now being comprehensively exploded.40
This work, apart from revealing layers and textures of power too
often absent from older political histories, also opens up exciting
possibilities for rethinking the complex effects of the imperial revolu-
tions of the eighteenth century. For example, ideas of continuity and
change need to be studied as historical categories, and not simply as
historiographical or analytical ones. A regime of colonial conquest
posed the issue of continuity and change in especially urgent ways for
both rulers and ruled, with substantial repercussions for understand-
ings of space, time, and the relationship between past and present.41
Colonial conquest was often followed by a rash of documentary
collections, as old forms of knowledge were gathered up and sifted
within new forms of archive. Often this had the effect of freezing a
particularly favoured image of, for example, land tenures, village
communities, or legal norms. Prachi Deshpande has shown how
historical narratives were produced by prominent Maratha lineages in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to record military valour or
to legitimize titles to honour and land. These were then read in the
nineteenth century by colonial officials and an emerging Marathi
middle class to construct ‘Maratha’ as a social category referring to a
specific (Hindu) ‘people’ in a particular place.42 In a different yet
related process studied by Norbert Peabody, Rajput kingship was
reinvented by British overlords and their local allies, who created
152 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

more fixed, territorially bounded entities in a system of indirect

‘empire by treaty’; previously, the perquisites of sovereignty had been
shared between a layered complex of royal and sacral authorities. At
the same time, antiquarian officials such as James Todd endowed the
region and its reinvented kingdoms with a colourful feudal and
chivalric past.43
Frank Perlin has argued that colonial conquests in the western
Deccan led to an ‘unprecedented centralization of monetary produc-
tion and control’, the displacement of rural elites, a decrease in rural
employment, a narrower delimitation of property right, and a conse-
quent flattening out of the ‘intermediary ground’ of noble households
and communal institutions that characterized the precolonial order –
leading exactly to the ‘climate of Asiatic despotism’ that colonial histo-
ries tended to read back into a cruel Asiatic past.44 This argument
finds echoes in other versions of a ‘neo-traditionalization’ thesis in
early colonial India, in which colonial authority is seen to have first
exploited the old order political economy and then gradually, in the
context of economic depression and an emerging global division of
labour in the early nineteenth century, pressed it into new but suppos-
edly ‘traditional’ shapes.45
One of the most important historiographical effects of this new
work on early modern and colonial state formation is to open up
points of connection and comparison between different forms of a
global early modernity. In this way, global history can mean some-
thing more than imperial history writ large, and the delineation of a
world crisis in the age of revolutions can extend beyond the contrast-
ing fortunes of vast empires. Frank Perlin, again, has compared the
growing power of English and Dutch merchants over textile produc-
ers in Eastern Europe to similar processes of mercantile centralization
and control of artisanal labour within South Asia.46 Jon E. Wilson,
meanwhile, has suggested that one of the most important effects of
colonial governance in South Asia was to draw sharper lines between
‘state’ and ‘society’, with the state constituted by abstract bureaucratic
categories, and with the realm of the social taken up as a distinct space
for Indian ‘social reformers’ in the emerging print culture of early
nineteenth-century Bengal. He finds points of comparisons here with
other self-consciously new and ‘modern’ kinds of state-building proj-
ects in post-revolutionary France and nineteenth-century Germany.
As Wilson argues, such comparisons will not efface the distinctive
valences of a colonial regime, but enable more closely specified
accounts of what these were.47
Imperial Revolutions and Global Repercussions 153

Imperial repercussions: South Asia and the world of empires

While the modern historiography of South Asia continues to be
largely framed by the question of the colonial impact on the Indian
subcontinent, the recent revival of interest in global history has also
opened up a set of new questions about the wider repercussions or
side-effects of major events such as the transition to colonialism in
South Asia. Recent historiography has emphasized that South Asia
was already entangled with multiple forms of ‘connected history’ –
oceanic, imperial, commercial, religious, linguistic, artistic – well
before the acceleration of European imperialism in the age of revolu-
tions.48 Yet between 1750 and 1850 South Asia was forcibly wrestled
into a new form of global connection forged by the modern British
Empire. The rise of British India had wide repercussions for the
British state and society in an era of global war and industrialization.
From the mid-eighteenth century, Indian territories became not
simply a ‘bridgehead’ to a new form of territorial empire in South
Asia, but also a jumping off point for a new global imperialism in the
Indian and Pacific Oceans. At the same time, the British conquest of
India generated reactions from other European empires, notably the
French and the Russians, and from other Asian empires, notably the
Chinese, in an era of heightened competition over land and trade.This
section attempts to sketch in some of these global repercussions of the
rise of British India in the wider world of empires.
John Maynard Keynes, who began his career as an economist by
studying the fluctuating fortunes of the Indian rupee, had a strong
sense of the global and imperial networks supporting modern British
institutions. Keynes dated the modern age to the ‘accumulation of
capital that began in the sixteenth century’, which in turn followed
from ‘the treasure of gold and silver which Spain brought from the
New World into the Old’. He traced Britain’s foreign investments to
the ‘treasure which Drake stole from Spain in 1580’, of which Queen
Elizabeth invested £40,000 in the Levant Company; ‘out of the
profits of the Levant Company’, he continued, ‘the East India
Company was founded; and the profits of this great enterprise were
the foundation of England’s subsequent foreign investment’. Keynes
further calculated that ‘£40,000 accumulating at 3% compound inter-
est’ approximated nearly to the actual volume of England’s foreign
investments in 1930, so that every pound that Drake brought home
had become £100,000 pounds.49
Keynes’s lesson on the amazing ‘power of compound interest’ subtly
discounted the amazing power of empire, but at the same time it
154 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

suggested the centrality of overseas commerce, especially in Asia, to

Britain’s subsequent financial strength. Modern economic historians of
Britain have in general been much more circumspect about the role of
Asian commerce in Britain’s economic performance. If an older
Marxist tradition saw intimate connections between industry and
empire, many economic historians since the 1960s have argued for the
essentially internal, microeconomic processes underpinning the indus-
trial revolution. Drawing on conceptions of ‘Smithian growth’ or ‘insti-
tutionalist’ economic theory, the new economic history focused
attention on regimes of private property and internal capital accumu-
lation, or on proto-industrialization and urbanization in creating
dynamic clusters of expertise and economic organization.50
More recently, more ‘externalist’ explanations of British economic
change, emphasizing the critical role of global conjunctures, have
come back into vogue.51 A new emphasis on the role of consumption
has highlighted the importance of tropical, colonial products in
generating new forms of mass market.52 Attention has shifted back
from industrial take-off in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, to the longer-term growth of commercial profit linked to
the ‘financial revolution’ of the late seventeenth century; again, this
tends to re-emphasize the role of colonial trades, and of the fiscal-
military state in protecting Britain’s terms of trade.53
In such arguments, the Atlantic empire tends to loom larger than
the Asian sphere, given that Britain’s trade with Asia, even as it grew
in importance across the eighteenth century, remained much smaller
than the Atlantic trades.54 So, for example, Patrick O’Brien empha-
sizes the demand of fast-growing colonial markets for British manu-
factures in North America and the Caribbean, while Kenneth
Pomeranz highlights the role of Atlantic slave colonies as a novel kind
of dependent periphery that enabled some European economies to
overcome Malthusian resource constraints.55
Yet if Asian trades were relatively small in the eighteenth century,
they were also intertwined and symbiotic with the larger pattern of
British commercial relations.56 Indian cotton-piece goods stimulated
emulation and import substitution in Britain, and helped to pay for
slaves in Africa. China tea, paid for in large part by the profits of
Indian opium exports, fed the demand for West Indian sugar.57 In
both the Netherlands and Britain, as Pomeranz has reiterated, the risks
and distance involved in Asian trade catalysed institutional innovation,
in the creation of permanent joint stock corporations, in which
ownership was separated from management, and protection costs
were internalized.58 The English East India Company was one of the
Imperial Revolutions and Global Repercussions 155

major pillars of the London stock market, and also helped to fund the
growth of the British national debt and fiscal-military state through
forced loans and customs revenues.Thus, when military adventurism
in India led the Company close to bankruptcy in 1772 and 1783,
ministers agreed that bailing out Company investors was necessary to
maintaining national credit.59
In part, the Asian colonial trades may now seem more important to
the history of British state formation because the transformations in
the British economy and society in the age of revolutions appear less
sudden and dramatic than they once did.The idea of a multisectoral,
incremental ‘industrial evolution’ has encouraged a more flexible and
multifaceted causal analysis. Moreover, as in Boyd Hilton’s recent
magisterial account, British historians are tending now to emphasize
the economic and political uncertainties and instabilities attending the
early industrial age. Hilton highlights the widespread contemporary
sense that the endurance of the British state, facing down related
threats of Malthusian overpopulation and revolutionary sentiment,
was by no means assured.60 Thus, apparently marginal gains from
foreign trade and investment may seem to attain a new significance.
Javier Cuenca Esteban’s detailed reconstruction of British national
finances during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars suggests that
remissions of funds from India may have been crucial in sustaining
national credit at a moment of severe strain.61 Similarly, Huw Bowen’s
reconstruction of the tentacular presence of the East India Company
in the early nineteenth-century British economy, as exporter as well
as importer, and as a presence in the provinces as much as in London,
also highlights the added value for Britain of the Indian empire.62
Meanwhile, if Asian trades were still a comparatively small element in
Britain’s imperial trading system in the early nineteenth century, they
would become increasingly important later on. By the later nine-
teenth century, India’s export surplus, to China in particular, was vital
in maintaining industrial Britain’s own balance of payments.63
The role of British India as a political and social, rather than only
financial, outwork of the British state in the age of revolutions may also
need rethinking. Again, Hilton’s picture of a landed and commercial
oligarchy looking nervously down at a fast expanding population of
‘mad, bad and dangerous people’ raises the question of the role of the
colonies in sustaining the domestic order.The number of poor Britons
serving in the rank and file of British forces in India was quite small –
less than 30,000 in 1800 – but given their extremely high mortality
(conventionally estimated at 25 per cent per annum in the late eigh-
teenth century), this flow of poor recruits may have represented a signif-
156 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

icant vent for an overstretched domestic population.64 For the officer

classes, service in the Indian armies or civil service represented a reason-
able fall-back position, especially after demobilization at the end of the
Napoleonic Wars. As a source of power and jobs for Scottish and Irish
landowners, merchants, and soldiers, British India also helped to inte-
grate the composite kingdom into a more cohesive national whole.65
Moreover, at moments of crisis in British national politics, Indian
affairs played a crucial and still understudied role. In an era of expen-
sive military conquests, the new empire in India often appeared as a
source of financial and political turbulence in Britain, but it also
provided a form of imperial compensation for the loss of North
American colonies. The particular institutional formation of British
India, in which the national state annexed but also propped up the
semi-detached empire of the East India Company, enabled ministers
to garner the glory of the new empire, while filtering out the less
desirable ‘blowback’. For example, in the immediate aftermath of the
American war, the king’s chosen minister, William Pitt the Younger,
restabilized royal and ministerial authority in part through a carefully
calibrated alliance with the East India Company. Pitt’s India Act of
1784, reforming alleged abuses in India, was an important part of his
self-presentation as an uncorrupted man of virtue. At the same time,
the nervous and debt-ridden Company was allowed to retain a
measure of autonomy and control over its patronage, and backed Pitt
in the crucial 1784 elections.66
The alliance between nation-state and Company state after 1784
was remarkably stable through the following decades given the
context of revolutionary upheaval and global war. From the ministe-
rial point of view, this mode of informal or semi-formal empire
allowed a measure of control over vital strategic and commercial
interests, while at the same time limiting national liabilities. The
Company funded most of British military and naval forces in Asia, the
effects of imperial militarism and patronage were held at arm’s length
from the domestic constitution, and the Company or its governors
remained useful scapegoats in the event of setbacks in India, such as
Richard Wellesley’s financial mismanagement, or Lord Auckland’s
disastrous invasion of Afghanistan in 1838. Meanwhile, the very
gradual dismantling of the Company’s commercial monopoly
between 1793 and 1833, and the opening of India to evangelical
missions, enabled ministers to quench domestic political pressures
with a steady drip of colonial reforms.67
Meanwhile, the British-Indian ‘garrison state’ was an important
venue and occasion for the ideological rearmament of the counter-
Imperial Revolutions and Global Repercussions 157

revolutionary ‘ancien régime’ in Britain and the empire.68 What Bayly

called the ‘constructive conservatism’ of counter-revolutionary British
nationalism, and what Hilton has termed the new efflorescence of
‘Church and King Toryism’, found a natural home in India.69 Scottish
scholar-administrators justified enlightened despotism as a necessary
stage of societal development, analogous to monarchical absolutism in
late medieval Europe.70 A revivified monarchism found Indian
expressions in British sponsorship of the formal sovereignty of the
Mughal emperors and other Indian ‘princes’, and also in Queen
Victoria’s emergence as an imperial monarch in the 1840s, symbol-
ized by the establishment of special royal honours for the Indian
army.71 The official culture of British India, with its strongly mili-
taristic, masculinist, and patriarchal ethos, also formed part of the
wider regendering of British politics in the age of evangelical
revival.72 British male officials professed to guard the imagined patri-
archal traditions of Indian society, even as they positioned themselves
as ‘protectors’ of Indian women, and sought to shelter the relatively
small population of European women from the supposed threats of
Asiatic corruption.73 Reforms designed to maintain the respectability
of empire, specifically by regulating interracial sexual encounters and
family life, generated new conceptions of Britishness as a form of
ethnicity.74 Meanwhile, a concern for protecting the perquisites of
(especially male) landed aristocrats was a cornerstone of Indian gover-
nance, as it was for many of the ruling elite in England.
The large mobilization around the reform of the East India
Company in the early 1830s showed that British India continued to
fuel domestic reformism. As Miles Taylor has detailed, domestic
merchants and radicals made strategic alliances with British settlers,
Indian and Eurasian reformers, and radical newspapermen from the
Indian presidencies, demanding an end to the China monopoly,
freedom of the press in India, and reforms to make the authoritarian
structures of Company rule more accountable to a local ‘public’.75
India was not, then, simply a useful appendage for propping up the
British oligarchy, but also a rallying point for liberal critics of the ‘old
corruption’.
Nonetheless, demands for imperial reform were bought off with
commercial concessions at relatively little cost to the domestic state,
while the militaristic colonial regime largely resisted pressures for
greater openness and accountability. Meanwhile, if many British radi-
cals continued to disparage the Indian empire, other liberals tried to
make the empire a vehicle for the cause of reform.76 C. A. Bayly’s
recent study shows that the leading Indian liberal of the 1830s,
158 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

Rammohan Roy, was not so much (as in Hobsbawm’s version) a

champion of French republicanism against British industrialism;
instead, he advocated a post-revolutionary or even counter-revolu-
tionary style of constitutional liberalism, proposing a gradualist reform
of imperial institutions, drawing eclectically on European and Asian
ideas and institutions, so that imperial power would be made progres-
sively more accountable to an evolving Indian public.77 For the
British Empire in general, political evolutionism underpinned the
broader consolidation of imperial authority during and after the age
of revolutionary scares. Whiggish constitutional history, combined
with more sociological theories of ‘stages of civilization’ drawn from
Scottish Enlightenment writers, appeared to justify authoritarian
forms of rule over ‘backward’ peoples as a temporary expedient – an
ideological move that was bolstered by a growing awareness of sepa-
rate economic trajectories between industrializing regions of Europe
and poorer agrarian societies.78
If Indian conquests became a vital adjunct to the British domestic
order in the age of revolutions, they also became the launching pad
for the redefinition and globalization (in a very literal sense) of
Britain’s overseas empire. From the point of view of ‘British Indian’
history, the early conquests of Bengal can be seen as the ‘bridgehead’
to a new style of territorial imperialism, with massive armies paid for
by taxes from the land.79 From another point of view, however, terri-
torial conquests in India became an appendage for a global maritime
empire built on the East India Company’s early modern founda-
tions.80 Warren Hastings, the first Governor-general of British India,
was interested not only in extending forms of tribute from Indian
lands, but also in opening up a new commercial route to China
through Tibet, and in strengthening the line of communication and
trade through the Red Sea and Suez.81 Alan Frost has argued that
William Pitt and Henry Dundas formulated a consciously global
strategy for imperial consolidation in the aftermath of the conquest of
Bengal and the American Revolution. Partly this was driven by the
need to provide extra naval protection for Indian territories, and
partly by the desire to extend naval and commercial power into the
Pacific. Thus, New South Wales was imagined as a reserve of naval
supplies and a commercial emporium, as well as a dumping ground
for transported convicts.82
This continued oceanic perspective on empire helps to explain
why ministers like Pitt professed to renounce the aim of further terri-
torial conquests in India.83 In the early nineteenth century, the East
India Company extended its commercial and military operations west
Imperial Revolutions and Global Repercussions 159

into the so-called trucial states of the Persian Gulf region, and also east
into the Straits of Malacca, the Chinese coast, and the Philippines.
Some Dutch colonies seized during the wars with France, such as
Java, were later returned; others, crucially the Cape Colony, were
retained and used to further extend British naval, maritime, and
commercial strength. Singapore and later Hong Kong emerged as
new imperial cities, while forms of ‘tributary alliance’ with local
princes were exported from India to the Gulf states and later the
Malay sultanates, creating what Sugata Bose has called a ‘sea-change
in sovereignty’ in the Indian Ocean arena.84 Bose and Thomas
Metcalf have recently detailed how the Indian empire stood as the
vital springboard for British expansion in Asia and Africa during the
high imperial age, sending out merchants and labourers, soldiers and
policemen, law codes and theories of racial ordering into the new
imperial world.85
Even in the late eighteenth century, other powerful European states
were intensely aware that new conquests in India were shifting the
balance of power in Europe. India was thus more tightly bound into
European conceptions of global politics beyond the ambitions of
British imperial statesmen. The fullest repercussions were felt in
France, after military escalations in south India led to the humiliation
and bankruptcy of the French East India Company. The American
war, and the resurgence of Hyder Ali of Mysore as a military threat to
the British position in south India, triggered a new flurry of French
military and naval activity in the late 1770s and 1780s, catalysing an
even stronger British response. Hyder’s son, Tipu, continued to hope
for French aid against the British (sending envoys to the court of
Louis XVI in 1787), while the British feared naval actions launched
from the Île-de-France.86
As it turned out, fortified by the fiscal windfalls of his recent terri-
torial conquests, Napoleon would take a different route to challeng-
ing the rise of imperial Britain. ‘Truly to overthrow England’, he
declared, ‘we must occupy Egypt.’87 As both Maya Jasanoff and Juan
Cole have recently emphasized, destabilizing British India was one of
major goals of his Egyptian campaigns. By invading Egypt, he could
compete with Britain’s growing colonial commerce, cut off the
quicker overland route for communication between Britain and
India, and lay the groundwork for eventually recovering France’s posi-
tion in India itself.88 Napoleon sent a small expedition to India in
1802 to make alliances with Indian states, and even in the 1830s Louis
Philippe was still trying to consolidate a diplomatic and military
alliance with the Ranjit Singh in the Punjab.89
160 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

Perhaps the most quixotic example of imperial ambition towards

India was the Cossack invasion force launched by Tsar Paul I of
Russia in 1801. Described by one recent historian as a ‘suicidal
mission’ launched on the ‘personal whim’ of Tsar Paul, this surprising
turn of events has sometimes been given as evidence of the tsar’s
insanity and a contributory factor in his subsequent assassination.90
Other historians have suggested the plan may have originated with
Paul’s new ally Napoleon, and even that it may have represented a
pragmatic response to British naval superiority.91 In the light of
Napoleon’s comment that ‘great reputations are only made in the
Orient; Europe is too small’, Paul’s hubristic venture might at least be
taken as a sign of the way that British imperialism in South Asia was
changing European conceptions of imperial prestige.92 Russian mili-
tary strategists continued to regard British India as a potential weak-
point in the British world system, and in 1857, on the eve of the great
mutiny/rebellion, they reconsidered the feasibility of invading India as
a way of promoting a general uprising.93 Meanwhile, the officer
classes of British India’s garrison state remained acutely aware of the
potential for mutiny and rebellion, and obsessed with the lack of good
intelligence about frontier regions. These preoccupations fed a
tendency to exaggerate external threats, which itself spurred periods
of renewed militarism and conquest as the British pushed their armies
up towards the north-west frontier.94
The rise of British India, then, helped to redraw imperial ambitions
and imperial frontiers across the world. If it enabled Britain to steal a
march on other European rivals, it further exacerbated the vulnera-
bilities of imperial systems outside Europe, the Ottoman and the
Chinese empires. China felt the brunt of European expansionism in a
new and more brutal form thanks to the resources brought to bear on
its trading ports from British India. George Bogle’s mission to Tibet
in the 1770s and Lord Macartney’s mission to China of 1793 signalled
British desires for further commercial penetration of Chinese
markets, but it was Indian reserves of opium, monopolized by the East
India Company and transported by British private traders, that proved
most threatening to the integrity and good order of the Chinese
empire in the long run. Britain’s growing willingness and ability by
the 1830s to coerce Chinese port authorities into unequal treaty
arrangements, and the power of opium to suck silver reserves out of
the Chinese economy, were a direct challenge to imperial authority
in China.95
Imperial Revolutions and Global Repercussions 161

South Asia’s global connections

The rise of British India marked and contributed to the intensifica-
tion of a modern form of globalization increasingly dependent on
European imperialism.Yet this picture needs qualifying in two impor-
tant ways. First, the territorial conquests of the late eighteenth century
were themselves predicated on a much longer trajectory of European
commercial, naval, and territorial consolidation in the Indian Ocean
region, which made Asian states and empires vulnerable to various
forms of dependency on European shipping, and to flows of silver
carried by Europeans from the Atlantic world.96 Thanks to early
victories in India, the British were in the best position to exploit these
structural dependencies, while trying to dictate the terms of South
Asia’s global connections. Second, European imperialism in Asia in
the age of revolutions remained more constrained and fitful in actu-
ality than the ambitions of imperial statesmen or the imaginations of
later imperial historians often allowed. European expansion often
worked by exploiting webs of connection forged in an earlier phase
of globalization, and South Asian merchants, sailors, labourers, schol-
ars, and pilgrims continued to make their own global networks under
the surface of, or even in competition with, European globalism.97
As Indian territories became embroiled with a global British
empire, their ties to the world economy were dramatically reworked.
From a situation in which (as David Washbrook has put it) Indian arti-
sans had ‘clothed the world’ with high quality cotton textiles, Indian
artisans lost most of their overseas markets from the 1820s to the rise
of the British cotton industry.98 If the extent of deindustrialization is
still argued about, and the character and impact of colonial policies
disputed, the dramatic trend from an artisanal to agricultural export
economy is clear.99 Prasannan Parthasarathi has recently added his
study of weavers in southern India to an older body of literature on
the coercive colonial controls on weavers, which depressed artisanal
incomes even before the onslaught of Lancashire goods.100 Despite
frequent harassment by the British, other European companies, and
increasingly American buyers too, continued to sustain demand for
Indian textile exports into the early nineteenth century.101 But
competition over procurement led to new restrictions on weavers,
backed by the colonial state, just as the colonial assault on Indian
regional states undercut the demand for high-end consumables by
Indian courts. David Washbrook has argued that these effects of colo-
nial rule, added to a penal tax regime, intensified the depressive effects
of the loss of export markets for Indian manufactures after 1820.102
162 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

The substitution of primary for industrial exports expanded cash-

cropping in some regions of South Asia, but at the same time left
peasant farmers increasingly vulnerable to ‘hectic cycles of profitabil-
ity and decline’ that characterized the early nineteenth-century world
economy.103 Indian sugar, raw cotton, and indigo found growing if
unsteady overseas markets; opium was the one sustained boom
product of the period, its major profits flowing to the East India
Company and the European merchants who managed the China
trade.104 The ruptures in South Asia’s export economy signalled what
Pomeranz has termed the ‘great divergence’ between industrializing
regions of Europe and the rest of the world, but they also hampered
attempts by European merchants to turn the new empire into a finan-
cial windfall. If the narrative of the China trade leading to the Opium
Wars can give the impression of an irresistible force of European capi-
talism opening up Eastern markets, the ready resort to violence often
reflected the continued insecurity and fragility of European commer-
cial expansion.
After all, only a few years before the first Opium War, many of the
major agency houses in Calcutta, the grand, neoclassical capital of
British India, had gone bankrupt. The career of John Palmer, finely
narrated in a recent book by Anthony Webster, illustrates both the
new opportunities and the pitfalls attending British merchants in the
emerging empire.105 The son of an aide-de-camp to Governor
Warren Hastings, John Palmer served in the navy and fought in the
American revolutionary war, before settling in Calcutta, and rising to
be a senior partner in one of the most successful Calcutta ‘agency
houses’. These trading firms managed funds for the official classes of
British India as well as Indian investors, and engaged in banking and
commodity trades throughout Asia. Palmer’s firm was heavily involved
in the opium and indigo trades, was linked (through Palmer’s half-
brother) with debt-financing to the Nizam of Hyderabad, and dealt
extensively with Penang, Java, and Canton. Palmer even developed his
own merchant fleet of over twenty ships, profiting from the disman-
tling of the Company’s monopoly of the trade between India and
Europe in 1813.
If close ties with the expanding Company made Palmer into a
‘merchant prince’, they also helped to break him. His brother became
embroiled in a political scandal in Hyderabad; meanwhile the
Company’s war with Burma in 1825–6, and its consequent heavy
borrowing, shrank the money market and drove up interest rates in
Calcutta. Finally, the London corresponding firm that Palmer
depended on for managing the remittance of funds for his British
Imperial Revolutions and Global Repercussions 163

Indian clients began to call in its debts at a moment of downturn in

commodity prices. To make these remittances, agency houses were
forced to lay out capital advances to indigo planters which they
frequently did not recover, especially if prices dipped.The collapse of
Palmer’s business in 1830 presaged a more general run on the Calcutta
houses, and showed the fragility of the circuits of foreign trade and
banking in early colonial India. In part, Palmer’s fall reflected a more
competitive environment with the end of the Company monopoly,
and the fact that London financial houses were forging links with Asia
independently from the old agencies. With the rise of the steamship
and later railway investments, European capital would find a more
direct and secure role in Asian markets.
In the meantime, and even after this, Indian bankers and merchants
continued to find significant niches within oceanic and interregional
commerce.The view that European steamships and modern colonial
empires fundamentally sundered older Indian Ocean trades is now
being re-evaluated. Rajat Ray and Sugata Bose have argued for the
endurance of an oceanic ‘bazaar’ economy linking Asian merchants
operating at an intermediary level within a European-dominated
commercial system.106 Claude Markovits has shown how the ‘global
world’ of Sindhi merchants survived and even thrived in the colonial
period, noting that South Asian merchants in the western regions had
longer to adjust to the colonial onset than those in, for example,
Bengal. Some networks, like Gujarati traders in Zanzibar and East
Africa, or the Shikarpur Sindhis trading in Afghanistan and Central
Asia, predated European colonial expansion; some, like the
Hyderabadi traders studied by Markovits, adjusted to being squeezed
out of state financing by British conquerors, and inserted themselves
into new colonial patterns of overseas trade.107
European expansion also interacted with, often conflicted with, but
never entirely cut off competing forms of religious universalism, for
example diverse modes of Islamic universalism.108 Tim Harper has
argued that much of the colonial world in the mid-nineteenth
century existed as a ‘Euro-Islamic condominium’, noting the contin-
uing salience of Ottoman suzerainty across South and South-east Asia,
and the survival and dynamism of the Hadhrami diaspora of
merchants, pilgrims, and scholars.109 The British Empire itself spon-
sored neo-traditional forms of Islamic kingship, enabling the Shi‘i
rulers of Awadh to declare their regal independence from the Sunni
Mughal emperors, and establishing systems of indirect rule through-
out India, the Persian Gulf, and Malaya.110 At the same time, the
British continued to preserve the faded vestiges of Mughal authority
164 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

in Delhi, until the mutiny/rebellion of 1857 showed that Hindustani

loyalties to the old empire were too strong and too deep to be safely
ignored. In deposing and desacralizing the Mughal emperor after
1857, the British thus indirectly contributed to the revival of the idea
of the Ottoman caliphate as a Pan-Islamic suzerain in the late nine-
teenth century,111 even while they continued to ape Islamicate impe-
rial forms in the oriental gothic or Indo-Saracenic styles of public
buildings, or in the great durbar ceremonials of the high Raj.112
Prior to the rise of British India, the Mughal court and other
Islamicate courts in India had been vital nodes within what Juan Cole
has termed a ‘far-flung ecumene of Persian culture’.113 Again, the
British Empire coexisted in a tense relation to this ‘Persophone world
culture’, initially appropriating the glamour of Persian as an imperial
language, and plundering Persian treatises for vital information about
revenues, laws, and other immediate concerns of imperial administra-
tion. Sir William Jones also relied on Persian scholarship during his
path-breaking studies of Sanskrit and Indo-European languages.114
The British maintenance of Persian as an administrative language
until the 1830s, early experiments in printing Persian texts, and the
survival in straitened means of a post-Mughal class of scholar-admin-
istrators meant that India’s strong Persian connection survived into
the nineteenth century.115 But it was increasingly threatened by
moves to Anglicize the high levels of administration, by the colonial
sponsorship of Brahminical Hinduism as the true cultural bedrock of
ancient India, and at a deeper level by the continuing vernaculariza-
tion of Indian language and literature. British India’s ‘Persian connec-
tion’ would increasingly become defined by the great power rivalries
of the great game,116 while one of the most profound long-term
effects of modern globalization would be to universalize increasingly
hard-edged national and religious distinctions, often under the cover
of empires.
The recent vogue for global histories has underscored a broader
recalibration of the field of modern history, challenging older notions
of a Western ‘core’ of modernity and a non-Western ‘periphery’.They
have underscored that modern forms of globalization were layered,
diverse, and entangled with earlier patterns of connection. Within
these new perspectives, the ‘age of revolutions’ appears as a particu-
larly unstable and confusing set of transitions, with power and wealth
shifting inexorably and subtly, and regions such as South Asia becom-
ing gradually ‘reglobalized’ within European imperial systems. The
unevenness and ruptures within these processes give the lie to any
notion of modern globalization as successive waves of connectivity
Imperial Revolutions and Global Repercussions 165

become ever stronger and more widespread.When Thomas Macaulay

complained in the British House of Commons that ‘a broken head in
Coldbath Field excites more debate in this house than three pitched
battles in India’, he was observing a form of forgetfulness that was as
important to empire as new orientalist knowledge.117
Modern empires, we know, worked to divide and rule as much as
to connect. Relying on its efforts ‘to control labour, fix prices, and
establish monopolies’, the British Empire often struggled against new
forms of integration unleashed within its own system of rule.118 Thus,
Thomas Munro, in a minute of 1824, justified the strict imperial
controls over the press in British India, arguing that press freedoms as
demanded by some British and Indian radicals would spell disaster.
Crucially, a free press would undermine the implicit hierarchies of
race and status on which military discipline depended; Indian soldiers
would learn ‘to compare their own allowances and humble rank, with
those of their European officers’; the desire for a ‘national govern-
ment’ would spread, but without the moderating effects of a mature
public, leading to mutiny, general rebellion, and anarchy.119 David
Washbrook has suggested how the authoritarian style of government
that Munro was defending in south India, combined with prolonged
economic depression, led to ‘the closure of broader lines of commu-
nication’ that had characterized the region’s history in a previous era
of numerous competing states and commercial expansion. For him,
the reduction of ‘South India’s links with the rest of the world’ was
‘perhaps one of the key meanings of colonialism in South India’.120
This example suggests that historians may need to attend to forms of
imperial ‘deglobalization’ alongside conventional emphases on
Western imperialism as a moment in the history of ‘globalization’.
The main benefits of the turn to global history may come less from
the abstract formulations of types or styles of globalization than from
the reframing of local, regional, imperial, national, and transnational
histories. Global perspectives are currently pulling the history of colo-
nial South Asia beyond the dichotomy of empire and nation, metro-
pole and colony, and recovering more supple lines of connection and
comparison than imperial or anti-imperial national histories allowed
for. An emphasis on transregional and oceanic ties that were reshaped
within the colonial world can encourage new regional histories that
resist the teleology of the territorial nation state. At the same time,
studies of diaspora and circulation foreground the role of ‘expatriate
nationalisms’ and ‘competing universalisms’ in creating the modern
world order.121 Recognizing analogous patterns of state and social
formation beyond the bounded categories of Europe, Asia, or Africa
166 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

enables comparisons between modern forms of governance that can

respecify rather than take for granted the notion of a ‘colonial moder-
nity’. Such studies will continue to show how networks of exchange
always transcended the ties that bound metropole and colony, and that
the British Empire never fully mastered the global connections it
worked to create, even as its armies and navies remade the world in
the age of revolutions.122
9
Revolutionary Europe and the
Destruction of Java’s Old Order,
1808–1830

Peter Carey

Introduction
At first glance, it may seem strange that Java, an island situated half a
world away from Revolutionary France, should end up being one of
the key battle grounds in the global conflict that followed the fateful
Girondin decision to declare war on Austria in the spring of 1792.Yet,
in the compass of less than a decade, Java’s own ancien régime was
violently overturned as in quick succession a Franco-Dutch regime
(1808–11) under Napoleon’s only non-French marshal, Herman
Willem Daendels (1762–1818), and a five-year British occupation
(1811–16) under the equally dictatorial Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles
(1781–1826), transformed the colony. This paved the way for the
restoration of Dutch rule in 1816 under the terms of the Treaty of
Vienna, by which time the commercial dealings of the Company had
been replaced by the beginnings of a modern colonial state, the post-
January 1818 Netherlands Indies. Over the next century, this would
reduce the power of the local rulers and establish Dutch authority in
nearly every corner of the archipelago.The boundaries of present-day
Indonesia were determined at this time.
Java’s destiny had long been linked to the emerging global
economy through the Dutch connection and the international busi-
ness networks of the overseas Chinese. These latter were the key to
the Dutch management of a complex trading system that under-
pinned the wealth of the failing Dutch East India Company
(Vereenigde Oost Indische Compagnie, henceforth VOC) in Asia.
Java’s rice and textile exports sustained the Company’s original
trading bases in the Spice Islands (Ambon, Banda, Ternate, and
Tidore), while its commodity exports – in particular coffee from West
167
168 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

Java, and indigo and sugar from the Bataviasche Ommelanden

(Batavian hinterland) developed with overseas Chinese capital – had
begun to make their mark on world markets. Java was also a major
rendezvous point for Dutch trade from its factories in Surat, Malabar,
and Nagasaki, as well as a potential military strongpoint in the Indian
Ocean given its extensive dockyards at Pulau Onrust in the Bay of
Batavia and its port and shipbuilding facilities along Java’s north coast.
Such assets were a tempting prize for both the French Republic and
the Republic’s First Coalition enemies, in particular Britain.
Despite its commercial and military importance, however, the
island, whose estimated population was some 3.5 million in 1795, was
not a Dutch version of the British Raj.A declining power in Europe,
Holland appeared to be on its way out in Java while the south-central
Javanese rulers in Yogyakarta and Surakarta enjoyed de facto sover-
eignty. The Fourth Anglo-Dutch War of 1780–4 was the turning
point. Faced with mounting debts, the VOC was declared bankrupt
and its assets were taken over by the Dutch state on 1 January 1800.
By then control of the Dutch possessions in the east had been taken
out of the hands of the Directors of the VOC and vested in the new
Committee for the Affairs of East Indian Trade and Colonies, a
creation of the new Batavian Republic (1796–1806) formed after
Holland’s incorporation in the French Grande Nation when General
Jean-Charles Pichegru’s Army of the North had crossed the Dutch
Republic’s frozen Maas and Waal rivers and installed a pro-French
regime in The Hague (January 1795).
News of these dramatic events in Europe and their implications for
Java’s old order were slow to percolate through to the distant archi-
pelago.The fact that VOC personnel, scions of the great mestiço Indies
families who were then politically pre-eminent in Java, continued in
post well beyond Daendels’s administration (1808–11) meant that the
local Javanese rulers had difficulty in getting a true insight into the
scale of the political revolution that was then transforming Europe.
Holland’s weakness masked political realities. Indeed, the fact that the
Dutch governor-general and Council of the Indies felt the need to
appeal to the south-central Javanese rulers to help them to defend
their colonial capital – Batavia – during the international crises that
sped the VOC’s demise reinforced the courts’ suspicion that the Dutch
were on their way out militarily in the Indies.
Following Holland’s occupation in 1794–5, the Stadhouder (head of
state), William V (reigned 1766–85, 1787–95), fled to London and
from his place of exile in the royal palace at Kew issued the so-called
‘Kew Letters’, which ordered that the Republic’s colonies be handed
The Destruction of Java’s Old Order 169

over to the British to prevent them falling into French hands. So

began a twenty-year period in which the East Indies was drawn into
the global conflict between Britain and France. During this period of
the Revolutionary (1792–9) and Napoleonic (1799–1802, 1803–13,
1815) wars, the archipelago became a battle ground on land and sea.
Between 1795 and 1797, British naval forces operating from Madras
and Pulau Pinang captured most of the Dutch possessions outside
Java. Although returned to Holland under the terms of the Peace of
Amiens (1802), all were recaptured by the British in the seven years
that followed the renewal of hostilities in Europe in May 1803.
During this time the East Indies were placed under strict naval block-
ade, an interdiction so tight that Napoleon’s younger brother, Louis
Bonaparte (King of Holland, 1806–10), took care to send Daendels
out to Java with a replacement governor-general following on a sepa-
rate fast frigate in case he fell into British hands.
The tragedy for the Javanese was that just as all the signs seemed to
point in the direction of a Dutch collapse, half a world away in Europe
events were taking place that would change the Javanese ‘Old Order’
for ever.The twin political and industrial revolutions then tearing the
anciens régimes of eighteenth-century Europe apart would hit Java with
the force of an Asian tsunami. In the space of just four years (1808–12),
the relationship between the European government and the south-
central Javanese rulers was transformed.The Yogyakarta sultanate bore
the brunt of these changes. In quick succession, the re-energized
Franco-Dutch regime of Daendels (1808–11) and the British-Indian
administration of Raffles (1811–16) forced open Yogyakarta’s eastern
outlying territories, plundered its court, and exiled its reigning
monarch. After the fall of the kraton (fortified royal capital/court) in
June 1812 and the imposition of new treaties, the relationship between
Batavia and the princely states began to resemble post-Plassey India
when the British replaced the Mughal emperors in Lower Bengal.The
returned Dutch administration of Governor-general Godert
Alexander Gerard Philip Baron van der Capellen (in office 1816–26)
continued this process. Desperate for money but keen to protect the
welfare of ordinary Javanese, van der Capellen attempted to square the
circle between increased fiscal returns and his ethical principles, which
ignited a powder keg in south-central Java.Adverse environmental and
health conditions, in particular the May 1821 cholera epidemic and
the December 1822 eruption of the central Javanese Mount Merapi
volcano, combined with soaring rice prices, triggered massive popular
uprisings in July and August 1825 that heralded the outbreak of the
Java War (1825–30).
170 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

This conflict was a watershed in the history of Java and of what –

after 1945 – would become the Republic of Indonesia. For the first
time a European colonial government faced a social rebellion cover-
ing a large part of the island. Likewise, the Javanese experienced for
perhaps the first time a rebellion that had at its heart social and
economic grievances rather than dynastic ambitions. Most of central
and east Java and many of the pasisir (north coast) areas were affected.
Two million Javanese, nearly half the island’s total population, were
exposed to the ravages of war, one-quarter of the cultivated area of
Java sustained damage, and about 200,000 Javanese died. In securing
their pyrrhic victory, the Dutch also suffered: 7,000 Indonesian auxil-
iaries and 8,000 of their own troops perished. The war cost their
exchequer an estimated 20 million guilders. The end of the conflict
left the Dutch in undisputed control of the island and a new phase of
colonial rule began with the inception of Governor-general Johannes
van den Bosch’s ‘cultivation system’ (1830–70). This turned Java into
a globally linked cash crop economy, a development that proved
immensely profitable for Holland, with an estimated 880 million
guilders (present-day US$100 billion) accruing to the Dutch excheq-
uer, easing the Netherlands’ transition to a modern industrial
economy. The war thus marked the end of a process, maturing since
the Daendels administration (1808–11), that saw the change-over
from the Dutch East India Company era, when contacts between
Batavia and the south-central Javanese kingdoms had had the nature
of ambassadorial links between sovereign states, to the ‘high colonial’
period when the Principalities occupied a clearly subordinate posi-
tion to the European power.
For the Javanese, this five-year conflict had far-reaching implica-
tions. The emergence of a strong charismatic leader in the person of
Pangéran (prince) Diponegoro (1785–1855), who took the title of the
Javanese messianic ratu adil (‘just king’), served to bring many
disparate social elements under the single banner of Javanese Islam.
Widespread millenarian expectations caught the imagination of the
peasantry and acted as a catalyst for social and economic grievances,
accumulating since the beginning of the nineteenth century. The
concept of holy war (prang sabil), imagery from the Javanese shadow-
play (wayang), and Javanese nativist sentiments, made up of an intense
longing for the restoration of an idealized traditional order – which
Diponegoro described as ‘restoring the high state of the Islamic reli-
gion in Java’ – all forged a common identity among the prince’s
followers. In this fashion, nobles, dismissed provincial officials, reli-
gious teachers, professional bandits, porters, day labourers, tax-paying
The Destruction of Java’s Old Order 171

farmers (sikep), and artisans were brought together briefly in a

common cause. The Java War was thus significant for Indonesia’s
future. The subtle interplay of economic grievances and millenarian
hopes created a movement of unique social breadth which anticipated
the nationalist movement of the early twentieth century.
The cultural dislocation wrought by the new European imperial-
ism shaped the young Diponegoro. A key transitional figure, he lived
through the shift from the old order of late eighteenth-century Java
to the new ‘high colonial’ era when steamships plied the trade routes
of the Netherlands-Indies archipelago, linking Diponegoro’s place of
exile in Sulawesi (Celebes) to the main Javanese ports. A traditional
figure steeped in the values of pre-modern Java, particularly the spirit
world of the south-central Javanese courts, he also pointed to the
future. One thinks here of his use of Javanese Islam, particularly its
millenarian traditions, as a way of forging a new identity for Javanese
Muslims in an era when the old Javanese order was crumbling.
Diponegoro inhabited a world increasingly divided between those
who were prepared to accommodate themselves to the new European
dispensation and those who saw the Islamic moral order (agami Islam)
as the lodestar in a society that had lost its traditional moorings.The
Java War thus gave impetus to a process still working itself out in
present-day Indonesia, namely the integration of Islamic values into
contemporary Javanese and Indonesian identity. Diponegoro’s world
view also encompassed a distinctly contemporary concern with how
Javanese Muslims should live in an age of Western imperialism. For
the prince, unlike most present-day Indonesian Muslims, the answer
lay in the waging of holy war and the development of a clear distinc-
tion between the wong Islam (‘people of Islam’, Muslim believers), the
European kapir laknatullah (heretics accursed by Allah), and the
Javanese kapir murtad (apostates), namely those who had allied them-
selves with the Dutch.There was also a concern on the prince’s part
for the preservation of specifically Javanese values as expressed in
language, dress, and cultural codes.This can be seen most clearly in his
treatment of Dutch prisoners and his insistence that they adopt
Javanese dress and speak to their captors not in the reviled language
of the new colonial state – ‘service Malay’1 – but in High Javanese
(krama), the medium of the court elite.
Despite his adoption of Ottoman dress and bestowal of Ottoman
military titles – Basah (‘Pasha’) and Ali Basah (‘The High Pasha’) – on
his military commanders, Diponegoro was no Islamic reformer. A
traditional Javanese Muslim, he had no problem reconciling the spirit
world of Java with membership of the international ummat (commu-
172 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

nity of Muslim believers) whose religious and politico-cultural

centres lay in the Hejaz (present-day Saudi Arabia) and Ottoman
Turkey. Although Diponegoro did not prevail in achieving his goal of
restoring the high state of the Islamic religion in Java, his wider moral
vision of securing an honoured place for Islam in the life of the nation
had a lasting resonance. Indeed, following Indonesia’s political inde-
pendence from the Dutch in 1945, it has continued to be negotiated,
especially in the current post-9/11 world of global conflict between
what some in the Islamic community perceive as the ‘materialistic’
values of the West and what many more – believers and unbelievers
alike – acknowledge as the deeply fissiparous loyalties of the world-
wide Muslim ummat.

Daendels’s political revolution, 1808–1811

The ‘beginning of the ruin of the Land of Java’ had been the
prophetic warning delivered to Diponegoro during a pilgrimage to
visit Java’s spirit guardians on the south coast in circa 1805.
Specifically, he had been told that this destruction would start in just
under three years’ time. Right on cue, on 5 January 1808, Daendels
arrived in Batavia to take up his post as governor-general. Lawyer,
revolutionary, politician, and career soldier, he was very much a
product of the new Europe forged by the French Revolution. A
participant in the ‘Patriot Revolt’ against the Stadhouder in Holland
(1786–7), he had helped to set up (and commanded) the Batavian
Legion (1792–5), which had fought alongside French Republican
forces in the 1794–5 invasion of the Dutch Netherlands. Later, as head
of the pro-French Unitarian Party, he had earned himself a reputation
as a ‘headstrong, sentimental and obstinate’ character.2 A man of few
scruples, great energy and a penchant for using force to achieve his
political ends, he was destined to make a lasting mark on the history
of Java.
One of the marshal’s primary strategic considerations in planning
Java’s defence was the position of the independent courts.Their power
and influence marked them out as potential rivals to the European
government and as dubious allies in the event of an enemy attack. In
this respect, the court of Yogyakarta was by far the more redoubtable
in the light of its military resources and substantial cash reserves.
Imbued with a fierce hatred of ancien régime monarchies, Daendels
promulgated a celebrated Edict on Ceremonial and Etiquette on 28
July 1808, which did away with most of the ceremonial functions
previously performed by the Residents for the rulers, which were
The Destruction of Java’s Old Order 173

considered degrading. Instead, Daendels’s Franco-Dutch regime

accorded them various privileges more in line with their positions as
direct representatives of the governor-general and the royal govern-
ment in The Hague.3 Thus the First Residents now received the title
of ‘minister’, wore new Napoleonic era uniforms (blue coats with
high collars braided in gold with olives, olive branches, and flat gold
buttons, white breeches with embroidered knee bands and white silk
stockings, and tricorn black hats with black straps and cockade), and
were allowed to carry a blue and gold state parasol or payung embla-
zoned with the arms of the King of Holland. On official occasions,
they were not to remove their hats when approaching the ruler, who
was to rise to greet the Dutch representative and make space for him
immediately to his left on his throne, thus allowing him to sit at
exactly the monarch’s level. Likewise, they were no longer required to
serve the ruler in a menial fashion with drink and betelnut.Various
other articles regulated the new forms of greeting when saluting the
ruler both inside and outside the kraton: the minister, for example, was
now accorded a military escort of mounted dragoons on all official
visits to the court and was no longer expected to stop his coach when
passing that of the ruler on the high road. Such changes in ceremo-
nial amounted to a very substantial alteration to the position of the
Dutch representatives at the courts that struck at the heart of the
Javanese understanding of the Dutch presence in Java.
The edicts effectively destroyed the finely balanced political struc-
ture that enabled the courts’ acceptance of Dutch rule in Java. If the
articles of the edicts were carried out as the marshal wished there
could no longer be any pretence that the Resident was a joint servant
of the European government and the ruler. Even the diplomatic skills
of the former VOC officials posted to the courts could not disguise
the scale of the changes now being demanded.The Yogyakarta court
chronicle describes how immediately upon receipt of the edict, the
sultan ordered his throne to be changed in order to maintain his more
elevated position during state functions. This involved making it
narrower so that only the ruler could sit on it, and having a wooden
footstool placed under it so that he would always sit higher than the
Resident even when he went to visit him in the Residency, a proce-
dure that nearly resulted in an armed clash between the sultan’s
entourage and British officers in the Residency ‘throne room’ at the
time of Raffles’s visit to Yogyakarta on 27 December 1811.4
The political pressure now bearing down on the south-central
Javanese rulers to accept their changed status opened up deep divi-
sions at the courts. Those who were prepared to work with the
174 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

European government began to display their pro-Dutch views in

striking sartorial and personal ways. During his May 1803 inspection
tour through south-central and east Java, the governor of Java’s
North-east Coast, Nicolaus Engelhard (in office 1801–8), had already
noticed that the Surakarta ruler’s court was beginning to dress ‘in
European style’ despite the huge debts this entailed.5 Even in the
more traditional Yogyakarta court, the value of adopting the cultural
as well as political fashions of Java’s foreign rulers was noted. The
Crown Prince, who would rule briefly (1812–14) as sultan under the
British, sought to prove his pro-Dutch sentiments by insisting that his
tea should be served with milk like that of his Dutch guests,6 and
crying out at the top of his voice during a military review in honour
of visiting Dutch officers that Yogyakarta courtiers and officials should
speak nothing but Malay on that day ‘because that was the language
which the sultan’s friends, the Dutch, used with their people!’7
Attempts by Daendels and his senior officials to make the Javanese
rulers understand that the marshal’s edicts were part of a pan-
European republican movement to overthrow the ‘feudal order’ fell
on deaf ears. So baffling indeed was Daendels’s language about the
abolition of feudalism that the official Javanese translator in Semarang
had great difficulty rendering the Dutch text into Javanese when the
prime ministers of the two south-central Javanese courts came to the
north coast port city to present their official compliments to the
newly arrived governor-general:

I receive with much pleasure and sincerity the homage of the [Surakarta
ruler] through his prime minister and further ambassadors.
I do not consider this solemnity in the light of homage by a vassal to
his lord paramount, the feudal system having been abolished in Europe,
but I look upon the same as congratulations on my safe arrival on this
island and on the commencement of the administration of His Majesty’s
possessions in India.
The [Dutch] East India Company and the Republic of the United
Provinces had lost their former influence in Europe. But the election of
the Emperor’s brother to the throne of Holland has caused the political
influence of that country to be re-established by adopting a more ener-
getic mode of administration and by a most intimate union with the
mightiest empire in the world. It is the wish of King Louis to promote
the happiness of his subjects on the island of Java and he offers them
peace, prosperity and a benevolent government:
And I do solemnly declare in the name of His Majesty, the friend and
protector of the princes and inhabitants of Java, that I will endeavour to
maintain peace and to render the island of Java as prosperous as possible.8
The Destruction of Java’s Old Order 175

As the prime ministers and their respective parties made their way
back to the south-central Javanese courts with Daendels’ declaration
in their hands, they must have wondered what exactly was going on.
A post-feudal Java? The happiness of subjects? The mightiest empire
in the world? How to make sense of all this in the context of an ‘Old
Order’ in Java that had seemed so immutable?
Luckily, symbolic explanation was at hand. No sooner had the
Yogyakarta delegation returned home than Daendels’s deputy, Jacob
Andries van Braam (1771–1820), came over from Surakarta on an
official visit with his wife. It was usual on such occasions for the court
to honour its distinguished guest with a tiger and buffalo fight on the
southern alun-alun (open field behind the kraton).Van Braam was not
disappointed.9 However, the particular fight he witnessed had an
interesting denouement: in the first round of the contest, the tiger
severed the leg tendons of the buffalo and then refused to fight
further. In the second, when a new tiger was introduced, it jumped
clean out of the ring of guarding spearmen and was only caught and
killed behind the elevated platform on which the sultan was sitting
with his Dutch guest. ‘This situation, which had never occurred
before’, van Braam reported to Daendels,‘caused the Javanese to make
many conjectures with regard to me . . . and the sultan made me a
compliment and said that it had occurred in my honour!’10
Some compliment; some honour! What van Braam did not realize
was that these contests had a deeper meaning. Whereas for a visiting
European dignitary like himself a tiger and buffalo fight might have
been seen as a rather gruesome form of entertainment, the equivalent
of bear-baiting or bull-fighting in Europe, for the watching Javanese
the contests had a much more profound significance. They equated
the Europeans with the quick and deadly tiger and themselves with
the powerful wild buffalo. Although the former was ferociously
aggressive, it had no staying power and was nearly always defeated by
its slower, more cautious and resilient adversary. In this particular case,
both rounds had shown the Dutch ‘tiger’ in a rather unflattering light:
in the first, although able to move in for the kill with the buffalo’s
tendons severed, it had not done so. In the second, the tiger had
jumped clean out of the ring. Did this not mean that the Javanese
could expect some unusual developments in terms of their Dutch
adversary? At the time of van Braam’s visit, the British invasion still lay
nearly three years away, but when it happened, those Yogyakarta
courtiers who could recall the October 1808 tiger-and-buffalo fight
on the southern alun-alun might have been forgiven for surmising that
it presaged a time when the once mighty Dutch and their now
176 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

defunct East India Company would be placed completely hors de

combat as far as their rule in Java was concerned by a new and more
formidable European enemy.

The British interregnum, 1811–1816

News that the British were planning an invasion of Java was known
there soon after the fateful tiger-and-buffalo fight in Yogyakarta. In
late 1810, a returned Mecca pilgrim from Java’s north coast, Haji
Mustapa, who appears to have witnessed the British naval build-up in
Melaka and Pulau Pinang, was arrested by the Franco-Dutch author-
ities for spreading rumours of an imminent British attack.11 At the
same time, the future British lieutenant-governor of Java sent secret
letters to various Indonesian rulers from Melaka announcing that the
British would be coming to help them ‘make an end’ of everything
associated with the Dutch and the French in Java and the eastern
archipelago.12 With the fall of the last Franco-Dutch stronghold in the
Indian Ocean, Mauritius (Île-de-France) on 7 December 1810, the
way was clear for a full-scale attack on Java.The Javanese elite would
now experience Britain at its imperial zenith, what historian Chris
Bayly has termed that island nation’s ‘imperial meridian’
(1780–1830).13 They would also find that they had exchanged one
form of colonial tyranny for another, no longer a Napoleonic marshal
this time but a ‘virtual Napoleonic philosopher’ and instinctive
authoritarian, Thomas Stamford Raffles, a man ‘who had a strong
distrust of the [native] chiefs and a desire to rule autocratically’.14
Appearing off Batavia on 3 August 1811, the British expedition
consisting of over 10,000 seasoned troops – half British line regiments
and half Bengal sepoy battalions and Madras horse artillery – was an
altogether more impressive army than Daendels’s hastily gathered
force, two-thirds of whom were raw local recruits. Despite the
obvious mismatch, the British-Indian attackers appear to have
conducted themselves with extreme ruthlessness. This can be seen
from the name of the swamp – ‘the swamp of the corpses’ (Rawa
Bangké, now Rawa Mangun) – into which they flung the dead after
they had overrun Daendels’s great redoubt at Meester Cornelis
(present-day Jatinegara) on 26 August 1811. Casualty figures ran as
high as 50 per cent for the European defenders and 80 per cent for
the local Javanese and Madurese auxiliaries.15 This was more a battue
than a battle. During the six-week campaign the Franco-Dutch force
lost over 10,000 men. Such behaviour, occasioned perhaps by the
ideological nature of the conflict in which the British were engaged,
The Destruction of Java’s Old Order 177

namely the overthrow of French Republicanism and the restoration

of pre-revolutionary monarchical principles in Europe, gave the lie to
the enlightened and liberal ideals proclaimed by the Governor-
General of India, Lord Minto (in office 1807–13), following the
Meester Cornelis engagement:

The inhabitants of Java now touch the fortunate moment when they will
be placed under the protection of a power which will keep the calamities
and sufferings of war far from their shores and under the guardianship of
a just and beneficent government whose principle it is to combine the
interests of the state with the security, prosperity and happiness of every
class and denomination of the people. Let the people prove itself worthy
of those blessings by a timely display of grateful zeal and obedience.16

Such ‘shock and awe’ continued when the British turned their atten-
tion to Yogyakarta, which they took by storm in a three-hour opera-
tion that began at first light on 20 June 1812. Even Raffles admitted
that while British casualties were light, losses among the Javanese
defenders had been ‘dreadful’.The body of the Javanese commander,
who was tracked down and killed in his private mosque, was inten-
tionally mutilated.17
This was the first time in Javanese history that a European force
had overrun a kraton, and the plundering went on for four whole days,
an unending stream of booty being carried to the Residency on ox-
carts and on the backs of porters. In India, booty was one of the major
perquisites of East India Company officers and the British army in
India had fought for the right to keep everything in fortresses, courts,
and strong points taken by assault. Yogyakarta was no exception.
Raffles referred briefly to this process in a dispatch to Lord Minto
written soon after the fall of the kraton:

The whole of the tangible property of Djocjocarta fell to the captors . . .

but in the immediate distribution they took more upon themselves than
was justifiable. . . . I had no reason to expect so hasty and hurried a
measure on their part, but the mischief being once done, it was useless to
object or condemn. . . .The universal opinion [has been] that in places
carried by assault the army was entitled to make an immediate distribu-
tion of treasure and jewels, and the authority of Lord Cornwallis
[Governor-General of India, 1786–93, 1805] as well as the precedent of
Lord Lake [commander-in-chief of the Indian Army and conqueror of
Scindia during the Second Mahratta War, 1803–5] were considered deci-
sive.18
178 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

In vain did the lieutenant-governor cite the example of Lord

Wellesley (Governor-General of India, 1797–1805), who had tried –
but failed – to prevent the army helping itself to the massive booty
from the treasure of Tipu Sultan of Mysore (reigned 1782–99) when
his fortified capital at Seringapatam was stormed in 1799 at the end
of the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War (1798–9).
The treaties signed between the British government and the courts
on 1 August 1812 gave legal title to the radically altered political envi-
ronment in which the south-central Javanese kraton were now forced
to exist.The new treaties, the lieutenant-governor averred, would place
the south-central Javanese courts ‘on such a footing as might no longer
endanger the tranquillity of the country’19 and would open up their
administrations to significant liberalization and reform.The annexation
of these eastern outlying provinces, many of which had earlier been
demanded by Daendels, meant that numerous – but not all –
Yogyakarta and Surakarta provincial administrators (bupati) lost their
positions and livelihood, for the British government only wanted to
retain officials from the rank of sub-district head downwards.
The introduction of Raffles’s land tax scheme into these annexed
regions and the lieutenant-governor’s over-optimistic view of their
productive capacity – Kedhu in particular – resulted in great hardship
for the local population. Not only were the tax demands pitched too
high, but the population – particularly those with dry fields – were
also required to pay in cash – preferably silver – rather than in kind.
This forced them into the hands of Chinese moneylenders who
charged extortionate interest, an issue we will return to shortly.At the
same time, many of the previous dues and personal services expected
by the local Javanese officials remained in force.20 Raffles’s land
annexations in August 1812 exacerbated social problems at the courts
and in Javanese society more widely, which would later manifest in
the breadth of support for Diponegoro at the time of the outbreak of
the Java War.
There was one further clause in the treaties that bore even harder
on the local population of the princely states. This was article eight,
which stipulated that all foreigners and Javanese born outside the
Principalities should henceforth fall directly under European govern-
ment jurisdiction and be tried according to government law.21 Raffles
stressed that the article was specifically designed to afford protection
to the Chinese and to ensure that they received their legal rights. But
this seemingly innocuous provision had far-reaching consequences, in
particular for the inhabitants of south-central Java. After February
1814, when the Resident’s courts were established, all litigation
The Destruction of Java’s Old Order 179

between these inhabitants and the Chinese, as well as foreigners or

subjects born outside the territories of the south-central Javanese
kraton, was tried under government law and not under Javanese-
Islamic law.This meant that Javanese plaintiffs and defendants hailing
from the sultan’s and Sunan’s dominions, who became involved in liti-
gation with non-Javanese or those Javanese born in government terri-
tories, were forced to have their cases tried under legal norms and law
codes of which they had no personal knowledge or understanding.
Raffles’s 1812 treaty, his subsequent legal reforms, and the question
of the sovereignty of Javanese-Islamic law in criminal cases would all
prove significant in the later context of the Java War. Unlike the issue
of Islamic religious practice, which tended to divide Diponegoro’s
court and santri (student of religion) supporters, the former favouring
a rather less strict observance than the latter, British moves against the
competence of the royal and religious courts in criminal cases united
the two groups. Diponegoro’s demands to be recognized as the regu-
lator of religion with special competence over issues of criminal
justice thus had widespread resonance.
The 1812 treaties were a disaster for the south-central Javanese
courts. Not only did they involve a significant reduction in their terri-
tory, they also left a potentially dangerous long-term social and
economic legacy, especially in Yogyakarta. Here the combination of
the fall of the court, the plundering of its treasury, artefacts, and
archives, and the imposition of Raffles’s treaty dealt a shattering blow
to the prestige and charisma of the court. Besides the financial and
territorial losses, the looting of the kraton was undoubtedly felt at a
deep psychological level by most Yogyanese. In previous Javanese
history, such an event had usually signified that the court had been
irredeemably defiled.The loss of magical power that such a defilement
entailed usually necessitated the removal of the court site to another
place. This had happened after the fall of Plérèd in June 1677 and
Kartasura in June 1742. But there seems to have been no attempt to
move the Yogyakarta kraton after June 1812, a seemingly fateful month
for the fall of Javanese courts. Besides, the sultanate did not have the
financial resources even if it had wished it. The sense of shame and
disappointment at the events of 1812 persisted, however. There are
references in the Javanese sources that even before the British attack
some held the view that the court’s lustre (cahya) had been so
tarnished that a move was essential.22 The aged Pangéran Ngabèhi,
elder brother of the exiled second sultan, probably spoke for many
when he referred to the surrender of his personal kris (stabbing
dagger) at the time of the British assault as a form of castration.23
180 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

Later, following the second sultan’s restoration (17 August 1826) and
return to the kraton (21 September 1826) during the Java War, some of
the letters written to him by Yogyakarta princes, who had joined
Diponegoro, dwelt on the sense of shame they had experienced in
witnessing his treatment at the hands of the British and the humiliation
of the plunder of the kraton.24 These feelings of humiliation and bitter-
ness towards the Europeans were to deepen during the fourth sultan’s
reign (1814–22), when the political and economic influence of the
European government in the princely territories became ever more
pronounced.They put in perspective the attempts by Diponegoro early
in the war to bring about the final destruction of the Yogyakarta kraton
and to establish a new undefiled kraton at another site. ‘All Java knows
this’, the lawyer Willem van Hogendorp would later write, ‘how the
Dutch allowed the kraton [of Yogyakarta] to be turned into a brothel
and how Diponegoro has sworn to destroy it to the last stone and expel
the [European] landowners who have driven out the Javanese offi-
cials.’25 The yearning for moral regeneration under the banner of Islam
and the restoration of the sultanate’s prestige became significant themes
in the years preceding the Java War and go far to explain why so many
members of the Yogyakarta court rallied to Diponegoro in 1825.

The role of the Chinese

The plight of the Chinese in south-central Java at the time of the
outbreak of the Java War in July 1825 was due in large measure to
another aspect of the British administration – continued by the
returned Dutch administration after August 1816 – which
contributed to the rising unrest in the south-central Javanese coun-
tryside.This was the working of the tollgates (bandar). In the space of
just twelve years (1812–24), following the British take-over in August
1812, the revenue received by the colonial government from the
bandar in the Yogyakarta territories alone nearly quadrupled.26 These
stopping places, which were positioned a day’s journey on foot from
each other, were frequented by Chinese merchants, some of whom
had bought the right from the local captain of the Chinese or kapitan
cina to levy tolls from other travellers for looking after their goods and
belongings overnight. Over time, a fully fledged bandar would be
established run by a Chinese tollgate keeper. Sometimes a market
would also develop from the wayside stalls (warung) serving the
overnight shelter. Then, as the Chinese bandar became more familiar
with the surrounding countryside and greater pressure was put on
him by his kapitan cina to pay higher rents, smaller tollgates (rangkah)
The Destruction of Java’s Old Order 181

would be set up on adjacent country lanes. Observation posts (salaran)

were also constructed on the borders of the customs districts
controlled by the separate bandar to check that the requisite taxes had
been paid before traders passed into a new zone.These developments
were accelerated by the rise of regional trade in the seventy years of
peace that followed the Giyanti treaty of the mid-eighteenth century.
So much so that just before the outbreak of the Java War, in the words
of the Dutch commissioners charged with enquiring into the admin-
istration of the principalities in 1824, ‘there was a tollgate at the
entrance of nearly every village and hamlet’.27
A senior Dutch official, Jan Isäak van Sevenhoven (1782–1841),
who considered the tollgates along with the porters’ guilds as the two
greatest evils of pre-war Javanese peasant society, gave a depressing
account of the sort of scene that became an all too familiar occur-
rence at tollgates throughout south-central Java in this period. He
described how a Javanese on the way to market would be forced to
wait for hours in a queue before his load was inspected. If his buffaloes
grazed on the tollgate keeper’s land during this time he was fined, and
if this fine was not paid his draught animals were impounded so that
at harvest time it was not uncommon for a Javanese farmer to surren-
der the bulk of his profits to cover the rent of his own animals from
the local bandar.28 When the peasant cultivator’s turn came for his load
to be inspected, the tollgate keeper would browbeat him and demand
that he hand over a large percentage payment on his goods for right
of passage. The peasant cultivator would then throw himself at the
tollgate keeper’s mercy:‘Ampun tuwan [Have mercy, Sir!], my family is
poor!’ But if he refused payment, he ran the risk of having his entire
load confiscated. During the long hours of waiting, the farmer would
often be tempted to take opium, which was readily available at the
bandar and usually retailed by the keeper as an additional income
source. In the event of an overnight stay, there would be the added
beguilement of ronggèng (dancing girls, prostitutes) and gambling
parties, which would further eat into the farmer’s meagre savings. If
he had serious ill-luck at cards, the farmer would often be forced to
part with his clothes and even the money, which many Javanese
traders and peasant cultivators borrowed from their village heads to
cover the cost of the toll dues. In such a situation, it was not uncom-
mon for a peasant cultivator to take to a roving life as a bandit or
porter on the roads rather than face the ignominy of returning
empty-handed to his village.29
Appeals to local Javanese officials about abuses of power by the toll-
gate keepers were usually unavailing because the officials themselves
182 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

were given cash gifts to ensure they overlooked extortionate practices.

In addition, a journey to the court towns to put a case before the
Residency court was usually beyond the means of the average farmer.
The only way a ‘little man’ (wong cilik) could revenge himself on a toll-
gate keeper would be by enlisting the help of local bandits and getting
them to plunder the bandar or burn it to the ground. Such cases of
burglary and arson occurred with increasing frequency in the years
before the Java War, as can be seen from the rising value of goods
stolen from the tollgates.30 Many Chinese tollgate keepers also lost
their lives.This situation became desperate following the outbreak of
the war when all the tollgates in the vicinity of Yogyakarta were burnt
to the ground.31 But popular retribution such as this often spelled
disaster for the inhabitants of neighbouring villages, which, under the
terms of the Javanese criminal codes, were liable to pay an indemnity
amounting to two-thirds of the value of any stolen goods or a ‘blood
price’ (diyat) – which was double the amount for a dead Chinese than
for a Javanese – to the family of the murdered man if the crime could
not be resolved satisfactorily.32
Faced with the threat of constant attack, the tollgate keepers began
to organize their own ‘private armies’ of bodyguards and thugs, some
of them recruited from former sepoys, thus adding another twist to
the spiral of violence in country areas as the Java War loomed.33 Even
when van Sevenhoven was first writing just before the British take-
over of the tollgates in August 1812, the potential that they might
develop into a serious impediment to trade in south-central Java was
already evident. Twelve years later, when he served as commissioner
enquiring into the administration of the principalities, the bandar had
become so effectively sited that nothing could be transported on the
roads without going through one. If a Javanese tried to evade a toll-
gate by taking a cross-country route, the tollgate keeper’s spies would
usually report his action, resulting in the forfeiture of his goods.34 The
increase in customs posts had a significant effect on the price of food-
stuffs in south-central Java. Nowhere was this more evident than in
Yogyakarta, where prices of rice and other necessities were nearly
double those in Surakarta, which benefited from cheap transport costs
for bulk goods along the Bengawan Sala (Solo River).
The colonial government was perfectly aware of the harmful
effects of the tollgates and it made some moves to restrict their influ-
ence before 1825. The British abolished the bandar along the Solo
River in February 1814 and the Dutch followed suit in Kedhu in
1824, a move that led to an immediate increase in the number of
markets and the level of trade in the province.35 In the same year,
The Destruction of Java’s Old Order 183

Governor-General van der Capellen appointed a three-man team of

commissioners headed by the Residents of Yogyakarta and Surakarta
and including van Sevenhoven, soon to take over as Resident of
Surakarta (in office 1825–7), to enquire into the working of the toll-
gates in the Principalities.The team reported back in October 1824,
unequivocally recommending the abolition of all internal customs
posts and suggesting that the European government should indemnify
itself for the lost revenue – estimated at about a million Indies guilders
– by annexing the western outlying provinces of Bagelèn and
Banyumas. They also urged that all Chinese residents in villages and
hamlets should be ordered to move to the royal capitals, that every
unmarried Chinese who had been in the Principalities for less than
two years should be expelled forthwith, along with those who were
unemployed or guilty of extortion, and that no new Chinese immi-
gration should be allowed.36 As one of the commissioners, Hendrik
Mauritz MacGillivray (1797–1835), later put it:

The Chinese are our work tools and although each year we rejoice over
the increased [tax revenues] which are ascribed to [increased] prosperity
and welfare, we bind the iron yoke more firmly on the shoulders [of the
Javanese] . . . for a million guilders a year worth of taxes we compromise
the welfare and happiness of almost two million inhabitants who are not
immediately under our protection . . . but whose interests are so clearly
linked to ours.37

Only the ‘good nature and peacefulness’ of the Javanese, in the

commissioners’ opinion,38 had enabled the oppression of the tollgate
system to continue for so long. They ended with a fearful prophecy:
‘We hope they [the Javanese] will not be awoken out of their slum-
bering state, for we reckon it as a certainty that if the tollgates are
permitted to continue, the time is not far distant when the Javanese
will be aroused in a terrible fashion.’39 Despite the dire warnings of
imminent agrarian unrest from nearly every official who studied the
problem, the post-1816 Dutch administration felt it could not forgo
the lucrative tollgate revenues from the Principalities.40 The nearly
threefold rise in annual profits from the tollgate farms in Yogyakarta
between 1816 and 1824 seems to have made the senior officials in the
Finance Department in Batavia blind to the fact that the bandar were
paralysing trade.Writing in November 1824, a mere two months after
taking over the once profitable tollgates of Bantul and Jatinom to the
south of Yogyakarta, the local Chinese tollgate keeper reported that he
had become bankrupt.41 A prolonged and severe drought since the
184 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

beginning of the year had destroyed the cotton crop and basic food-
stuffs such as castor-oil plants, soya beans, and maize were in short
supply. Rice prices were soaring but little trade was being carried on
in the local markets because commerce had effectively collapsed.
In these terrible months before the Java War, the south-central
Javanese countryside became a place of suspicion and terror. Armed
gangs operated with virtual impunity, murders were rife, and the daily
activities of the local peasant cultivators took place under the ever-
watchful eyes of the tollgate keepers’ spies, who were positioned on
every village and country road to prevent the evasion of toll dues. Even
the dead on their way to burial were liable for imposts, and mere
passage through a tollgate even without dutiable goods would expose
the traveller to what the Javanese sarcastically came to refer to as the
‘bottom tax’ (pajak bokong).42 Neither were high-placed Javanese offi-
cials exempt. The Secretary (Assistant-Resident) of Yogyakarta, Pierre
Frederic Henri Chevallier (1795–1825), remarked how the grey-haired
bupati of Nganjuk, a district in the Surakarta eastern mancanagara,
remarked wrily that he was less fearful of the tigers infesting the teak
forests on his cross-country journeys to the Sunan’s capital to attend
the Garebeg festivals than he was of the bare-faced thugs who manned
the tollgates on the Nganjuk–Surakarta highway.43 Other Javanese offi-
cials spoke with scarcely concealed contempt of the obscene way in
which their wives and daughters were physically searched for items of
jewellery by Chinese bandar newly arrived from the maritime
provinces of China who were barely conversant in Malay.44
The Dutch now began to refer to the Chinese as ‘a race of
customs house keepers’ in their reports echoing the common
Javanese expression for them as ‘tollgate people’.45 Huibert Gerard
Nahuys van Burgst (1782–1858), who served as Resident of both
Surakarta (1820–2) and Yogyakarta (1816–23), noted that barely one
Chinese in twenty who came to the Indies from China ever returned
to the place of their birth, so rich were the pickings in Java.46 Yet not
all Chinese were by nature oppressors. Before the post-1816 Dutch
administration had ratcheted up its fiscal demands to intolerable
levels, there were a number of favourable reports of the behaviour of
Chinese tax-farmers. During the British period, the principal
Chinese land-renter in Wirasaba in east Java, Lib Sing, who
controlled over 200 villages, was reported to have been ‘a kind and
indulgent master’ under whom the wong cilik or common people
liked to take service because ‘the lands and villages in his area were
better looked after than elsewhere’.47 Similar reports were made of
the Chinese land-renters of Ulujami near Pekalongan on the north
The Destruction of Java’s Old Order 185

coast, the ‘rice granary’ of Semarang.48 Even Chinese tollgate keepers

were praised. In May 1812, during his journey across Java, van
Sevenhoven noted that the Chinese bandar at the ferry crossing at
Kreteg on the Opak River to the south of Yogyakarta ‘seemed the
very best sort of tollgate keeper’, whose subordinates ‘appeared
healthy and robust’.49 What had changed in the post-1816 period
was not the character of the Chinese but the character of the fiscal
regime they served.And for this the post-1816 Dutch administration
must take full responsibility.
Although van der Capellen’s government was principally responsi-
ble for the sharp rise in tollgate and market revenues after 1816, the
British were the midwives to another equally disastrous development:
the rapid extension of the opium retail trade. The greater ease of
opium imports from Bengal following the lifting of the British block-
ade of the archipelago in August and September 1811 and the finan-
cial pressures on Raffles’s government were the key reasons.50 Once
again, the Chinese came to assume a prominent and invidious role as
farmers and retailers, opium retail and tollgate farming often going
hand in hand.
The statistics for official opium sales in the Principalities reflect the
sharp increase in opium consumption that began in the British
period. Between 1802 and 1814 sales doubled from forty chests of
148 pounds avoirdupois each to eighty, by which time the wholesale
value of a chest had increased twofold due to the effects of inflation,
the tightness of the British naval blockade (1804–11), and the more
stringent British enforcement of the opium monopoly after they
assumed control of Java in August 1811. During the decade 1814–24,
revenue from the Yogyakarta opium farm multiplied five times. By
1820 there were 372 separate places licensed to retain opium in the
sultan’s territories, namely nearly every major tollgate, sub-tollgate,
and market in the sultanate. The exact number of opium addicts is
difficult to ascertain. On the basis of consumption figures compiled in
the late nineteenth century, a Dutch official estimated that some 16
per cent of the then 20-million strong Javanese population took
opium.51 But if one counts all those who inhaled and digested ‘poor
men’s’ varieties of the drug, such as opium-soaked cigarettes, opium-
seasoned coffee, and opium-laced betelnut, the incidence of narcotic
consumption was almost certainly very much higher.52 Raffles, for
example, distinguished between the crude opium or manta ‘eaten’ by
people in the interior of Java, particularly in the Principalities, and the
prepared opium or madat/candu smoked extensively along the north
coast.53
186 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

During his journey through south-central Java in May 1812, van

Sevenhoven remarked on the widespread use of opium among the
members of the porters’ guilds and unemployed labourers in the court
towns. He also noted how the tollgate opium outlets had spread the
habit among Javanese in the countryside.54 As he passed through the
usually bustling market of Klathèn one morning, he noticed how full
the opium dens were and how threadbare their inhabitants: some were
barely clothed, others were dressed in worn-out kain (wrap-arounds).55
One and a half cents was enough, on average, to purchase a small wad
of opium-soaked tobacco, containing at the most 76 milligrams of
opium, which represented about 15 per cent of a porter’s daily wage at
this time.56 For many it offered the only release from a life of unre-
lieved toil and hardship. In Pacitan, in the immediate post-Java War
period, a huge religious feast (slametan) would be held to celebrate the
end of the coffee harvest when crop payments would go on ‘opium
eating’.57 The drug was also used widely as a stimulant and as a valued
part of the Javanese pharmacopoeia for treating various ailments.58
During the Java War, there were reports that many of Diponegoro’s
troops had ‘fallen sick’ for want of opium, and Chinese peddlers did a
brisk trade behind the prince’s lines when the violent sinophobe senti-
ments of the first months of the war had abated somewhat.59 Several
Yogyakarta princes and high officials also acquired a taste for the opium
pipe, and princely addicts were noticed among Diponegoro’s followers
at his headquarters at Selarong in late July and early August 1825.60
A pastime for the rich, opium addiction was a disaster for the poor.
Even the slightest predilection for the drug would exhaust the scarce
savings of the Javanese peasant and made his already difficult
economic position even more precarious.The road to social degrada-
tion and crime was ever present. Nahuys recognized this during the
Java War when he called for the rounding up of the thousands of land-
less labourers and footloose vagrants in south-central Java, ‘men with
no ricefields whose [thin] shoulders and smooth hands bear no marks
of labour and whose eyes, lips and colour betray the habitual use of
narcotics’.61 The social consequences of opium addiction and the
increasingly salient role played by the Chinese as retailers were yet
another strand in the rapidly deteriorating socio-economic conditions
in south-central Java in the post-1816 period. Along with the toll-
gates, the opium farm lay at the heart of the rise in anti-Chinese
sentiments among the Javanese population in the decade before the
Java War. Attacks on Chinese tollgate keepers and merchants would
become an increasingly salient feature of popular movements in
south-central Java as the war neared.
The Destruction of Java’s Old Order 187

Conclusion
The humiliations experienced by the Yogyakarta elite at the hands of
the Dutch and the British were the inevitable outcome of their
inability to come to terms with the reality of the new European colo-
nialism born of the twin industrial and bourgeois democratic revolu-
tions that had convulsed the Atlantic world in the late eighteenth
century. The changes had been introduced into Java too rapidly and
in too brutal a fashion. In the space of just under four years, the south-
central Javanese courts had been forced to accommodate themselves
to a new form of centralized colonial government that stood in direct
contradiction to their own political philosophy of divided sovereignty
in Java. Given time, they might have been able to reshape their polit-
ical conceptions to legitimize the changed realities, but they could not
do it in the quick fire way demanded by Daendels and Raffles. The
result was disaster.This was particularly the case for Yogyakarta, which
had entered on this period of cataclysmic change with ostensibly the
most powerful and prosperous court, but in fact hopelessly divided
against itself and ruled by a vain and inflexible man.The rapid germi-
nation of intrigues within the court literally tore it apart just at the
time when it needed its undivided energies to cope with the new
challenges posed by a resurgent Europe.The Yogyakarta sultanate had
been founded by the sword in the mid-eighteenth century. In June
1812, it could be said to have perished by the sword.
For the British colonial government in Java, there was little doubt
about the significance of their victory. Raffles’s exceedingly able
Dutch assistant, Harman Warner Muntinghe (1773–1827), who later
took British citizenship, hailed it as an event of similar significance to
Robert Clive’s victory at Plassey in June 1757, which had opened up
the whole of northern India to British rule. Raffles echoed this in a
dispatch to his patron, Lord Minto, when he stated that ‘the European
power is for the first time paramount in Java . . . we never till this
moment could call ourselves masters of the more valuable provinces
in the interior, nay, our possessions on the sea coasts would always
have been precarious and, had [our] military force been materially
reduced, much eventual danger was to be apprehended’.62 Although
both Yogyakarta and Surakarta would continue as dismembered states
after 1812, they were never again in themselves capable of posing a
threat to the position of the European government.When a new chal-
lenge did materialize under Diponegoro’s Javanese-Islamic banner in
July 1825, it would owe its inspiration and energies to influences
outside the great court traditions.The support given to the prince by
188 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

the religious communities and the Javanese peasantry, both groups

who felt themselves increasingly excluded from the new colonial
order and oppressed by the Chinese-run tollgate system, was more
important than the traditional foci of court patronage and loyalty. In
many ways, June 1812 rather than the end of the Java War should be
seen as the date when the new colonial era dawned in Java. Out of
this collapse and the legacy of bitterness that it left, however, a new
and more potent combination of elements in Javanese society would
emerge. It would bring the restored Dutch colonial regime close to
destruction at the start of the Java War and lay the foundations for the
future Indonesian nationalist movement of the early twentieth-
century. A turning point as significant as any in the colonial era, it
would set the course of Indonesian history for the next hundred and
fifty years.
10
Their Own Path to Crisis?
Social Change, State-Building,
and the Limits of Qing Expansion,
c.1770–1840

Kenneth Pomeranz

The period from about 1770 to 1840, or at least 1785 to 1840, can be
seen as one of escalating crisis for the Qing empire, fitting well with
the proposed ‘age of revolutions’ or ‘world crisis’. (In the Qing case,
however, the situation worsened after 1840.) The most striking indi-
cation of trouble was a series of rebellions, which revealed surprising
military weaknesses and wiped out longstanding fiscal surpluses. Four
of these rebellions – including by far the largest one – originated in
highland areas to which many Han Chinese1 farmers had recently
migrated: in Taiwan (1787–8); Hunan and Guizhou (1794–5);
Sichuan, Hubei, Henan, and Shaanxi (the White Lotus Rebellion of
1796–1805); and in Shaanxi again (1813–15). North China millenar-
ians led two brief uprisings (1774, 1813) – the only two that could,
by any stretch of the imagination, be said to have begun in a ‘core’
region. (The relevant area was a long-settled, easily accessible plain
entirely populated by Han Chinese, but it was economically and
ecologically quite fragile.) Chinese pirates off the Guangdong coast,
allied with a resurgent Vietnamese state, led another. Unsuccessful
Qing incursions into Burma (1770) and Vietnam (1788) and an
inconclusive war with the Kokandis on the far western frontier
(c.1817–35) add to this sense of accumulating problems.
But ultimately the Qing defeated all rebels, and lost no territory to
invaders; they also fought successfully against Nepalese/Gurkha troops
in Tibet in 1788 and 1793.Thus, though our period ended with Qing
defeat in the Opium War (1839–42), this should not be seen as the
inevitable culmination of a steady military decline. While the Qing
189
190 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

could not defend their coast against new technologies (most notably,
steamships that allowed the Anglo-Indian forces to move upriver
behind coastal gun batteries),2 they remained reasonably successful
against known threats. Circa 1835 they might even have thought things
were improving: certainly 1805–35 had been better than 1785–1805.
Arguments for a steadily gathering crisis must therefore begin on
other levels: socio-economic, ecological, and fiscal. Here the evidence
is mixed. Despite rapid population growth, core regions were reason-
ably prosperous, and do not show clear signs of economic decline
until after 1830.3 But there were fundamental trends that left the
Qing very little room for manoeuvre.

Causation? A frankly materialist sketch of the Qing path to late

eighteenth-century crisis
Coastal China from Shanghai on south was among the world’s richest
regions until the Industrial Revolution: in particular, Yangzi Delta
living standards (population 31,000,000 plus in 1770) were probably
comparable to mid-eighteenth-century England’s or Holland’s. Its
agriculture was exceptionally productive – not only per acre, but per
labour day – its handicraft industries (especially textiles) huge and
solidly profitable, and at least its grain markets – the only ones for
which we have thorough studies – remarkably well integrated.4
Estimates of real wages for unskilled Chinese workers are less posi-
tive; the most recent study suggests that even in China’s richest
regions they were in the mid-eighteenth century well below real
wages in Amsterdam or London, and more like those in Milan.5
However, this is not inconsistent with a general comparability in
living standards.Wage labourers were a small minority in China: prob-
ably under 10 per cent of rural adults even in the highly commer-
cialized Lower Yangzi, where one might expect widespread
landlessness. By contrast, in at least England and Holland, wage
labourers probably represented close to half of the working popula-
tion by the late seventeenth century. And as we shall see shortly,
Chinese wage labourers were far poorer than most tenants, let alone
smallholders.Thus a comparison of unskilled real wages is a compar-
ison of the bottom of the income scale in one place with something
close to the middle in the other.
Land, labour, and tenancy systems
China had an unusually low rate of landlessness, even in highly
commercialized and densely populated regions. In poorer areas, most
Their Own Path to Crisis? 191

farmers were smallholders, with probably little more than 15 per cent
of land farmed by tenants, and 10 per cent or so by wage labourers.6
In richer regions, tenancy was common, sometimes covering more
than half the land, but most tenants had very strong cultivation rights,
which were themselves a kind of property.7 These rights seem to have
emerged as matters of local custom during the fifteenth century,
amidst considerable rural unrest.8 By the middle to late seventeenth
century, these rights had become widely (if often reluctantly)
accepted by both landowners and officials of the new Qing dynasty;
they could be legally bought, sold, mortgaged, inherited, and so on.9
A spectrum of rights existed, varying in strength and details, depend-
ing on the time, place, and manner in which they were acquired, but
the general outlines seem to have become increasingly standard over
time, at least in ‘advanced’ areas.10
Having secure use rights, these tenants often behaved like owners,
making land-improving investments (which strengthened their claim
in cases where any doubt remained).11 They also resembled owners of
their own means of production in that they earned something closer
to their average product than their marginal product. The best esti-
mate I can currently make is that secure tenants earned 2.5 to 3 times
as much as year-round wage labourers in the same region, and were
almost as far ahead of insecure tenants; their net earnings were closer
to those of smallholders.12
Political and demographic reinforcement
The Chinese state wanted an independent peasantry it could tax and
rule without going through local magnates; thus, despite some
misgivings, it generally supported secure tenancy arrangements.13
Such arrangements also gave tenants strong incentives to do the very
careful work needed for high-yielding wet rice cultivation, without
monitoring by landlords (who increasingly lived in towns). However,
some grim aspects of the social system also kept the numbers of
completely dispossessed people small.
First, some women were sold, either as concubines or as servants.
We know very little about the ‘typical’ circumstances of such sales, but
some presumably involved hard-pressed families who sold a daughter
rather than their land rights. The number of women thus removed
from the regular marriage market was probably under 5 per cent,14
but that was non-trivial. Second, some families (including some pros-
perous ones) practised sex-selective infanticide.15 While we do not
know how widespread this was either – or how it varied by time and
region – the imbalance from differential infant and child mortality
192 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

was probably at least 10 per cent: the same imbalance found for the
(quite possibly atypical) imperial lineage.16 In nineteenth-century
Xuzhou – in a particularly poor, disaster-prone and violent region –
the male:female sex ratio apparently reached 129:100.17
These imbalances created a permanent crunch in the marriage
market; thus the poorest men – typically landless labourers – rarely
married.18 In each generation, some luckless smallholders and tenants
fell into the proletariat – as one would expect in a competitive
economy – but since few proletarians reproduced, their numbers did
not grow. (In Europe, by contrast, proletarians may have had higher
birth rates than small farmers.)19 Having only one mouth to feed,
labourers could survive on the fraction of tenant incomes that they
earned. And in some sense, the non-growth of the proletariat helped
to stabilize the Chinese socio-economic system.
In another sense, however, these ‘bare sticks’ were a major source of
instability. They had little to lose, often lacked community ties, and
were over-represented among bandits, rebels, and those involved in
(or scapegoated for) criminal activity. Neither of the Qing standing
armies – the Eight Banners and the Green Standard army – made
much effort to recruit/absorb these men into the forces of order
during peacetime, though local officials sometimes hired them as
additional ‘braves’ once the standing forces had failed to suppress a
conflict. Interestingly, married men temporarily away from ‘their’
women – whether in cities or on the frontier – were not considered
similarly threatening;20 apparently it was lacking a proper social niche,
not the physical absence of a female companion, that made men seem,
and sometimes be, dangerous.
Consequences for migration, regional differences, and fiscal issues
Unskilled urban workers in China earned little more than agricul-
tural labourers – as one would expect without strong guilds – and
thus much less than secure tenants or smallholders.21 Consequently,
most people had little reason to head for the cities; the urbanization
rate remained low;22 and the large agricultural surplus instead fed
rural industrial producers who remained embedded in farm house-
holds. Individuals often specialized (in theory, men ploughed and
women wove23), but households combined diverse income streams.24
Home-based commercial handicrafts allowed women to earn
money without compromising female modesty,25 and households
with some land rights plus another source of income had a stake in
order. To the extent that the Qing had an ‘economic development
policy’, it often consisted of officials helping poorer areas to imitate
Their Own Path to Crisis? 193

the combination of farming and rural handicrafts epitomized by the

Yangzi Delta.26
These same factors also shaped migration.While per capita income
differed greatly among Chinese regions – with the Yangzi Delta
perhaps 50 per cent above the empire-wide average circa 175027 –
real wages for the unskilled were apparently fairly uniform.28 Thus
people who could not pay the substantial rent deposit required for
secure tenancy in long-settled areas (or the even larger sum needed to
buy land), would gain little by heading for the Yangzi or Pearl River
Deltas. For them, the frontier offered better opportunities: per capita
incomes were lower but working to clear land often yielded owner-
ship or cultivation rights on that land.29 Thus, net migration was
strongly away from the richest regions in China.That pattern, in turn,
had the effect of maintaining, rather than eroding, economic gaps
between regions.30
Richer areas paid higher taxes.The Yangzi Delta in particular paid
far more than other areas, but local elites (loosely supervised) provided
most of its public goods.31 Surplus revenues extracted from the Delta
went elsewhere and helped to underwrite the conditions for family
farming (and Confucian morality) in more ecologically fragile areas.
These measures included subsidies for well-digging in the semi-arid
north and north-west, paying to control major north China rivers
(while expecting southern communities to manage this themselves),
placing most emergency granaries in poor areas, providing loans to
help migrants to certain regions start farms, and so forth.32 Thus
interregional transfers directed part of China’s surplus towards stabi-
lization in peripheries rather than capital accumulation and possible
transformation in the cores.
From stability to crisis
There were other reasons why the Qing economy, though certainly
dynamic, was not moving towards Western-style modernity. The
Yangzi Delta’s handicraft industries were, for various reasons, probably
less well positioned for technological change than at least some of
their Western counterparts.33 The Delta was particularly poorly posi-
tioned for the vital transition to much more energy-intensive kinds of
production. It had never had much heavy industry, largely because it
lacked metallic ores and, above all, energy sources. Wood, coal peat,
and even water power (due to flat terrain) were all scarce;34 there
were also significant obstacles to importing large amounts of energy.35
Under the circumstances, the relative price of energy was exception-
ally high along the China coast, making it unlikely that people would
194 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

focus on finding ways to be more productive by using more of it.

(One study finds that in 1704 real wages in Canton were almost at
London levels, but charcoal was almost twenty times as expensive rela-
tive to labour as it was in London.36) Meanwhile the Delta’s light
industry relied heavily on long-distance trade with other parts of
China, exchanging cloth and other handicrafts for about 20 per cent
of its grain supply plus raw cotton, timber, beancake fertilizer, and
other primary products.37
In the absence of growth based on technological transformation, it
was crucial for China that extensive growth continue – which it
could not do forever. By the end of the eighteenth century the system
outlined above was stagnating, and during the nineteenth century, it
unravelled. Population growth in long-settled parts of the interior
(e.g. the Middle Yangzi and North China) decreased the amount of
grain, timber, etc. those areas supplied to the coast; they also developed
their own handicrafts, substituting for imports from the coast. By
1840, an average piece of cloth exported from the Yangzi Delta
bought half as much rice as in 1750, trade volumes probably shrank
too.38 Thus in economics, as in politics, crisis began in peripheries and
eventually affected cores. The Delta found some growing markets,
mostly in Manchuria, South-east Asia, and among high end domestic
consumers. Moreover, the Yangzi Delta’s population almost stopped
growing from c.1770 to 1850, while China’s almost doubled.39 Delta
living standards probably didn’t fall much, but they did stagnate.
This made subsidizing other regions increasingly burdensome.
Meanwhile, population growth in those poorer regions made ecolog-
ical stabilization increasingly challenging: the soaring cost of Yellow
River control, which absorbed 10–20 per cent of Qing spending from
1820 to 1850, is the outstanding example, but not the only one.40
With most lowland territories becoming crowded by the mid-nine-
teenth century – except in Manchuria, which the Qing tried to
maintain a preserve for ‘traditional’ Manchu lifestyles – new farms
were carved from hillsides, wetlands, and other ecologically risky
places.41 Adding Western incursions and other misfortunes pushed the
system beyond its limits, and environmental, political, and social crises
in the poorer regions (especially ethnically mixed frontiers) reinforced
each other.The resulting unrest eventually engulfed rich regions, too
– most famously when the Taiping emerged from the Guangxi
mountains to make the Yangzi Valley a battleground for over a decade
– inaugurating a century of disunity and recurrent uprisings.
Their Own Path to Crisis? 195

Frontiers, instability, and state capacity

Most large-scale collective violence occurred in areas that could be
called frontiers. Some were ‘frontiers’ in the sense of being near some
other polity (e.g. the Vietnamese/south China piracy crisis and war
with the Kokandis). But most involved frontiers of settlement rather
than of conquest, i.e., areas that were far from any border, but which
had been fairly sparsely populated until a recent influx of settlers.
Some cases involved violence between Han newcomers and other
ethnic groups. But the biggest uprising of all – the White Lotus
Rebellion of 1796–1805 – occurred in the highlands of Hubei,
Sichuan, and Shaanxi, where very few non-Han lived.A combination
of factors brought Han migrants to this region in the late eighteenth
century: population growth, increased lowland demand for mountain
products (especially timber, paper, charcoal, and iron), and increased
familiarity with American maize and potatoes, which would grow at
high elevations with relatively little labour (making it easier to feed
loggers, paper-makers, etc.). This rugged terrain had previously had
very few people and little law and order: many earlier residents were
people, such as salt smugglers, who preferred inaccessible territory.
White Lotus sectarian networks seem to have helped to organize
immigrant society – in contrast to some other highland districts
where many of the migrants were Hakka42 and ethnic organization
helped to keep order. When the Qing attempted to crack down on
the illegal White Lotus sect, they touched off a defensive rebellion that
they could not contain.43
This summary of ‘frontier’ problems allows at least some negative
conclusions.The problem was not one of ‘imperial overstretch’ in the
most direct military sense; the biggest problems were not in recently
conquered territories. Second, though many of these uprisings
occurred in areas of considerable ethnic tension, ethnic minorities
were not always the rebels; nor were Han Chinese always allied with
the state. The Lin Shuangwen rebellion on Taiwan, for instance, was
mostly carried out by Han Chinese, and certain groups of ‘cooked
aborigines’ (i.e. semi-civilized, from the state’s perspective) played a
critical role in its suppression.44 Many East Turkestani Muslims fought
for the Qing during the Kokandi invasion, despite rumours about
Muslim fifth columnists and massacres of Muslims by Han militia.45
In multiethnic Yunnan, the brief rebellion of 1817–18 did not divide
people on ethnic lines, and the Qing found a variety of allies to help
them suppress it. They created much more trouble for themselves in
the 1830s and 1840s, when they allied themselves with Han militia,
196 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

which were organized on ethno-religious lines, and reflexively blamed

Muslims for most disturbances.46 Neither frontier settlement nor
ethnic diversity automatically bred rebellion; the biggest problems
ensued when a Qing state with little grass-roots presence on the fron-
tier nonetheless decided that it could not tolerate certain alternative
systems of local authority.
Consequently, even though these uprisings often occurred in
ethnically diverse peripheral regions, they do not fit into the wave of
‘tribal breakouts’ that C. A. Bayly sees occurring in many Asian
empires between 1780 and 1830. They do, however, confirm the
importance of frontiers as an outlet for migrants.47 The problem was
not necessarily that the frontier was ‘disappearing’ – at least not in the
early part of our period. (Taiwan, for instance, still had plenty of
cultivable land during and long after the Lin Shuangwen Rebellion.)
The bigger issue was that periods of rapid immigration outstripped
the ability of the Qing to tie the leaders of frontier society firmly to
the state (and to regulate downstream environmental consequences of
some new settlements).Violence could result both from the weakness
of state control and from sudden, lurching, efforts to rein in non-state
organizations to which frontier authorities had previously ceded a
good deal of de facto control.
The Qing were certainly not the only empire in this period that
failed to control the movement of land-hungry frontiersmen, to tax
them for their own defence, or to retain their loyalty – British North
America comes to mind, for instance. However, the scale of the
migrations,48 the particular importance of highland areas49 that were
both ecologically fragile and inhospitable to regular troops (especially
cavalry, a Qing speciality), and the disproportionate role of young men
destined to be permanently single all suggest a distinctive variant of
more widely shared problems.The Qing civil administration was also
quite thin on the ground – by 1800 a magistrate with an average staff
of perhaps a few hundred would be responsible for a county averag-
ing about 300,000 inhabitants50 – but that in itself cannot be a full
explanation: similar or higher ratios prevailed in densely populated
core regions that remained fairly peaceful. Probably the bigger differ-
ence is that core regions often had large numbers of ‘gentry’. These
men had participated in Confucian education and the civil service
exams, and were often wealthy, but were not in office; they often
helped to fund and organize public projects and mediated between
state and society. While a considerable literature emphasizes the role
of disgruntled lower gentry in various sorts of unrest, we must
remember the much larger numbers of such people who served as
Their Own Path to Crisis? 197

crucial auxiliaries of orthodoxy.51 Frontiers often lacked such people,

and government there needed to recruit lineage heads, minority
chieftains, unlettered landlords, and others into functionally equiva-
lent roles in order to operate effectively.
In this context, it is noteworthy that there were some fairly
common problems that the Qing did not face.The relative absence of
serious foreign threats between 1759 and 1839 is an old story, but it
is equally striking that the Qing were remarkably untroubled by
urban uprisings prior to 1900. A few strikes in Lower and Middle
Yangzi cities turned violent during the very early Qing (though fewer
than in late Ming), and there were other sorts of occasional unrest;52
but in general Qing cities were fairly peaceful, and certainly saw very
little antistate violence. While many rural uprisings eventually took
control of mid-sized or even major cities, no major uprisings against
the state began there. Moreover, only a tiny percentage of eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century incidents of collective violence (most of it
among social groups and not targeting the state) occurred in Beijing
or in provincial capitals. Many did touch prefectural and county capi-
tals, or other cities, but these cases were clustered in a few periods of
exceptional instability, and rarely originated in town.The baseline of
collective violence in ‘ordinary’ times was mostly rural; in the most
disorderly periods, rural incidents would increase further above this
baseline, and the number of incidents in low-level urban centres (e.g.
county capitals) would jump suddenly.53
The contrast to the morphology of European disturbances – which
often began with an urban incident and spread to the countryside
only if the urban unrest incident proved unusually lasting, giving rural
people a perceived opening by paralysing the state54 – is particularly
striking, but the role of urban insurgency in China seems to me (more
impressionistically) to be relatively minor as compared to Ottoman
and late/post-Mughal patterns. It is further worth remembering in
this context that, while China’s urban population was small in
percentage terms, it had many of the world’s largest cities in absolute
terms. Moreover, because of patterns of sojourning, China’s cities
were probably just as male as the tumultuous frontier areas I have
described (and much more male than the more restive cities of
Western Europe, which often had female majorities); they may,
however, have had fewer lifelong bachelors than the frontier.
Moreover, except for the two brief millenarian uprisings in north
China mentioned above, China’s long-settled lowland areas were also
relatively peaceful until the end of our period. Even in eighteenth-
century Fujian, which was notorious for its ‘lawlessness’, at least the
198 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

Urumqi

Hami

GANSU
Ya
l on
g
R.

SICHUAN
Jinsha R.

Lhasa Chongqing
gzi
Yan
La

YUNNAN
nc
an
g

Kunming
R.

Re
d
R.

Map 4 China in the eighteenth century (adapted from Susan

Naquin and Evelyn S. Rawski, Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century,
New Haven, CT, 1987).
 Their Own Path to Crisis? 199

MANCHURIA

Heilongjiang

Jilin

Shengjing
Rehe

Beijing

Mt. Wutai ZHILI

SHANXI SHANDONG

U
JIANGSU
Xi’an

SHAANXI HENAN Yangzhou

Nanjing
Suzhou
Shanghai
R.

ANHUI
gzi

Hangzhou
n

HUBEI Putuoshan
Ya

Ningbo
Hankou Huizhou
.
zi R
ZHEJIANG
JIANGXI
HUNAN

GUIZHOU FUJIAN
Quanzhou
Zhengzhou
Xiamen

GUANGXI GUANGDONG Chaozhou Province boundary

Guangzhou
Macroregional boundary
TAIWAN Qing Empire boundary
200 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

reported homicide rate was lower than in many parts of the North
Atlantic world.55 While some long-settled lowland areas suffered from
endemic and violent competition between groups – lineage feuds
(often tied to land reclamation) in coastal Guangdong and Fujian,
banditry in impoverished, flood-prone Huaibei, etc. – antistate
violence was generally rare until the more general breakdown of the
mid-nineteenth century.The geography of anti-Qing uprisings, then,
seems consistent with the economic, demographic, and fiscal system
sketched out above, and stands in sharp contrast to various patterns
that seem more typical of some other empires: cases where challenges
to the state were provoked by more intensive extractive efforts in core
areas (which might offend elites, plebeians, or both), new patterns of
class conflict, the breakdown of arrangements between tribal military
specialists and agrarian states, and various stresses related directly or
indirectly to wars between states.

Connections? From political economy to politics, policy, and

ideas
The heavily structural account given above should not obscure the
significance of conscious policy choices. For instance, the Qing chose
to keep Manchuria largely off-limits to Han settlement, though that
outlet would accommodate about twelve million permanent migrants
(and millions more seasonal or life-cycle migrants) once restrictions
were lifted in the late nineteenth century, providing considerable
relief to the North China plain – probably the most ecologically,
economically, and socially strained lowland region in the empire, and
the only one to generate significant antidynastic uprisings during this
period.56 Foreign trade would probably have increased faster with
more liberal policies, providing some relief to coastal cores suffering
from the contraction of long-distance internal trade discussed above
(though it would have been small relative to the regional economies
involved). More consistent policies on various internal frontiers might
have done better at preventing violence than the stop-start policies on
immigration, land clearance, and ‘Sinicization’ of non-Han popula-
tions that actually prevailed. Different policies for what was becoming
a less effective bureaucracy might have allowed tax collection, flood
control, military provisioning, and so on to function well somewhat
longer, though in the case of flood control they probably could not
have avoided crisis too much longer.57 And to the extent that differ-
ent policies might have at least postponed crises, it becomes less likely
that global influences specific to this period were the crucial factors.
Their Own Path to Crisis? 201

The strongest case for a very powerful ‘global’ influence in this

period would probably be the opium trade. Maritime imports alone
went from a level sufficient to supply 100,000–200,000 daily users in
the mid-eighteenth century to enough to supply perhaps ten million
addicts (in a population of about 380 million c.1839); the most rapid
increases came after the development of Malwa opium c.1815.58 Both
domestic opium production and imports from Central Asia (as
opposed to British India) also escaped state suppression campaigns, so
that the Anglo-Indian role in this epidemic was crucial only for a few
decades; but in that time, British India produced the innovations in
opium processing, quality control, and methods of consumption that
combined to create a much more attractive and addictive product.59
And while this trade solved some basic revenue and control problems
for the British, it exacerbated such problems in China.
In economic terms, the increasing outflow of silver that resulted
caused considerable disruption to China’s monetary system – espe-
cially when combined with a downturn in Latin American silver
production during and immediately after the years of revolution –
with particular impact on those peasants who sold their output for
copper but paid taxes in silver.60 But here, too, we should not exag-
gerate. First of all, the copper–silver exchange rates that were figured
into tax collection were generally not market rates, but rates set by
local administrative fiat. At any rate, land taxes remained quite low in
comparative perspective;61 and a century of rising grain prices and
(largely) fixed nominal tax rates from 1730 onwards should have offset
much of the increase caused by currency shifts in the last couple of
decades of that century. The outflow of silver might have had more
general effects on commerce, but these are not currently understood.
Socially, the impact was probably a good deal larger. Addiction per
se no doubt took its toll, and the increased difficulty of maintaining
public order in the key smuggling areas (principally the Guangdong
coast) had implications for later conflicts. Moreover, opium imports
may have had a role in stimulating another important kind of
commerce.An interesting but largely unexplored topic in eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century Chinese history is the proliferation of
firearms in private hands – which is probably related both to increased
smuggling and to the increased number of frontier settlements that
could not count on protection from the Qing. Given that the Qing
military was also relatively slow to adopt new, more powerful, firearms
during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the gap
between civilian and state coercive abilities was quite likely to have
been declining during this period – in contrast to many places where
202 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

military build-up was accompanied by the gradual disarming of civil-

ians.62 But here, too, we should remember that any strong impact
from opium trading comes late in our period and strongly affected
only some regions.
Foreign ideas were considerably less influential.The liberal demo-
cratic ideas of the Atlantic revolutions had no significant impact in
China until much later. Foreign religious ideas – specifically millenar-
ian Protestantism – would soon have a major impact by inspiring the
Taiping Rebellion (1851–64), but not quite yet. Major Islamic revolts
– assuming one even wants to call Islam ‘foreign’ at this point in
Chinese history – are also mostly post-1850. Jahangir’s 1826 inva-
sion/jihad was Muslim in inspiration, but it was successfully defeated,
and many Muslims in the area stood by the Qing; ironically the rebel-
lion’s greatest long-term impact may have been that it led to a hard-
ening of anti-Muslim attitudes among some Han and Manchu
powerholders, thus indirectly radicalizing later generations of Muslim
subjects.63
In other cases, we can find politically relevant intellectual and
cultural developments in China that might possibly have been influ-
enced by foreign contact, but were probably home-grown. Thus, for
instance, we find the Qing, in the course of an early nineteenth-
century conflict with Britain over Macao, articulating ideas of terri-
torial sovereignty that sound increasingly ‘Westphalian’.64 But this was
not the first time they had done so – they had made similar arguments
in the course of defining their borders with Russia a century earlier.65
Nor was it a once and for all change: for several decades more, the
Qing continued to employ both ‘territorial’ and ‘tributary’ ideas of
sovereignty as suited them in particular cases.
The global circulation of ideas about what it meant to claim terri-
tory – including new kinds of mapping, ethnographic investigation,
and so on66 – certainly had some impact on Qing frontier policy,
especially in the south-west. However, those influences may well have
been stronger c.1600–1760 and after 1850 than in the century in
between. The mid-eighteenth century saw not only the completion
of conquests in Central Asia, but (beginning slightly earlier) a change
in policy regarding frontiers of settlement. After the first decade or so
of the Qianlong reign (1736–96), there was a retreat from Yongzheng-
era (1723–36) attempts to expand direct rule in the south-west.67
Later – around the turn of the century, and especially after 1820 –
intellectuals showed a renewed interest in more direct rule, Han
immigration, and assimilationist policies on minorities. When the
Qing realized, after defeating Jahangir’s invasion of Xinjiang, that they
Their Own Path to Crisis? 203

needed to keep more troops there than they could comfortably afford,
one might have expected eighteenth-century proposals to pull back
from the far north-west to be heard again; but instead the regime
turned to promoting more colonization of the area as a way of financ-
ing its troops there, with enthusiastic support from some of the same
groups that had previously been sceptical of expansion into Central
Asia.68 Perhaps one factor behind this increased assertiveness was an
increasing perception that both Muslim and European foreigners
were hostile and dangerous, but this is speculative. At least explicitly,
‘statecraft’ thinkers drew on older Chinese thinkers and internal polit-
ical debates, not foreign ones, to justify this agenda.69 Moreover, this
new aggressiveness had little impact on policy outside of Xinjiang and
perhaps Yunnan. Thus while some changes in thinking about sover-
eignty and cultural unity may parallel trends elsewhere, this seems less
firmly connected to global currents than some earlier developments,
such as the interest that Kangxi (r. 1661–1722) had shown in Jesuit
cartography, ethnography, etc. over a century earlier.

Back to comparisons: dilemmas of growth and statecraft

If it is hard to find strong global connections, it is much easier to find
useful points for comparison, since both the Qing state and Chinese
society faced many of the same basic problems as other empires.The
effects of commercialization and population growth were, to some
extent, experienced across much of the world; so were growing fiscal
problems as various sorts of government costs grew faster than popu-
lation or revenues; so were resistance to new fiscal expedients, and
difficulties in controlling the agents who mobilized some of the addi-
tional revenues states sought.
In 1713, the Qing had taken the unusual step of freezing the land
tax, their main source of revenue – and largely kept that promise
throughout our period. The grain tribute surcharges assessed on the
Lower Yangzi did rise significantly, and we think that irregular, off-
the-books charges by local governments also grew. Because grain
tribute surcharges not only rose sharply, but fell very unevenly on
different types of households (as was probably also true of illegal local
surcharges), they caused significant discontent in the Lower Yangzi
during the 1830s and 1840s. But even in these prefectures, the most
heavily taxed in the empire, the tax bite peaked at 10–15 per cent of
agricultural output;70 empire-wide it was under 4 per cent of agri-
cultural output, and less still of total income.71 By 1766, ‘public’
revenues,72 which were almost 70 per cent from agricultural levies,
204 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

were about 60 per cent higher than in 168273 – when military victo-
ries on Taiwan and in the south-west finally completed the Qing
conquest – while the population had at least doubled. Under the
circumstances, the Qing needed to raise revenues from non-agricul-
tural sources to provide themselves with some flexibility and with the
means to meet certain growing costs: principally those of flood
control and of stipends for rapidly multiplying Manchu bannerman
families, and in the years to come, of suppressing rebellions.74 They
did not, however, pursue new revenues as aggressively as European
states (which faced endless war among relative equals) or probably
South Asian states during the Mughal/British interregnum.
To some extent, Qing efforts to tap new revenue sources paralleled
those seen in many other places: state commercial monopolies and
taxes on foreign trade. This is hardly surprising – in a preindustrial
society, non-agricultural revenues mostly mean commercial revenues,
and monopoly rents and taxes levied at ports of entry are easier to
collect than more generalized sales taxes. In fact, what stands out in
comparative perspective is how small the Qing efforts were in this
direction, even during the immensely expensive suppression of the
White Lotus Rebellion (1796–1805). The salt tax monopoly was
successfully reorganized to yield more revenue,75 but it remained the
only domestic monopoly of any importance. Compared to various
other empires’ measures – tobacco, alcohol, sugar, salt, and other
consumer goods monopolies, licensing and royalty schemes for mines,
and so on – this represents fairly modest revenue-raising.
The government-backed oligopoly on foreign trade at Canton was
by no means unique, despite British efforts to paint it as highly pecu-
liar.76 Officials at Canton faced strong pressure in the early nineteenth
century to increase customs receipts, which went directly to the impe-
rial purse. But maximizing revenue often involved sacrificing control,
as officials turned a blind eye to an increased smuggling (including that
of opium) so as to draw ships to port while raising the exactions on
their legal cargoes.77 Such trade-offs between revenue and regulatory
power were part of many expedients undertaken by growing but hard-
pressed states around the world, including tax-farming and sales of
office.The phrase ‘growing but hard-pressed’ is important here, point-
ing to at least two complexities that are well known but bear repeat-
ing. First, revenue-enhancing, control-compromising measures were
often both a contributing factor to the crises of the late eighteenth
century and a response to them. Second, many states became consid-
erably larger, at least fiscally, at the same time that some of their other
capacities and their legitimacy may have weakened.
Their Own Path to Crisis? 205

What is striking, though, is how much less decisively the Qing

chose revenue over other priorities.Tax farming and the sale of offices
remained rare in China until the much greater crisis of the Taiping
Rebellion. (Exam degrees were sold earlier, but they did not usually
lead to administrative appointments.) Huge sums were raised in
‘contributions’ from wealthy individuals, especially during the White
Lotus Rebellion;Wang Yeh-chien has estimated that the share of state
revenues coming from merchants’ contributions and commercial taxes
soared from 17 per cent under Qianlong (1736–95) to 54 per cent
under Jiaqing (1796–1820). But it then fell to 36 and 23 per cent
during the next two reigns.78
As large-scale fund-raising from merchants was not institutional-
ized, neither were most favours granted in return for contributions.
Contributions sometimes yielded small implicit grants of authority;
the elite of Suzhou, for instance, apparently gained greater control
over the designation of its local worthies and historical sites in return
for massive payments to help defeat the rebels.79 But in comparative
perspective, this does not represent a particularly large compromise of
the state’s control of key resources. And only after 1850 did the state
borrow – an expedient that often compromised control in return for
cash, and was both a contributor and a response to state crises from
Bengal to Boston.
Without the use of such measures, the growth in Qing revenues
both leading up to and during the late eighteenth- and early nine-
teenth-century crisis was comparatively modest. As noted before,
Qing state revenues rose less than the population did between 1682
and 1766. Between then and 1850 statutory revenues barely rose at
all.80 The real figure is somewhat higher, thanks to increased payments
from sources such as the Canton customs that went directly into the
Imperial Household Department; and in an emergency, the state had
the capacity to raise huge though irregular revenues from ‘contribu-
tions’ without diluting its power. Illegal local government exactions
probably rose, but not enough to change this general picture. Overall,
Qing revenue-raising seems to have a modest increase compared to
Ottoman trends over the same period.81 It may have been closer to
trends in France (where revenue as a share of GDP stagnated
c.1800–50) though the French state started from a considerably higher
base, in part because its revenues had grown significantly in the
decades leading up to the Revolution.82 It was very small compared
to British efforts.83 By contrast, Chinese government revenues (in real
terms) probably grew faster from 1850 to 1937 than those in most
colonies or in the Ottoman Empire, and kept up with revenue growth
206 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

in at least some Western European countries,84 despite the fact that

Chinese economic growth in that period lagged increasingly far
behind that in most of Europe. But that later revenue growth went
along with sharper changes in the nature of Chinese state-making.
The Qing did not simply ‘fail to raise enough revenue’ in this
period, and therefore ‘fail to respond’ to the crises they faced; instead,
they responded differently. For example, the Jiaqing period (officially
1796–1820, but really 1799–1820) saw reforms that involved pulling
back from financially unsustainable state commitments and intrusions
into local society that had provoked popular resistance, while renego-
tiating relationships between different parts of the bureaucracy and
between the state and local elites.The state’s endorsement of gentry-
led militia during the White Lotus Rebellion – which it had previ-
ously forbidden – should be seen not as a premonition of its loss of
control over its own armed forces a century later but as a pragmatic
adjustment that allowed it to defeat the rebels while causing less
carnage in local society and spending less money than it had early in
the rebellion.85
The contrast between these measures and contemporaneous
European efforts at what Charles Tilly called ‘nationalization’86 is
striking. In early modern Europe, the fundamental challenges of mili-
tary administration involved (a) getting the state’s hands on more
resources and (b) gaining control of the suppliers, mercenaries, finan-
ciers, and other contractors external to the state who made huge profits
from military mobilization (and in doing so reduced the bang the
state got for its buck). It thus made sense that late eighteenth-century
efforts to streamline mobilization would concentrate on bringing
more of the process in-house, and would contribute to an increase in
the size of state apparatuses that might well accelerate, rather than
reverse itself, in times of crisis. In China, however, the principal chal-
lenge was controlling corruption and malfeasance by commanders
and suppliers, who were already officials of the state (or sub-officials,
such as yamen runners).Thus the innovation that accompanied Qing
war-making was often focused on finding ways to control (or even
circumvent) the state apparatus itself, and less on expanding that appa-
ratus to incorporate new functions.87
Some similar points could be made about the ‘campaigns’ to engi-
neer environmental stability and safety from famine.The Qing had no
need to add functions such as flood control, assistance to people reset-
tling on selected frontiers, or the creation of large buffer stocks of
grain to the list of tasks that the state at least sometimes carried out.
Nor, more generally, did they need to argue with elites over whether
Their Own Path to Crisis? 207

in principle these were tasks that properly belonged to ‘state’ or

‘society’.As R. Bin Wong points out, there was a strong consensus that
what mattered was making sure these tasks were carried out; who
carried them out was less important, and could be decided on prag-
matic grounds reflecting local conditions (particularly the reliability of
the local gentry).88 Instead, the larger challenge in the first half of the
nineteenth century was to control the costs of what had become very
large in-house programmes for environmental and social stabilization.
But while the rural-focused social and economic dynamics
outlined in the first part of this chapter endured well past the crises of
our period – indeed, until very recently in some ways – the distinc-
tiveness of Chinese state-making began to change much sooner.
Beginning in the 1850s, we increasingly see the Chinese state aggres-
sively raising taxes and focusing more on commercial taxes;89 grant-
ing more privileges to merchants in return for revenue; borrowing;
modernizing its standing army; and so on.A bit later, we see it invest-
ing in infrastructure designed more to help create a modern sector in
rich areas rather than focusing on stabilizing poorer ones.90 Even for
this later period, one would not want to overdo the degree of conver-
gence in state-making strategies, but similarities to both European and
colonial processes were definitely stronger in the post-Taiping period
than before. Does that mean that the policies of c.1770–1850 should
be seen as some sort of detour – a delay before China ‘figured out’ the
‘right’ policies for coping with new challenges?
From a certain highly teleological perspective, such an argument
makes sense, but its limitations become clear if we think prospectively
about the problems and challenges the Qing could have seen c.1800,
and about their successes as well as their failures. The financial and
other contributions from elites (both near the war zones and far away)
that the Qing needed in order to withstand rebellions were success-
fully mobilized, without significant compromises of state autonomy;
the White Lotus sect was politically neutralized (1813 proved to be its
last rebellion); a gradual (as it turns out, perhaps too gradual) trim-
ming of non-functional military units got under way; and undersized
county governments in many areas both took on more staff (admit-
tedly, mostly outside the official personnel system) and began, at least
in selected areas, to develop a new division of labour with local
elites.91 Neither military units nor owners of capital nor other elites
shifted support towards rival claimants of sovereignty.Though crucial
socio-economic issues could not really be resolved, modified versions
of old management techniques were at least effective enough to stave
off empire-wide crisis until the outbreak of the Taiping Rebellion in
208 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

1851 – an event that certainly derived in part from the intensification

of problems discussed in the first part of this chapter, but also
belonged in some respects to an era of unprecedented challenges. In
that period, the ways in which other parts of the world had emerged
from the ‘world crisis’ of 1760–1840 would, of course, matter much
more to China.
One could argue, then, that some basic material challenges were
shared among late eighteenth-century empires.At a very high level of
abstraction, all of them were coping with the effects of societies
‘outgrowing’ old state structures, rather than with ‘collapse’, ‘stagna-
tion’, or ‘decay’. But beyond those kinds of gross generalizations,
commonalities that span the Qing and other cases become harder to
develop; the fundamental institutional inheritances and reform strate-
gies of officials dealing with late eighteenth-century crises seem very
different. Under the circumstances, the effect of global flows on the
Qing was also relatively muted in this period: not trivial, but quite
probably smaller than in the previous 200 years, and certainly far
smaller than in the 150 years to come. For the time being, global
currents took a decided back seat to the working out of tensions
generated by domestic social and political structures. Connections
remain worth probing, but for this time, place, and set of issues,
comparisons seem a more promising optic.
The Age of Revolutions in Global
Context: An Afterword

C. A. Bayly

The global ‘turn’ in historical studies was an indirect response to the

perceived decline of the nation-state, the huge flows of capital across
the world, and the rise of Asia in the international economy that
occurred in the 1990s. Much of the new global history consisted of
comparison and analogy at world level, though analogy, as Freud once
said, is the weakest form of analysis. This volume demonstrates,
however, that a global perspective can be combined with significant
revisions in regional and national histories.Two interconnected ques-
tions emerge from the book. First, what determined the ‘age of revo-
lutions’ as a period of global historical time? Second, what were its
defining characteristics and consequences?
The volume takes the Seven Years War, 1756–63, as its starting
point. It is certainly true that in different ways the French, American,
and even Caribbean and Latin American revolutions were indirect
consequences of the enormous fiscal and military burdens placed on
European states, especially Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and
Portugal, following their attempts to project power transnationally on
the basis of limited and politically contested domestic resources.Yet a
significant context for these worldwide European conflicts was set by
the prior deformations of large multiethnic empires outside Europe:
particularly the Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals, and Mataram in
present-day Indonesia. The fragmentation, decentralization, or
collapse of these powers from about 1700 created threats to world
trade and also opportunities for the enrichment of the expanding
European empires. In the context of mercantilist ideologies, it drew
European states into worldwide warfare and the invasion of indige-
nous societies in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific.Yet the
decline or transformation of these great non-European empires was
itself brought about by a host of regional and local revolts. If these
209
210 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

cannot easily be described as ‘revolutions’, they were certainly

upsurges against intrusive state-forms, taxation systems, and official
cults. They were given range and force by new ideologies that were
deeply heterodox for the ruling groups and, by implication, they were
socially levelling.
What were the defining characteristics of the period at a world
level? While revolutionary upsurges, new concepts of the self and
citizen, and the idea of popular rights were pervasive, a major actor in
this volume is the growing state itself: militarized, increasingly intru-
sive, and, in many regions, muscle-bound by its conflict with revolu-
tion and ideological rebellion. In one important respect, the volume
greatly extends the argument about the growth of the state during
this period by bringing in the African continent more centrally.
Previous writers have tended to see Africa as an exception to these
global developments by virtue of the relative weakness of its states and
the existence of the ‘exit option’ of flight or migration for peasants
and labourers, leading to the characterization of the state as a mere
‘gate-keeper’. Joseph Miller, by contrast, shows here that weapons,
new ideologies of kingship, and transnational trade helped to create a
new state order in Africa, at least comparable with developments in
Europe or Asia.
It has long been clear, as Albert Camus once wrote, that the ulti-
mate beneficiary of all revolutions is the state. But over recent years
historians have been able to show much more clearly how the
transnational dimensions of modernizing and militarizing govern-
ment expanded, at the same time as its internal density grew greater.
The response to the revolutions across the world created a kind of
knock-on effect. In Europe, for instance, it was the searing experience
of the Irish rebellion of 1798, supported by revolutionary France, that
forced the British elite to try to buy middle-class Catholic support by
creating the Union of Britain and Ireland, a move that rapidly back-
fired. The complex financial relations between revolutionary France
and Algeria in the 1800s created the conditions for France’s ultimate
conquest of that country after 1830 and large sections of the former
Napoleonic army were mobilized to accomplish this.The Revolution
and Napoleon’s occupation of Spain and Portugal after 1805 created
the conditions for the creation of new creole states in Latin America.
The invigorated state roamed more widely even than this. Because
Britain was outclassed militarily in Europe, it seized a whole range of
indigenous and colonial states in the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa,
ruling them through forms of more intrusive viceregal power. The
new provinces included much of western and southern India, Java and
Afterword 211

Ceylon, the Cape of Good Hope, and, for a time, Egypt. European
and Indian troops, seamen, and administrators were scattered across
the world in greater numbers than ever before as the size of military
forces hugely increased. Distant new linkages were made, so that
Maori whalers were found off the coast of Newfoundland and South
Asian merchants traded in Brazil. There emerged, too, ‘para-colonial’
regimes, such as Tipu Sultan’s Mysore, the Sikh Punjab, Thailand,
Mehmet Ali’s Egypt, or Qajar Iran.These drew on some of the tech-
niques of European state-building pioneered during the wars. If not
revolutionary in the European sense, they spurned or transformed
existing dynastic legitimacy, becoming mini-Bonapartist regimes.
Tipu Sultan raised the Cap of Liberty over his fortress in south India
and rejected the authority of the Mughal Emperor, now compro-
mised by the British. Ranjit Singh’s new model army in the Punjab
was officered by a number of refugees from Napoleon’s armies.
Not all the older supremacies fragmented.The introduction to this
volume considers the survival of the Ottoman Empire and asks the
question why it did not experience a revolution itself. For the
Ottomans, the European revolutions were upsurges of atheism that
disrupted the God-given order of monarchies. But the Ottoman
Empire did, in fact, experience a sort of revolution quite apart from
the Wahhabi uprising in its fringes. The destruction of the Janissaries
was in reality a revolution of the state against society, as was much of
what followed through to the Tanzimat reforms after 1839.The Qing
Empire, as Kenneth Pomeranz argues here, soldiered on through this
period, despite increasing internal dissent.This was perhaps because it
was a smaller and less burdensome polity, financing itself, as Pamela
Crossley has suggested, by external expansion more than by increas-
ing internal taxation.1
Yet across much of the world the most striking development was
the internal rather than the external expansion of the state, which
followed from the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.At the close of
the American Revolution, William Pitt, the British Prime Minister,
had reduced the duties on tea to help bail out the East India
Company, pushing forward Britain’s opium and cotton trade with
China. But the general picture was of the increase in internal taxation,
especially on the wealthy, thus completing the story of John Brewer’s
‘military-fiscal’ state in Britain.2 Elsewhere, the pressure for regular
revenue during time of war created, first, a new tax-paying landlord
class in Bengal in 1793 and, later, a secular increase in taxation on all
British Indian territories. Effectively, then, it was the Indian peasant
tax-payer or revenue-payer who financed the greatly expanded
212 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

British Indian armies and created the conditions for further interven-
tion and territorial expansion throughout the next century. This
change was paralleled elsewhere across the world, though in a less
dramatic form. The experience of French occupation created more
integrated and intrusive bureaucracies in the German states, as T. C.
W. Blanning has shown.3 In Russia, the expansion of the purview of
the state under Catherine the Great was speeded up dramatically after
1815 as demobilized soldiers were planted in military colonies adjoin-
ing the Khanates of the Crimea and in the Caucasus.
The ‘conservative turn’ in the global history of the revolutionary
age, then, has left the state as the great winner. In the case of the revo-
lutionary states of Latin America, the emphasis has fallen on the
conservatism that preserved the rights of the Church, the corpora-
tions, and the creole elites. The revolutionary shine has even been
taken off the ‘black republic’ of Haiti where, once again, the survival
of an indigenous African and mixed-race slave-holding ruling class has
attracted recent scholarly attention. Equally, many historians have
commented on the fact that it was precisely at the time of the revo-
lutionary surges, from 1780 to 1830, that the slave trade reached its
apogee.The abolition of the British trade in 1807 had little effect on
the institution of slavery, while the trade itself merely moved into
Portuguese, Spanish, and Arab ships. Even in the British case, naval
moves against the trade often provided justification for colonial
expansion and invasion of the sovereignty of African and Arab rulers.
It was justly remarked that William Wilberforce was as passionately in
favour of British Christian domination in India as he was hostile to
the slave trade.
In the recent past, historians of Great Britain were taken to task for
spending their careers trying to prove that ‘nothing happened’. That
disease now seems to be in danger of becoming a global complaint.
So was there anything revolutionary about the ‘revolutionary age’?
The answer remains affirmative if we turn to a field that has been
somewhat unfashionable in the midst of the ‘cultural turn’: the history
of political thought. Here the years between 1763 and 1842 did
indeed witness an epochal change in the nature of popular ‘claim-
making’ and in the wider construction of political thought. It seems
to me that the concept of claim-making, put to good use by Frederick
Cooper,4 links ideas to social practice in the manner called for by
Lynn Hunt in this volume. It was a change that affected liberal and
conservative ideologies as much as radical ones. It transformed under-
standings of the role of the state and the nature of international order
as much as it empowered a radical republicanism and discourse of
Afterword 213

popular rights. Indeed, this change created the very foundation of

modern global politics: the dichotomy between ‘right’ and ‘left’ that
replaced the antithesis between sin and goodness as the measure of
Man. It was transnational in implication and it also powerfully affected
people’s understanding of and reaction to broader economic and
social changes. The introduction correctly reminds us that change
came slowly and patchily across the world, but that is no reason to
deny its very existence.
One striking illustration of this point is embodied in David
Armitage’s own notion of the ‘contagion of sovereignty’, which
spread globally after the American Declaration of Independence.5
Armitage focused on the diffusion of this idea within the Americas
and the Atlantic world. But one can see it reflected across the globe
before the end point of this volume. Elites in the Philippines debated
‘independence’ and government by Filipinos before 1820. In India,
even a reluctant creole empire-loyalist such as Rammohan Roy spoke
of the inevitability of India’s ‘separation’ from Great Britain if the East
India Company’s despotism did not abate. British radicals as well as
conservatives in India and Ceylon were meanwhile using the word
‘independence’ itself to describe the coming dissolution of empire.
The point about this, as well as other idioms in the new political
language, was not that they necessarily had immediate effects, but that
they could be generalized, pluralized, and appropriated to different
conditions.
Another version of this new political idiom can be seen in the
notion of the liberal or ‘mixed’ constitution. Here we see the final act
of John Pocock’s ‘Machiavellian moment’ being played out across the
world and in Asia rather than the Atlantic world.6 The idea of the
republican constitution, Anglicized by British political theorists, and
appropriated by American patriots, came home to Europe at the same
time as it spread across the Asian world.The concept of a constitution,
of course, was itself an ideological compromise between republican
populism and the powers that be, compatible even with constitutional
monarchy.When the European Union celebrated the fiftieth anniver-
sary of the Treaty of Rome in the Presidential Palace in Rome in
2006, the Polish Republic sent a late nineteenth-century historical
painting of the declaration of the Polish Constitution of 1791, ‘the
second oldest democratic constitution in the World’, as its national
contribution to the exhibition.That constitution was stillborn at least
until the 1920s. More immediately significant across the world was
the declaration of the Cádiz constitution of 1810, which resulted in
stirrings across the whole Portuguese and Spanish colonial world.
214 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

Filipinos, who had already been alerted to the idea of the ‘British
constitution’ during the British occupation of Manila in the early
1760s, took up the idea again as a way of fending off the power of
Madrid. Rammohan Roy hosted dinners in the Calcutta Town Hall
to celebrate the Iberian constitutions, while his British, Irish, and
Portuguese friends toasted radical movements and the free press across
the world, including India itself. Meanwhile he searched the Sanskrit
texts, imagining his own version of a once and future Indian, or rather
‘Hindu constitution’.7
A third major ideological change over these three generations was
the hardening of ideas about the rights of peoples, states, and nations.
The works of Tom Paine and Benjamin Constant were diffused across
the world and translated into numerous languages by the 1850s, soon
to be joined by versions of Mazzini’s ‘Duties of Man’.8 These ideas of
human rights ‘bonded’ with ideas in societies outside Europe with
which they had an elective affinity. Older idioms concerning the
virtue of the pioneer, who mixed his labour with the land and its
produce, echoing Locke, proved hospitable to the notion of rights in
the Americas. Christian notions concerning the free will of the spirit
bonded with ideas of the status of Brahmins in Goa and aristocratic
birth in the Philippines to give rise to early movements for native
rights to be recognized alongside those of the Spanish- and
Portuguese-born. In the Muslim world the particular status afforded
to submission to God and Quranic piety empowered the Wahhabi
movements in Arabia and related jihadist purist movements in Central
West Africa, and ultimately India and China.
These movements were ‘revolutionary’ in a broad sense even if they
do not conform to the teleology of Western political thought. The
introduction and Robert Travers’s chapter draw attention to the
discursive battle between those who lauded the revolution of rights,
those who saw merely the sudden overthrow of legitimate power
(inqilab), and those who saw merely rebellion in the upsurges of these
times.Yet most of the great rebellions of this era were infused with a
sense of customary rights or of spiritual equality, as in the case of the
Sikh movements of the Punjab or the neo-Buddhist and nativist
revolts that scarred China in the latter part of Qianlong’s reign.
Rebellion in China took two forms: first, the creation of local insur-
rectionary states; second, networks of millenarian dissidence such as
the White Lotus movement or the Three Trigrams ‘conspiracy’.
Arguably, the Qing regime survived because these two elements never
came together in this period as their equivalents did in Europe. The
Taiping Rebellion, which broke out a decade after the end date of this
Afterword 215

volume, saw local state-building empowered by a semi-Christian and

neo-Buddhist ideology.
One critically important form of rights claiming that imprinted
itself heavily on the ‘age of revolutions’ was the demand for freedom
from slavery. The European and American revolutionary movements
were, of course, ambivalent about freeing slaves en masse. In general a
consensus, which allowed the continuation of slave-holding, persisted
right through to the end of our period. But, as Christopher Brown
writes, the movement to end slavery was pre-eminently an evangeli-
cal Christian ideological movement that pluralized the idea of eman-
cipation and spilled broadly into political theory and practice. Once
enunciated it changed the nature of political discourse.9 By the 1830s,
the subjection of poor Indian women to dancing and prostitution and
the subjection of colonized people more generally were being
denounced as ‘slavery’. Shortly after, as copies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
appeared in India, activists saw a similarity between American planta-
tion slavery and the ‘slavery’ of the Bengal peasant.
Freedom extended to the idea of freedom in the market. Indeed,
the longer-term consequence of Napoleon’s Continental Blockade
was to spur forward the British attempt to break into foreign markets
under the rubric of ‘free trade’. Free trade imperialism was one of the
most revolutionary consequences of the ‘age of revolutions’, leading
directly to confrontations with the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, Burma,
and China. For a time, France also adopted laissez-faire policies in
equal measure. Just as the antislavery movement and antipiracy poli-
cies resulted in attacks on the sovereignty of African and Arab princi-
palities, so attacks on monopoly as ‘despotism’ signalled the rise of
imperialism across the world.
The emergence of the nation-state from the detritus of revolu-
tionary war absorbed the attention of historians for many generations.
But the theories of Jürgen Habermas provided them with a new
marker of cultural change.The ‘public’ as an entity, reflecting both on
government and also on popular practice, emerged from the salon, the
coffee house, and the commercial practice of the eighteenth century.
But its significance was enormously expanded by the worldwide
revolution. As noted, politics across the world became polarized
between ‘right’ and ‘left’, transforming the language of politics. By the
1810s and 1820s Indian rogue horsemen – the Pindaris – could be
called the ‘Frenchmen of India’, while Bishop Heber could note the
Indian ‘advanced Whigs’ of Calcutta. More significantly, the newspa-
per and ephemeral pamphlet publications expanded hugely in volume
and the range of critical political scrutiny the press purveyed increased
216 The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

vastly. Hundreds of newspapers sprang up in the United States alone

between 1780 and 1830.There was an equivalent expansion of news-
papers catering to the elites of the new South American republics.
Meanwhile, the first newspapers, some in indigenous languages with
indigenous editors, sprang up in Calcutta, Penang, Singapore, and
Canton. The Istanbul and Beijing gazettes remained official publica-
tions, but they were forced to engage with information supplied by
nearby colonists’ newspapers and even to engage in debate with them.
Newspapers deployed the idea that there existed a transnational
‘public’, or as we would now say a ‘public sphere’, which represented
the common concerns of all humanity.This was a direct result of the
revolutionary paradox: its elevation of both the idea of the separate-
ness and sovereignty of peoples and the existence of a wider sphere of
‘rights of man’.
A final question raised by this collection concerns the outer
boundary of the ‘age of revolutions’ at a global level. At one end of
the period there was the Seven Years War, rightly seen as the first truly
transnational war in history, ranging as it did from the Americas to the
East Indies. As for the end date of the ‘revolutionary age’, the present
volume breaks with a predominantly European time-frame by taking
the onset of the Anglo-Chinese Opium War as its end point.To reit-
erate, Kenneth Pomeranz’s chapter on China helps to foster a sense of
difference within global history. Nevertheless, the rapid unravelling of
Qing authority after 1850 points to massive political and ideological
challenges that were only just held in check over this period of appar-
ent expansion and relative social peace. Philip Kuhn’s Soulstealers
provides some evidence for this view.10 China was perhaps only just
entering its own ‘age of revolution’ at the end date of this volume.
A few years after the tumultuous events in Canton, the 1848 revo-
lutions in Europe set off further chain reactions of dissidence and
conquest in Ceylon, French India, Canada, and Indochina.The rhet-
oric of ‘the Rights of Man’ was empowered once again across the
world. Perhaps the true end of the ‘age of revolutions’ was marked by
the reaction of the 1850s.The state across Europe and the Americas,
now empowered by railroads and new military capacity, strengthened
itself enormously, especially after the unification of Germany and Italy
and the American Civil War.The colonial state over much of the rest
of the world also entrenched itself violently for another two genera-
tions: in India in 1857, and through the French conquest in
Indochina, for instance. One small sign of the future was the creation
of a new state in Japan consequent on the Meiji restoration of
1868–72. Broadly, then, we may think of the ‘age of revolutions’ of the
Afterword 217

years from about 1760 to 1840 as framed in turn by a longer period

that stretched from 1720 to 1850, including a phase when the state
was unusually dominant stretching from about 1850 to 1914 (or 1870
to 1911 in the case of China).The expansion of the state was in turn
matched by the ideological and military challenges to it. Thus the
perceptive and novel essays in this volume begin a wider reconceptu-
alization of global history.
Notes

Introduction: The Age of Revolutions, c.1760–1840 – Global

Causation, Connection, and Comparison
1. Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The
British in Bengal (Cambridge, 2007), p. 31; see also Robert Travers,
‘Imperial Revolutions and Global Repercussions: South Asia and the
World, c.1750–1850’, ch. 8 in this volume, and Rajat Kanta Ray,‘Indian
Society and the Establishment of British Supremacy’, in P. J. Marshall,
ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, II: The Eighteenth Century
(Oxford, 1998), pp. 508–10, 519–20, 523, on Mughal responses to
inqilab.
2. Robert Clive to Richard Clive, 19 August 1757, in Bengal in
1756–1757, ed. S. C. Hill, 3 vols (London, 1905), III, p. 360.
3. Ghulam Husain Khan Tabataba’i, A Translation of the Sëir Mutaqherin; or
View of Modern Times, trans. Haji Mustafa, 3 vols (Calcutta, 1789–90), I,
p.‘467’ (sc. 463). For a discussion of this work, see Iqbal Ghani Khan,‘A
Book with Two Views – Ghulam Husain Khan’s “An Overview of the
Modern Times”’, in Jamal Malik, ed., Perspectives of Mutual Encounters in
South Asian History, 1760–1860 (Leiden, 2000), pp. 278–97.
4. ‘Nous approchons de l’état de crise et du siècle des révolutions’: Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, Émile, ou de l’éducation, 4 vols (Amsterdam, 1762), II,
p. 54.
5. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke’s Attack on the
French Revolution (London, 1791), p. 162.
6. John Adams to James Lloyd, 29 March 1815, in The Works of John Adams,
ed. Charles Francis Adams, 10 vols (Boston, 1850–6), X, p. 149.
7. Gary B. Nash,‘Sparks from the Altar of ’76: International Repercussions
and Reconsiderations of the American Revolution’, ch. 1 in this
volume; compare Nash, The Forgotten Fifth:African Americans in the Age of
Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2006).
8. Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Historische Kriterien des neuzeitlichen
Revolutionsbegriff ’, in Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik
geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt, 1979), pp. 68–9; also in English as
‘Historical Criteria of the Modern Concept of Revolution’, in
Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith
Tribe (Cambridge, MA, 1985), pp. 39–54.
9. Un libertin dans l’Inde moghole: Les voyages de François Bernier (1656–1669),
ed. Frédéric Tinguely (Paris, 2008), pp. 18–19.
10. François Bernier, Histoire de la dernière révolution des états du Grand Mogol
(Paris, 1670). On the politics of the term ‘revolution’ in English around
the same time, see Ilan Rachum, ‘The Meaning of “Revolution” in the

218
Notes 219

English Revolution (1648–1660)’, Journal of the History of Ideas 56

(1995), 195–215.
11. Louis Bazin, SJ,‘Seconde Lettre . . . contenant les révolutions qui suivirent
la mort de Thamas-Kouli-Khan’ (post 1747), in Lettres édifiantes et curieuses,
écrites des missions étrangères, 26 vols (Toulouse, 1810–11), IV, pp. 256–80.
12. Baron Antoine de Jucherau de Saint-Denys, Révolutions de Constantinople
en 1807 et 1808, précédées d’observations générales sur l’état actuel de l’empire
ottoman (Paris, 1818).
13. R. R. Palmer and Jacques Godechot, ‘Le problème de l’Atlantique du
XVIIIe au XXe siécle’, in Relazioni del X Congresso Internazionale di
Scienze Storiche (Rome, 4–11 Settembre 1955), 6 vols (Florence, 1955),V,
pp. 175–239; Godechot, Les révolutions (1770–1799) (Paris, 1963); Eng.
trans., Godechot, France and the Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth
Century, 1770–1799, trans. Herbert H. Rowen (New York, 1965);
Palmer, The World of the French Revolution (New York, 1971).
14. Max F. Millikan and W.W. Rostow, A Proposal: Key to an Effective Foreign
Policy (New York, 1957), p. 4.
15. As noted forcefully by Jaime E. Rodríguez O.,‘Two Revolutions: France
1789 and Mexico 1810’, The Americas 32 (1990), 239–56. Among
accounts inspired by Palmer, Lester D. Langley, The Americas in the Age of
Revolution, 1750–1850 (New Haven, CT, 1996), is expansive and hemi-
spheric, and Wim Klooster, Revolutions in the Atlantic World:A Comparative
History (New York, 2009), is both hemispheric and transatlantic.
16. R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of
Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ, 1959–64), I, p. 13.
For important reassessments of the work, see especially Palmer, ‘La
“Révolution atlantique” – Vingt ans après’, in Eberhard Schmitt and
Rolf Reichardt, eds, Die Französische Revolution – zufälliges oder notwendi-
ges Ereignis? Akten des internationalen Symposions an der Universität Bamberg
vom 4.–7. Juni 1979, 3 vols (Munich, 1983), I, pp. 89–104; William
Pencak, ‘R. R. Palmer’s The Age of the Democratic Revolution: The View
from America after Thirty Years’, Pennsylvania History 60 (1993), 73–92;
Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, MA,
2005), pp. 25–30; and Edoardo Tortarolo, Annie Jourdan, Jack A.
Goldstone, Simone Neri Serneri and Peter Onuf,‘L’era delle rivoluzioni
democratiche di Robert R. Palmer’, Contemporanea 10 (2007), 125–55.
17. R. R. Palmer, ‘The World Revolution of the West, 1763–1801’, Political
Science Quarterly 69 (1954), 1–14; Palmer, The Age of the Democratic
Revolution, II, p. 574.
18. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (London, 1962), pp.
ix, 2–3, 4.
19. Travers, ‘Imperial Revolutions and Global Repercussions’, ch. 8 in this
volume.
20. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction,
trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge, 1975), p. 176; Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel,
Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh, 2009).
220 Notes

21. Joseph C. Miller, ‘The Dynamics of History in Africa and the Atlantic
“Age of Revolutions”’, ch. 6 in this volume.
22. David Geggus, ‘The Caribbean in the Age of Revolution’, ch. 5 in this
volume.
23. C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World,
1780–1830 (London, 1989), ch. 6,‘The World Crisis, 1780–1820’; Bayly,
The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and
Comparisons (Oxford, 2004), pp. 88–9; John Darwin, After Tamerlane:The
Rise and Fall of Global Empire (London, 2007), p. 162.
24. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, p. 119; Darwin, After Tamerlane, p.
160.
25. E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘The General Crisis of the European Economy in the
17th Century’, Past and Present 5 (May 1954), 33–53; Hobsbawm, ‘The
Crisis of the 17th Century – II’, Past and Present 6 (November 1954),
44–65; Trevor Aston, ed., Crisis in Europe, 1560–1660: Essays from Past
and Present (London, 1965); Geoffrey Parker and Lesley M. Smith, eds,
The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, 2nd edn (London, 1997).
26. Jonathan Dewald,‘Crisis, Chronology, and the Shape of European Social
History’, American Historical Review 113 (2008), 1047. For penetrating
discussions of the concept of crisis, see Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Some
Questions Regarding the Conceptual History of “Crisis”’, in Koselleck,
The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans.
Todd Samuel Presner et al. (Stanford, CA, 2002), pp. 236–47; Koselleck,
‘Crisis’, trans. Michaela W. Richter, Journal of the History of Ideas 67
(2006), 357–400.
27. Geoffrey Parker, ‘Crisis and Catastrophe: The Global Crisis of the
Seventeenth Century Reconsidered’, American Historical Review 113
(2008), 1053–79; Michael Marmé,‘Locating Linkages or Painting Bull’s-
Eyes around Bullet Holes? An East Asian Perspective on the
Seventeenth-Century Crisis’, American Historical Review 113 (2008),
1080–9.
28. For a recent survey, see J. H. Elliott, ‘The General Crisis in Retrospect:
A Debate without End’, in Elliott, Spain, Europe and the Wider World,
1500–1800 (New Haven, CT, 2009), pp. 52–73.
29. On which see Jeremy Adelman, ‘Iberian Passages: Continuity and
Change in the South Atlantic’, ch. 4 in this volume;Adelman, Sovereignty
and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton, NJ, 2006).
30. Jeremy Adelman, ‘An Age of Imperial Revolutions’, American Historical
Review 113 (2008), 319–40.
31. Ryan T. Jones, ‘Empire of Extinction: A Natural History of Russian
Expansion in the Eighteenth-century North Pacific’ (PhD dissertation,
Columbia University, 2008); Leonard Blussé, Visible Cities: Canton,
Nagasaki, and Batavia and the Coming of the Americans (Cambridge, MA,
2008); James Fichter, American Enterprise, British Empire:The East Indies in
the Transformation of Anglo-American Capitalism, 1773–1815 (Cambridge,
MA, forthcoming).
Notes 221

32. Compare Patrick O’Brien, ‘Historiographical Traditions and the

Modern Imperatives for the Restoration of Global History’, Journal of
Global History 1 (2006), 3–39; Michael Adas,‘Reconsidering the Macro-
narrative in Global History: John Darwin’s After Tamerlane and the Case
for Comparison’, Journal of Global History 4 (2009), 163–73.
33. István Batsányi, ‘A franciaországi változásokra’ (On the Changes in
France) (1791), quoted in Ivan T. Berend, History Derailed: Central and
Eastern Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, CA, 2003), p. 2
(translation slightly modified).
34. The diaries of István Széchenyi and Baron Miklós Wesselényi, cited in
Berend, History Derailed, p. 39.
35. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making
of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ, 2000).
36. ‘Generally speaking, for the economical development of the bour-
geoisie, England is here taken as the typical country; for its political
development, France’: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist
Manifesto, ed. Gareth Stedman Jones (London, 2002), p. 221 (Engels’s
note to the 1888 English edition).
37. Anna Bezanson, ‘The Early Use of the Term Industrial Revolution’,
Quarterly Journal of Economics 36 (1922), 343–9; David Cannadine, ‘The
Present and the Past in the English Industrial Revolution, 1880–1980’,
Past and Present 103 (May 1984), 131–72.
38. See Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson, ‘Rehabilitating the Industrial
Revolution’, Economic History Review n.s. 45 (1992), 24–50, a response in
large measure to the important revisionist and ‘gradualist’ account of N.
F. R. Crafts, British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution
(Oxford, 1985).
39. T. R. Malthus, Principles of Political Economy Considered with a View to Their
Practical Application (London, 1820), p. 409.
40. François Crouzet, ‘The Impact of the French Wars on the British
Economy’, in Crouzet, Britain, France and International Commerce: From
Louis XIV to Victoria (Aldershot, 1996), pp. 208–9. Also see, more gener-
ally, Erik Aerts and François Crouzet, eds, Economic Effects of the French
Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (Leuven, 1990); Kevin H. O’Rourke,
‘The Worldwide Economic Impact of the French Revolutionary and
Napoleonic Wars, 1793–1815’, Journal of Global History 2 (2006), 123–49.
41. Eliana Balla and Noel D. Johnson,‘Fiscal Crisis and Institutional Change
in the Ottoman Empire and France’ (19 February 2008), SSRN
Working Paper available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?
abstract_id=1096744, accessed 12 June 2009.
42. Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World
(Berkeley, CA, 1991).
43. Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context,
c.800–1830 (Cambridge, 2003).
44. This stress on the political also lies behind a recent analysis of the trans-
fer of the court from Portugal to Brazil: José Jobson de Andrade Arruda,
222 Notes

Uma colônia entre dois impérios: A abertura dos portos brasileiros, 1800–1808
(Bauru, 2008).
45. Maya Jasanoff,‘Revolutionary Exiles:The American Loyalist and French
Émigré Diasporas’, ch. 3 in this volume; see also Jasanoff, ‘The Other
Side of Revolution: Loyalists in the British Empire’, William and Mary
Quarterly 3rd ser. 65 (2008), 205–32.
46. Juan Cole, ‘Playing Muslim: Bonaparte’s Army of the Orient and Euro-
Muslim Creolization’, ch. 7 in this volume; see also Cole, Napoleon’s
Egypt: Invading the Middle East (Basingstoke, 2007).
47. Peter Carey, ‘Revolutionary Europe and the Destruction of Java’s Old
Order, 1808–30’, ch. 9 in this volume; see also Carey, The Power of
Prophecy: Prince Dipanagara and the End of an Old Order in Java
(1825–1830) (Leiden, 2007).
48. Kenneth Pomeranz, ‘Their Own Path to Crisis? Social Change, State-
Building and the Limits of Qing Expansion, c.1770–1840’, ch. 10 in this
volume.
49. Blussé, Visible Cities, pp. 6–8.
50. Letter from Charles Élie, Marquis de Ferrières, in Marquis de Ferrières,
Correspondence inédite, 1789, 1790, 1791, ed. Henri Carré (Paris, 1932),
pp. 37–8; also see the discussion in Paul Friedland, Political Actors:
Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution
(Ithaca, NY, 2002), pp. 129–31.
51. Bruce McGowan, ‘The Age of the Ayans, 1699–1812’, in Halil İnalcık
and Donald Quataert, eds, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman
Empire, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1997), II, pp. 637–758.
52. Stanford J. Shaw, ‘The Origins of Ottoman Military Reform: The
Nizam-i Cedid Army of Sultan Selim III’, Journal of Modern History 37
(1965), 291–306.
53. Sheyh Galib, ‘To Me Love Is the Flame’, in Ottoman Lyric Poetry: An
Anthology, ed. and trans. Walter G. Andrews, Najaat Black and Mehmet
Kalpaklı (Austin,TX, 1997), pp. 153–4.
54. R. S. Sharma, Early Medieval Indian Society: A Study in Feudalisation
(Hyderabad, 2001), pp. 62–4.
55. For an excellent overview of the current historiography of Spanish
America in the Age of Revolutions see Gabriel Paquette, ‘The
Dissolution of the Spanish Monarchy’, The Historical Journal 52 (2009),
175–212; compare José M. Portillo Valdés, Crisis atlántica. Autonomía e
independencia en la crisis de la monarquía hispana (Madrid, 2006).
56. Lynn Hunt, ‘The French Revolution in Global Context’, ch. 2 in this
volume.
57. For example,Albert Sorel, L’Europe et la Révolution française, 8 vols (Paris,
1885–1904); Jacques Godechot, La Grande Nation: l’expansion révolution-
naire de la France dans le monde de 1789 à 1799 (Paris, 1956); Joseph Klaits
and Michael H. Haltzel, eds, The Global Ramifications of the French
Revolution (Washington, DC, 1994); Bailey Stone, The Genesis of the
French Revolution: A Global-Historical Interpretation (Cambridge, 1994);
Notes 223

Stone, Reinterpeting the French Revolution: A Global-Historical Perspective

(Cambridge, 2002).
58. See generally P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain,
India, and America, c.1750–1783 (Oxford, 2005).
59. Compare the essays collected in ‘Early Modernities’, Daedalus 127, 3
(Summer 1998).
60. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Connected Histories: Notes towards a
Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies 31
(1997), 735–62.
61. Dominic Lieven, Russia Against Napoleon: The Battle for Europe, 1807 to
1814 (London, 2009).
62. François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster
(Cambridge, 1981), pp. 85–6. For a classic view on the genealogy of
modern revolutions, see Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution,
expanded edn (New York, 1965).

Chapter 1: Sparks from the Altar of ’76: International

Repercussions and Reconsiderations of the American Revolution
1. R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of
Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ, 1959–64), I, pp.
239–40, 282.
2. Michael Lienesch, New Order of the Ages: Time, the Constitution, and the
Making of Modern American Political Thought (Princeton, NJ, 1988), cit. C.
A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections
and Comparisons (Oxford, 2004), pp. 86, 493 n. 1.
3. Thomas Paine, Common Sense (Philadelphia, 1776), ‘Introduction’
(unpaginated).
4. David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History
(Cambridge, MA, 2007). For a discussion of Armitage’s book, which
stresses claims of statehood more than individual rights, see William and
Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 65 (2008), 347–69.
5. P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and
America c.1750–1783 (Oxford, 2005).
6. John H. Coatsworth, ‘Patterns of Rural Rebellion’, in Friedrich Katz,
ed., Riot, Rebellion, and Revolution: Rural Social Conflict in Mexico
(Princeton, NJ, 1988), p. 30, quoted in Lester D. Langley, The Americas in
the Age of Revolution, 1750–1850 (New Haven, CT, 1996), p. 150;
compare Jeremy Adelman’s chapter in this volume.
7. Laurent Dubois, whose A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave
Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill, NC,
2004) and Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution
(Cambridge, MA, 2004) are the latest of a tidal wave of recent Caribbean
studies, assigns nearly zero significance to the American Revolution in
the Haitian uprising against French masters. See also David Geggus’s
224 Notes

chapter in this volume for further thoughts on the paltry influence of

the Haitian Revolution in transforming the rest of the Caribbean slave
regimes.
8. Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American
Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 2000); Richard B.
Sheridan, ‘The Crisis of Slave Subsistence in the British West Indies
during and after the American Revolution’, William and Mary Quarterly
3rd ser. 33 (1976), 615–41.
9. Gelien Matthews, Caribbean Slave Revolts and the British Abolitionist
Movement (Baton Rouge, LA, 2006),
10. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World.
11. Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’War and the Fate of Empire
in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York, 2000), p. xviii.Though it
goes unsaid,Anderson is surely referring to the geopolitical importance of
the Seven Years War and not to its greater importance than the American
Revolution in terms of political Enlightenment-based ideology.
12. I have studied Thomas Peters and others in this movement of black
abolitionists out of the country in Gary B. Nash, ‘Thomas Peters:
Millwright and Deliverer’, in David G. Sweet and Nash, eds, Struggle and
Survival in Colonial America (Berkeley, CA, 1981), pp. 69–85; and in Nash,
The Forgotten Fifth:African Americans in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge,
MA, 2004). See also Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway
Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston,
2006) and Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the
American Revolution (New York, 2006).
13. Deirdre Coleman, Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery
(Cambridge, 2005); Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations
of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006). For the comments in
1779 of one concerned Dutch reformer regarding American slavery, see
J.W. Schulte Nordholt,‘The Impact of the American Revolution on the
Dutch Republic’, in The Impact of the American Revolution Abroad
(Washington, DC, 1976), p. 48; for similar dismay among Russian
reformers, see N. N. Bolkhovitinov, ‘The American Revolution and the
Russian Empire’, ibid., pp. 86, 89.
14. For an argument that the Founding Fathers had a better chance of
accomplishing a gradual abolition of slavery in their own lifetimes than
historians have generally been willing to allow, see Nash, The Forgotten
Fifth, ch. 2.
15. Richard Price, Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution, in
Price: Political Writings, ed. D. O.Thomas (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 117–18.
16. Ibid., p. 150.
17. [John Lind and Jeremy Bentham,] An Answer to the Declaration of the
American Congress (London, 1776), p. 107, quoted in Brown, Moral
Capital, p. 133.
18. Price, Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution, in Price:
Political Writings, p. 150.
Notes 225

19. Betty Fladeland, Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Antislavery Cooperation

(Urbana, IL, 1972), p. 42; Price to John Jay, 9 July 1785, in The
Correspondence of Richard Price, ed.W. B. Peach and D. O.Thomas, 3 vols
(Durham, NC, 1983–94), II, pp. 292–3. Price had used the same
language in a letter to Jefferson, 2 July 1785, ibid., II, pp. 289–90. See also
Price to Benjamin Rush, 22 July 1785, ibid., II, pp. 293–4. For distribu-
tion of pamphlets to Continental Congress members, see ibid., II, p. 271
n. 1.
20. Thomas Day, A Letter from ***** in London, to His Friend in America, on
the Subject of the Slave-Trade (London, 1784), discussed in David Brion
Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca,
NY, 1975), pp. 398–9. Day wrote his screed in 1776, when he was
twenty-five years old, but withheld publication until 1784. Quakers in
Philadelphia and New York quickly republished it so that it would
receive wide circulation in centres of American political power.
21. Thomas Slaughter, The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman:Apostle of Abolition
(New York, 2008); Maurice Jackson, Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony
Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism (Philadelphia, 2009).
22. Gary B. Nash, ‘Franklin and Slavery’, Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society 150 (2006), 618–35.
23. Claude-Anne Lopez, My Life with Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, CT,
2000), pp. 200–3; in his Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and
the American Revolution (New York, 2004), David Waldstreicher sees
Franklin’s sea-change as more limited.
24. Adams called them ‘atheists, deists, and libertines’; quoted in William
Howard Adams, The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson (New Haven, CT,
1997), p. 75.
25. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree et al., 39 vols to
date (New Haven, CT, 1959–), XXXVII, pp. 619–20, lviii.
26. Benezet to Franklin, 8 May 1783, in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin,
XXXIX, p. 575.
27. George S. Brookes, Friend Anthony Benezet (Philadelphia, 1937), p. 162.
28. For an analysis of the rapid decline of slavery in the Philadelphia area
and the growth of a free black population, see Gary B. Nash and Jean R.
Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its
Aftermath (New York, 1991), p. 18,Table 1.
29. Rush to Granville Sharp, August 1791 in The Letters of Benjamin Rush,
ed. L. H. Butterfield, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ, 1951), I, p. 608. I have treated
this era of black institution-building in Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom:
The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840
(Cambridge, MA, 1988), chs 3–5.
30. Quoted in Nash, ‘Franklin and Slavery’, 635.
31. ‘The Pennsylvania Abolition Society to the United States Congress’ (3
February 1790); ‘Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim on the Slave Trade’ (23 March
1790), available at http://franklinpapers.org/franklin/ (The ‘digital
Franklin’).
226 Notes

32. Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard, 1738. An Almanack for the Year of Christ
1738, in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, II, p. 197.
33. Henry Wiencek, Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the
Creation of America (New York, 2003), p. 261. Lafayette had lost his own
father when he was a teenager, and Washington had no children of his
own. Later, calling Washington ‘my adoptive father’, Lafayette named his
first son George Washington Lafayette.
34. Louis Gottschalk, Lafayette Between Two Revolutions (Chicago, 1950), pp.
3–4.
35. Lafayette to Washington, 5 February 1783, in Lafayette in the Age of the
American Revolution: Selected Letters and Papers, 1776–1790, ed. Stanley J.
Idzerda, 5 vols (Ithaca, NY, 1977–83),V, pp. 90–3.
36. Quoted in Wiencek, Imperfect God, p. 262.
37. Ibid., p. 262.
38. Gordon to Washington, 30 August 1784, in The Papers of George
Washington. Confederation Series, ed.W.W. Abbot and Dorothy Twohig, 6
vols (Charlottesville,VA, 1992), II, p. 64.
39. Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of
Jefferson (Armonk, NY, 1996), p. 106.
40. Quoted in ibid., p. 273.
41. Ibid., pp. 274–7.
42. Quoted in Fritz Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery (Columbia,
MO, 1997), p. 121.
43. François Furstenberg, In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy,
Slavery and the Making of a Nation (New York, 2006), pp. 84–8.
44. Garrison is quoted in David Brion Davis, Was Thomas Jefferson an
Authentic Enemy of Slavery? An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the
University of Oxford on 18 February 1970 (Oxford, 1970), p. 4.
45. William Howard Adams, The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson (New Haven,
CT, 1997), pp. 11–12; the Lafayette–Jefferson relationship, along with
letters between them, can be followed in Gilbert Chinard, The Letters of
Lafayette and Jefferson (Baltimore, 1929). Many years later, Jefferson remem-
bered that Lafayette, already an honorary citizen of several American states
and cities, ‘was my most powerful auxiliary and advocate’, the man who
paved the way for negotiating commercial and diplomatic treaties.
Quoted in Jason Lane, General and Madame de Lafayette: Partners in Liberty’s
Cause in the American and French Revolutions (Lanham, MD, 2003), p. 92.
46. For Jefferson’s friendship with Condorcet, see Adams, Paris Years of
Jefferson, pp. 134–40; on Condorcet’s wide influence on the slavery ques-
tion, see Richard Popkin, ‘Condorcet, Abolitionist’, in Leonora Cohen
Rosenfield, ed., Condorcet Studies, I (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1984), pp.
35–48. Jefferson’s translation of Condorcet’s Réflexions sur l’esclavage des
nègres is in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, XIV, pp. 494–8.
47. Liliane Willens,‘Lafayette’s Emancipation Experiment in French Guiana,
1786–1792’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 242 (Oxford,
1986), pp. 345–63; Lloyd Kramer, Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures
Notes 227

and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolutions (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996), p.

164. On Sharp and the saga of the Black Loyalists, see Graham Russell
Hodges, The Black Loyalist Directory: African Americans in Exile after the
American Revolution (New York, 1996), and Pybus, Epic Journeys of
Freedom, chs 5, 7, and 9. For a hyperdramatic portrayal of Sharp and the
travails of the ex-slaves from North America in Nova Scotia and Sierra
Leone, see Schama, Rough Crossings.
48. Price to Jefferson, 2 July 1785; Jefferson to Price, 7 August 1785, in
Papers of Jefferson,VIII, pp. 258–9, 356–7.
49. Madison to Washington, 11 November 1785, in Papers of George
Washington, Confederation Series, III, pp. 355–6.
50. Lafayette to Adams, 22 February 1786, quoted in Louis Gottschalk,
Lafayette Between the American and the French Revolution (Chicago, 1950), p.
229. What Lafayette proposed and instituted was the purchase of land in
French Guiana. The colony had been the site of a disastrous attempt in
1763 to populate it with French, Germans, Swiss, Belgians, Venetians,
Genoans, and Maltese to create a commercial and agricultural power with
the military capability to attack British holdings in the region and to offset
the loss of French Canada. Few of the settlers had any farming experience.
The settlement was poorly planned and, plagued by excessive heat and a
hostile disease climate, over ten thousand people died in the ensuing
calamity. That fiasco meant, however, that Lafayette would not have to
confront suspicious plantation owners as he would in the French West
Indies. Lafayette bought land, hired a manager recommended by
Condorcet, and wrote to Washington eagerly of his plans. Lafayette did not
anticipate immediate emancipation of slaves in French Guiana, but
believed that gradual exposure to education and better working conditions
would prepare them for freedom. Harder realities intruded.A yellow fever
epidemic raged in Guiana at the time of launching the scheme and the
disease killed Lafayette’s manager. Lafayette turned his attention more to
the unfolding events in France and gave charge of the project to his wife.
51. Jefferson’s lengthy interchange with Démeunier is in Papers of Jefferson,
X, pp. 3–65; the quoted sentences are on p. 63.
52. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, pp. 175–6.
53. Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery
and Other Writings, ed.Vincent Carretta (New York, 1999). For Cugoano’s
prominent role in London among free blacks and abolitionists, see Stephen
Braidwood, Black Poor and White Philanthropists: London’s Blacks and the
Foundations of the Sierra Leone Settlement, 1786–1791 (Liverpool, 1994).
Two years after the publication of Cugoano’s book, Richard Cosway
subscribed to Equiano’s Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano.
54. Jefferson to Bancroft, 26 January 1789, Papers of Jefferson, XIV, pp. 492–3.
Bancroft’s letter to Jefferson, 16 September 1788, is in ibid., XII, pp.
606–8. John C. Miller sees 1788 as the year when ‘Jefferson’s moral
revulsion against slavery reached its climax’: The Wolf by the Ear:Thomas
Jefferson and Slavery (New York, 1977), p. 100.
228 Notes

55. In great detail and with keen insights, Annette Gordon-Reed has
explored the Jefferson–Hemings relationship in The Hemingses of
Monticello:An American Family (New York, 2008).Ten years later, Jefferson
rekindled his emancipationist inclinations through the ardent friendship
he forged with Tadeusz Kosciuszko, the Polish military engineer who
had fought for seven years in the American Revolution and had
returned to the United States in 1797, when he made Jefferson the
executor and beneficiary of his American assets. For the full story of this
hidden chapter of American history, which provides an illuminating
example of how the rights agenda of the revolution reshaped the ideol-
ogy of a European reformer, especially regarding universal individual
rights, see Gary B. Nash and Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Friends of
Liberty: Thomas Jefferson, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, and Agrippa Hull, A Tale of
Three Patriots,Two Revolutions, and a Tragic Betrayal of Freedom in the New
Nation (New York, 2008).
56. ‘Racial Thermidor’ is the term used in Patrick Rael’s Black Protest and
Black Identity in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002), p. 48.
57. Miller, Wolf by the Ear, pp. 273–5; for Israel’s recollection of Lafayette’s
strictures on slavery, see Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate
History (New York, 1974), pp. 461–2; and Lucia Stanton,‘The Other End
of the Telescope: Jefferson through the Eyes of His Slaves’, William and
Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 57 (2000), 144. After gaining his freedom in the
1830s, Israel adopted Jefferson as his surname. ‘The Memoirs of Israel
Jefferson’ are reprinted in Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and
Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville, VA, 1997), pp.
247–53.
58. Virginia Herald, 27 November 1824, quoted in J. Bennett Nolan, Lafayette
in America Day by Day (Baltimore, 1934), p. 259.
59. Kramer, Lafayette in Two Worlds, p. 218; the incident was described in
Levasseur’s travelogue.
60. Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United
States Government’s Relations to Slavery (New York, 2001), ch. 5.
Fehrenbacher concludes that American ‘enforcement tended to be
episodic, rather than systematic, and the engagement of federal officials
in the battle against the slave trade ranged all the way from diligence to
nonfeasance, with some instances of corrupt involvement in the traffic’
(p. 152). For African Americans turning to England as the best ally in the
struggle to overthrow slavery, see Van Gosse, ‘“As a Nation, the English
Are Our Friends”: The Emergence of African American Politics in the
British Atlantic World, 1773–1861’, American Historical Review 113
(2008), 1003–28.
61. The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews:
I, 1841–1846, ed. John W. Blassingame (New Haven, CT, 1979), pp.
80–1.
62. The Complete Works of Thomas Paine, ed. Philip S. Foner, 2 vols (New
York, 1969), II, pp. 992–1007.The italics are Paine’s.
Notes 229

Chapter 2: The French Revolution in Global Context

1. R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of
Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ, 1959–64). Jacques
Godechot’s 1963 book in the same vein, Les révolutions (1770–1799), was
published in English translation two years later as France and the Atlantic
Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, 1770–1799, trans. Herbert H.
Rowen (New York, 1965); Godechot taught in Toulouse. More recently,
Annie Jourdan, who teaches in Amsterdam, has published an updated
view: La Révolution, une exception française? (Paris, 2004).
2. Simon P. Newman, ‘American Political Culture and the French and
Haitian Revolutions’, in David Patrick Geggus, ed., The Impact of the
Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, SC, 2001), p. 87 n. 29.
3. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, I, pp. 472–3.
4. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, II, pp. 382–91.
5. Copy in the French Language together with a Translation of the Proceedings of
a Jacobin Club formed at Seringapatam, by the French Soldiers in the Corps
Commanded by M. Dompart (Madras, 1799).
6. Ho Chi Minh, ‘Declaration of Independence of the Democratic
Republic of Vietnam’ (2 September 1945), in Ho Chi Minh, Selected
Works, 4 vols (Hanoi, 1960–2), III, p. 17.
7. C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections
and Comparisons (Oxford, 2004), ch. 3, ‘Converging Revolutions’.
8. When these broader questions are not posed, the meaning of a global
context remains uncertain. See, for example, Joseph Klaits and Michael
H. Haltzel, eds, The Global Ramifications of the French Revolution
(Cambridge, 1994).The excellent essays in this collection show that the
French Revolution had effects around the world but it does not use that
knowledge to create a new understanding of the French Revolution
itself.
9. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, I, pp. 146–56, II, p. 338. On
the difficulties of incorporating the colonial, see Frederick Cooper,
Colonialism in Question:Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, CA, 2005),
pp. 3–32.
10. Jean Jaurès, Histoire socialiste, 1789–1900, 13 vols (Paris, 1901–8), I, p. 50,
II, p. 984; François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg
Forster (Cambridge, 1981); Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the
French Revolution (New York, 1989), p. 602; blurb for the Benot book at
http://www.bibliomonde.net/livre/revolution-francaise-fin-des-
colonies-1789-1794-4201.html (accessed 4 June 2009).
11. The most efficient way to see the differences in Tocqueville’s treatment
of France and the United States is to do a word search on Frantext avail-
able at http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/ARTFL. I looked at
esclave, esclavage, and colonies. For Tocqueville’s interest in Algeria, see
Alexis de Tocqueville:Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. and trans. Jennifer
Pitts (Baltimore, 2001).
230 Notes

12. Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of

France, Russia, and China (Cambridge, 1979); Bailey Stone, Reinterpreting
the French Revolution: A Global-Historical Perspective (Cambridge, 2002).
13. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London, 1790), pp.
11–12.
14. Elizabeth Colwill is preparing a book based on notarial records for Saint
Domingue; Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian
Insurrection, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin (Chicago, 2007); C. L. R. James, The
Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
(London, 1938); Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery,
1776–1848 (London, 1988); Michel-Rolphe Trouillot, Silencing the Past:
Power and the Production of History (Boston, 1995); Florence Gauthier,
L’Aristocratie de l’épiderme: Le combat de la Société des Citoyens de Couleur,
1789–1791 (Paris, 2007).
15. Robin Blackburn, ‘Haiti, Slavery, and the Age of the Democratic
Revolution’, William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 63 (2006), 643–73; the
quotation from Jefferson appears on pp. 657–8.
16. Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World; see
also Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington, 2002), esp. p.
171.
17. For the slave voyages, see http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces;
Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation
in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004); John
Garrigus, ‘Blue and Brown: Contraband Indigo and the Rise of a Free
Colored Planter Class in French Saint-Domingue’, The Americas 50
(1993), 233–63; Marcus Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black
Empire of Hayti: comprehending a view of the principal transactions in the revo-
lution of Saint Domingo; with its ancient and modern state (London, 1805).
18. David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge,
2000); Emma Rothschild, ‘A Horrible Tragedy in the French Atlantic’,
Past and Present 192 (August 2006), 67–108.
19. John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the
Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 2006), p. 2: his figures on
political economy come from Christine Théré, ‘Economic Publishing
and Authors, 1566–1789’, in Gilbert Faccarello, ed., Studies in the History
of French Political Economy: from Bodin to Walras (London, 1998), pp. 1–56.
More attention to the imperial dimension can be found in Paul Cheney,
‘Finances, Philosophical History and the “Empire of Climate”:
Enlightenment Historiography and Political Economy’, Historical
Reflections 31 (2005), 141–67.
20. Compare Michel Benoit, 1793, la République de la tentation: une affaire de
corruption sous la Ière République (Précy-sous-Thil, 2008).
21. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, pp. 93, 95.
22. Michael D. Bordo and Eugene N. White, ‘A Tale of Two Currencies:
British and French Finance During the Napoleonic Wars’, Journal of
Economic History 51 (1991), 303–16; Jonathan R. Dull, The French Navy
Notes 231

and American Independence: A Study of Arms and Diplomacy, 1774–1787

(Princeton, NJ, 1976).
23. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York, 2007).
24. Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge,
1971).
25. David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History
(Cambridge, MA, 2007); Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, p. 86.
26. The essential starting point is John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular
Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976).
27. Barbara Ann Day-Hickman, Napoleonic Art: Nationalism and the Spirit of
Rebellion in France (1815–1848) (Newark, DE, 1999), focuses on a later
period but gives some sense of the diffusion of such images.
28. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, p. 119.
29. Ibid., p. 15.
30. I have discussed these developments in Lynn Hunt,‘Freedom of Dress in
Revolutionary France’, in Sara E. Melzer and Kathryn Norberg, eds,
From the Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political in
Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France (Berkeley, CA, 1998), pp.
224–49. See also J. C. Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes (London, 1930),
p. iii; Kaja Silverman, ‘Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse’, in Tania
Modleski, ed., Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture
(Bloomington, IN, 1986), pp. 139–52.
31. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983).

Chapter 3: Revolutionary Exiles: The American Loyalist and

French Émigré Diasporas
I am grateful to David Armitage, François Furstenberg, Patrice Higonnet,
John Merriman, and participants in the ‘“Age of Revolutions” or “World
Crisis”?’ symposium for comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

1. The episode is recounted in Mémoires du Prince de Talleyrand, ed. Duc de

Broglie, 5 vols (Paris, 1891–2), I, p. 231; translation mine. If the story is
true, then Arnold may himself have been waiting to sail: he was in
Guadeloupe three months later, when the island was recaptured by the
French.
2. Ibid., I, p. 232.
3. On connections between these revolutions, see R. R. Palmer, The Age of
the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America,
1760–1800, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ, 1959–64); Patrice L. R. Higonnet, Sister
Republics: The Origins of French and American Republicanism (Cambridge,
MA, 1988); and the numerous studies of figures common to both revolu-
tions, such as Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and the Marquis de
Lafayette. François Furet’s observation that ‘the history of the French
232 Notes

Revolution has been a story of beginnings and so a discourse about iden-

tity’ could equally be applied to the United States: Furet, Interpreting the
French Revolution trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge, 1981), p. 6.
4. E. P.Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1966),
p. 12.
5. Anglo-Canadian historians, by contrast, traditionally celebrated loyalists
as ‘founding fathers’; but the association of United Empire Loyalists with
the nineteenth-century Tory party helped to perpetuate a sense of loyal-
ists as conservatives within Canadian historiography as well. See
Norman J. Knowles, Inventing the Loyalists: The Ontario Loyalist Tradition
and the Creation of Usable Pasts (Toronto, 1997).
6. Donald Greer contested this sterotype with a statistical demonstration
that approximately half the émigrés belonged to the Third Estate: Greer,
The Incidence of the Emigration During the French Revolution (Cambridge
MA, 1951), pp. 63–5.
7. But for new perspectives on these ‘reactionary’ years, see Sheryl Kroen,
Politics and Theater: The Crisis of Legitimacy in Restoration France,
1815–1830 (Berkeley, CA, 2000); R. S. Alexander, Re-Writing the French
Revolutionary Tradition: Liberal Opposition and the Fall of the Bourbon
Monarchy (Cambridge, 2003); and John Merriman, Police Stories: Building
the French State, 1815–1851 (Oxford, 2006).
8. John Adams to James Lloyd, January 1815, in The Works of John Adams,
ed. Charles Francis Adams, 10 vols (Boston, 1850–6), X, p. 110.
9. In a letter of November 1813,Adams estimated that ‘about a third of the
people of the colonies were against the revolution’ (quoted in Thomas
McKean to John Adams, January 1814, in Adams, Works, X, p. 87); and he
later observed that British ministers had ‘seduced and deluded nearly one
third of the people of the colonies’ into supporting them (Adams to Dr
J. Morse, 22 December 1815, in Adams, Works, X, p. 193).Writing about
the membership of the 1774 Congress, Adams stated that ‘To draw the
characters of them all . . . would now be considered as a caricature-print;
one-third tories, another whigs, and the rest mongrels’ (John Adams to
Thomas Jefferson, 12 November 1813, in Adams, Works, X, p. 79).
10. See Paul H. Smith, ‘The American Loyalists: Notes on Their
Organization and Numerical Strength’, William and Mary Quarterly 3rd
ser., 25 (1968), 260.
11. The best modern estimate (based on military enrolment) suggests that
one-fifth of the white colonial population sympathized with Britain
during the American Revolution: Smith,‘The American Loyalists’, 269.
12. A full accounting of these figures will be provided in my forthcoming
book on the loyalist diaspora.
13. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British
Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006), ch. 4.
14. Greer’s appendices provide breakdowns by region and occupation:
Greer, The Incidence of the Emigration During the French Revolution, pp.
109–38.
Notes 233

15. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, rev. edn
(Cambridge, MA, 1992), p. 19.
16. See Christopher Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal
Violence and Punishment in America (New York, 2002), pp. 15–20.
17. William Doyle, ‘Introduction’, in Kirsty Carpenter and Philip Mansel,
eds, The French Émigrés in Europe and the Struggle against Revolution,
1789–1814 (London, 1999), p. xix. My estimate of the loyalist migration
excludes the five to seven thousand residents of East Florida who, at the
time of the evacuation, ‘are imagined to have gone over the Mountains
to the States &c.’ (‘Return of Persons who Emigrated from East Florida
to different parts of the British Dominions’, 2 May 1786,The National
Archives, Kew, CO 5/561, fo. 407).
18. On popular persecution of loyalists, see especially Robert M. Calhoon,
The Loyalists in Revolutionary America 1760–1781 (New York, 1973), chs
24–7.
19. Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, MA,
1974).
20. These measures are summarized in Claude Halstead Van Tyne, The
Loyalists in the American Revolution (New York, 1902), Appendices B and
C, pp. 318–41.
21. Diary of Abner Sanger, 15 January 1777 and 31 May 1779. Library of
Congress, Manuscript Division: Abner Sanger Diary, fos 52 and 114.
22. For a classic, elite-centred narrative of the emigration, see Ernest
Daudet, Histoire de l’émigration pendant la révolution française . . . , 3 vols
(Paris, 1905–7).
23. Greer, The Incidence of the Emigration During the French Revolution, pp.
22–3.
24. Timothy Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-
Century France (Princeton, NJ, 1986), esp. ch. 2.
25. Timothy Tackett, When the King Took Flight (Cambridge, MA, 2003), ch. 6.
26. Greer, The Incidence of the Emigration During the French Revolution, p. 113.
27. The phases of flight are neatly summarized in Greer, ibid., pp. 21–37, and
Kirsty Carpenter, Refugees of the French Revolution: Émigrés in London,
1789–1802 (Basingstoke, 1999), Appendix 1. See also Peter McPhee,
Living the French Revolution (Basingstoke, 2006), pp. 98–103, 154–5,
208–12.
28. Greer, The Incidence of the Emigration During the French Revolution, pp.
38–62. Prominent loyalist women who stayed behind to fight for prop-
erty rights included Grace Galloway and Janet Smith, both of whose
husbands departed for England. Confiscation of family or marital prop-
erty would be the subject of numerous lawsuits in the years after the
revolution.
29. Manuscript copies of this document survive in the UK and US National
Archives, and it has been published as The Black Loyalist Directory:African
Americans in Exile after the American Revolution, ed. Graham Russell
Hodges (New York, 1995).
234 Notes

30. John Eardley Wilmot, Historical View of the Commission for Enquiring into
the Losses, Services, and Claims of the American Loyalists . . . (1815; reprinted
Boston, 1972), pp. 50, 90–1.
31. This has been most recently chronicled by Simon Schama, Rough
Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (New York, 2006),
and Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the
American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston, 2006).
32. Arnold’s son Edward went to India ‘under the Patronage of Lord
Cornwallis’, and his son George followed three years later. ‘Edward
Shippen Arnold’,‘George Arnold’, q.v.,V. C. P. Hodson, List of the Officers
of the Bengal Army, 1758–1834, 4 vols (London, 1927–47); Benedict
Arnold to Jonathan Bliss, 19 September 1800, New Brunswick
Museum, Benedict Arnold Papers.
33. See Pybus, Epic Journeys, passim.
34. Lord Mackenzie-Stuart, ‘French Émigrés in Edinburgh’, in Carpenter
and Mansel, eds, The French Émigrés in Europe, p. 109.
35. Frédéric d’Agay, ‘A European Destiny: the Armée de Condé
1792–1801’, in Carpenter and Mansel, eds, The French Émigrés in Europe,
p. 33.
36. Thomas Höpel, ‘French Émigrés in Prussia’, in Carpenter and Mansel,
eds, The French Émigrés in Europe, pp. 101–7.
37. T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany: Occupation and
Resistance in the Rhineland, 1792–1802 (Oxford, 1983), pp. 52–3.
38. Adéle d’Osmond de Boigne, Mémoires de la comtesse de Boigne, née
d’Osmond, ed. Jean-Claude Berchet, 2 vols (Paris, 1986), I, p. 142; trans-
lation mine.
39. Miranda Frances Spieler, ‘Empire and Underworld: Guiana in the
French Legal Imagination, c.1789–c.1870’ (PhD dissertation, Columbia
University, 2005).
40. Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, Engaging Scoundrels: True Tales of Old Lucknow
(New Delhi, 2000), pp. 12–13.
41. Frances Sergeant Childs, French Refugee Life in the United States,
1790–1800 (Baltimore, 1940), pp. 36–7.
42. For the estimate of 20,000: Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution,
II, p. 514; Childs, pp. 15, 63–6. Ashli White estimates that at least 15,000
Saint Dominguan refugees arrived in the USA: White, ‘“A Flood of
Impure Lava”: Saint Dominguan Refugees in the United States,
1791–1820’ (PhD Dissertation, Columbia University, 2003).
43. François Furstenburg, ‘US and French Atlantic Connections: The Case
of the French Émigrés in America, c.1789–1803’, unpublished paper.
44. Ronald Schechter, ‘Gothic Thermidor: The Bals des Victimes, the
Fantastic, and the Production of Historical Knowledge in Post-Terror
France’, Representations 61 (Winter 1998), 78–94. On the traumatic
effects of the Revolution more generally, see Patrice Higonnet, ‘Terror,
Trauma and the “Young Marx” Explanation of Jacobin Politics’, Past and
Present 191 (May 2006), 121–64.
Notes 235

45. D. M. G. Sutherland, France 1789–1815 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 386–7. Such

rumours did help aristocrats to repurchase their confiscated lands from
revolutionary buyers, however.
46. Almut Franke, ‘Le milliard des émigrés: The Impact of the Indemnity Bill
of 1825 on French Society’, in Carpenter and Mansel, eds, The French
Émigrés in Europe, pp. 124–37. The claims and payments are thoroughly
outlined in André Gain, La Restauration et les biens des émigrés . . ., 2 vols
(Nancy, 1928).
47. John Bartlet Brebner, The Neutral Yankees of Nova Scotia: A Marginal
Colony During the Revolutionary Years (New York, 1937); Andrew Jackson
O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided:The American Revolution and the British
Caribbean (Philadelphia, 2000).
48. White, ‘“A Flood of Impure Lava”’, p. 29. Maria Nugent, the American
loyalist wife of Jamaica governor George Nugent, routinely encountered
Saint Domingue émigrés during her time in Jamaica. See Lady Nugent’s
Journal of Her Residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805, ed. Philip Wright
(Kingston, 1966).
49. Lynn Hunt, ‘The French Revolution in Global Context’, ch. 2 in this
volume.
50. For a suggestive intervention, see R. Darrell Meadows, ‘Engineering
Exile: Social Networks and the French Atlantic Community,
1789–1809’, French Historical Studies 23 (2000), 67–102.
51. P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and
America c.1750–1783 (Oxford, 2005).
52. C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World,
1780–1830 (London, 1989); Bayly, ‘The First Age of Global
Imperialism, c.1760–1820’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History
26 (1998), 28–48; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837
(New Haven, CT, 1992). I also treated these wars as an imperial water-
shed in Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850
(New York, 2005).
53. British authorities even appear to have considered granting French
émigrés who wished to settle in Canada the ‘same Proportion of Lands,
Rations, farming Utensils &c.’ that American loyalists had received – a
plan judged ‘at least, problematical’ by one suspicious Kingston loyalist.
John Stuart to William White, 26 November 1798, Archives of Ontario:
Stuart Family Papers, MS 606, p. 90.
54. Carpenter, Refugees of the French Revolution, p. 47. Robert Tombs and
Isabelle Tombs state that Wilmot raised more than £400,000:Tombs and
Tombs, That Sweet Enemy:The French and the British from the Sun King to
the Present (London, 2007), p. 213.
55. Watson is perhaps best known today as the subject of ‘Watson and the
Shark’, a large, curious canvas painted by the American loyalist John
Singleton Copley.The image depicts an incident from 1749: the teenage
Watson was swimming in Havana harbour when a shark attacked him
and bit off his lower right leg.Watson commissioned the painting in the
236 Notes

mid-1770s; it now hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington,

DC (see http://www.nga.gov/feature/watson/watsonhome.shtm),
accessed 4 October 2008.
56. New York Historical Society, Diary of Samuel Shoemaker of Philadelphia,
1783–1785, p. 131.
57. For the committee membership see Carpenter, Refugees of the French
Revolution, p. 45.
58. Wilmot, Historical View of the Commission, p. 1.
59. On this image and the later portrait of Wilmot in which it appears, see
Helmut von Erffa and Alan Staley, The Paintings of Benjamin West (New
Haven, CT, 1986), pp. 219–22, 565–7.
60. Fanny Burney, Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay . . . , 7 vols
(London, 1846),VI, p. 11.
61. William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah
More, 2 vols (New York, 1834), I, p. 420.
62. Carpenter, Refugees of the French Revolution, pp. 107–9; assorted letters in
The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, gen. ed. Thomas W. Copeland, 10
vols (Chicago and Cambridge, 1958–78), vols VII–VIII.
63. Jeremy Adelman, ‘An Age of Imperial Revolutions’, American Historical
Review 113 (2008), 319–40; Adelman, ‘Iberian Passages: Continuity and
Change in the South Atlantic’, ch. 4 in this volume.
64. Despite the vast scholarship on Napoleonic Europe, there are relatively
few treatments of French cultural imperialism in these years. But see Stuart
Woolf,‘French Civilization and Ethnicity in the Napoleonic Empire’, Past
and Present 124 (August 1989), 96–120; Todd Porterfield, The Allure of
Empire: Art in the Service of French Imperialism, 1798–1836 (Princeton, NJ,
1998); and Michael Broers, The Napoleonic Empire in Italy, 1796–1814:
Cultural Imperialism in a European Context? (Basingstoke, 2005).
65. Quoted in Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (Oxford, 1962),
p. 87.
66. A good example of such a complex figure would be J. Hector St John
de Crèvecoeur, widely hailed in the United States for his exceptionalist
meditation ‘What Is an American?’ – but himself wrong-footed twice by
revolution, first as a loyalist in revolutionary America, then as a petty
nobleman in revolutionary France: Edward Larkin, ‘What Is a Loyalist?
The American Revolution as Civil War’, Common-Place 8, 1 (October
2007) (http://www.common-place.org/vol-08/no-01/larkin), accessed
11 June 2009; Simon Schama, The American Future:A History (New York,
2009), pp. 223–38.

Chapter 4: Iberian Passages: Continuity and Change in the

South Atlantic
1. Peter Gourevitch, Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Responses to
International Economic Crises (Ithaca, NY, 1986), pp. 17–19; on Trotsky see
Notes 237

Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, MA, 1978), pp.

190–1.
2. C. A Bayly has argued that the birth of the modern world was one that
saw an increased uniformity, from practices of dress to intellectual
currents. Of course, the process of global integration did facilitate kinds
of isomorphism.The argument in this chapter is that (a) there were basic
social and material forces that conditioned the emergence of a variety of
arrangements for rule, and (b) efforts at diffusing uniformity from the
centres unintentionally created greater diversity at local levels. In some
fundamental ways, Latin America and the Caribbean were much more
internally diverse in the 1820s than they were in the 1780s. See C. A.
Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and
Comparisons (Oxford, 2004).
3. James J. Sheehan, ‘The Problem of Sovereignty in European History’,
American Historical Review 111 (2006), 1–15; Saskia Sassen, Territory,
Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, NJ,
2006). Most work on sovereignty has been done by political scientists,
mainly concerned with international relations. See Daniel Philpott,
Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations
(Princeton, NJ, 2001), and on how sovereignty rests on contradictory
principles and practices, see Stephen D. Krasner, ed., Problematic
Sovereignty: Contested Rules and Political Possibilities (New York, 2001).
4. Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History,
1400–1900 (Cambridge, 2002); Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, p.
139.
5. Charles Tilly, ‘War Making and State Making as Organized Crime’, in
Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol, eds, Bringing
the State Back In (New York, 1985), pp. 169–91; Stanley J. Stein and
Barbara H. Stein, Silver,Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of
Early Modern Europe (Baltimore, 2000), pp. 120–1.
6. Gabriel B. Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and
Its Empire, 1759–1808 (Basingstoke, 2008), p. 39; Kenneth Maxwell,
Pombal: Paradox of the Enlightenment (New York, 1995).
7. Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic
(Princeton, NJ, 2006), pp. 13–36.
8. David Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and their Savages in the Age of
Enlightenment (New Haven, CT, 2005), ch. 5; John Fisher, Commercial
Relations Between Spain and Spanish America in the Era of Free Trade,
1778–1796 (Liverpool, 1985); Jorge M. Pedreira, ‘From Growth to
Collapse: Portugal, Brazil, and the Breakdown of the Old Colonial
System (1760–1830)’, Hispanic American Historical Review 80 (2000),
839–64; Maxwell, Pombal; Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Apogee
of Empire: Spain and New Spain in the Age of Charles III, 1759–1789
(Baltimore, 2003).
9. Kenneth Maxwell, Conflicts and Conspiracies: Brazil and Portugal,
1750–1808 (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 23–8, 67–71; Anthony McFarlane,
238 Notes

‘Rebellions in Late Colonial Spanish America: A Comparative

Perspective’, Bulletin of Latin American Research 14 (1983), 313–38; Eric
Van Young,‘The Age of Paradox: Mexican Agriculture at the end of the
Colonial Period, 1750–1810’, in Nils Jacobsen and Hans-Jürgen Puhle,
eds, The Economies of Mexico and Peru During the Late Colonial Period
(Berlin, 1986), pp. 64–90.
10. Manolo Garcia Florentino, Em Costas Negras: Uma história do tráfico
Atlântico de escravos entree África e o Rio de Janeiro (séculos XVIII e XIX)
(Rio de Janeiro, 1993); Fisher, Commercial Relations Between Spain and
Spanish America.
11. Richard L. Garner,‘Long-term Silver Mining Trends in Spanish America:
A Comparative Analysis of Peru and Mexico’, American Historical Review
93 (1988), 898–935; Matilde Souto Mantecón, Mar abierto: La política y el
comercio del Consulado de Veracruz en el ocaso del sistema imperial (Mexico
City, 2001); Enrique Tandeter,‘Forced and Free Labour in Late Colonial
Potosí’, Past and Present 93 (November 1981), 98–136.
12. Archivo General de Indias (Seville), Estado, Americas, 86A, 14,
‘Dictámen leido en Consejo pleno con asistencia de su Governador’;
Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution, pp. 65–73.
13. David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
(New York, 1987), p. 247.
14. AGI, Indiferente General, Legajo 2826, 8 August 1802.The literature on
the effects of the slave trade is now vast. See Jorge Gelman, Campesinos
y estancieros: una region del Rio de la Plata a fines de la época colonial (Buenos
Aires, 1998); Sheila de Castro Faria, A Colônia em Movimento: Fortuna e
Família no Cotidiano Colonial (Rio de Janeiro, 1998).
15. Jacques A. Barbier, ‘Peninsular Finance and Colonial Trade: The
Dilemma of Charles IV’s Spain’, Journal of Latin American Studies 12
(1980), 21–37; Richard L. Garner, Economic Growth and Change in
Bourbon Mexico (Gainesville, FL, 1993), pp. 230–45.
16. Manuel Belgrano, ‘Memoria-3’, in Escritos económicos (Buenos Aires,
1954), p. 99; José Ignacio de Pombo, ‘Informe de Don José Ignacio de
Pombo del Consulado de Cartagena sobre asuntos económicos y
fiscales’, in Sergio Elias Ortíz, Escritos de dos economistas coloniales (Bogotá,
1965), p. 157; José Joaquim da Cunha Azeredo Coutinho, Ensaio
económico sobre o comércio de Portugal e suas colónias (Lisbon, 1992), pp.
91–102.
17. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Mobility of Property and the Rise of Eighteenth-
Century Sociology’, in Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on
Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge,
1985), pp. 103–23; Hilton Root, The Fountain of Privilege: Political
Foundations of Markets in Old Regime France and England (Berkeley, CA,
1994).
18. José da Silva Lisboa, Princípios de Economia Política (Lisbon, 1804), pp.
112–16; Kenneth Maxwell, ‘The Generation of the 1790s and the Idea
of Luso-Brazilian Empire’, in Dauril Alden, ed., Colonial Roots of Modern
Notes 239

Brazil (Berkeley, CA, 1973), pp. 107–44. Jovellanos is cited in José Alvarez
Junco, Mater Dolorosa: La idea de España en el Siglo XIX (Madrid, 2001),
pp. 120–1.
19. Brian Hamnett, La política española en una época revolucionaria, 1790–1820
(Mexico City, 1985), pp. 57–67; Valentim Alexandre, Os Sentidos do
Império: Questão Nacional e Questão colonial na Crise do Antigo Regime
Português (Lisbon, 1993).
20. François-Xavier Guerra and Annick Lempérière, ‘Introducción’, in
Guerra and Lempérière, eds, Los espacios públicos en Iberoamérica.
Ambigüedades y problemas, siglos XVIII–XIX (Mexico City, 1998), pp.
5–21; Victor Uribe-Uran, ‘The Birth of a Public Sphere in Latin
America During the Age of Revolution’, Comparative Studies in Society
and History 42 (2000), 425–57; Kirsten Schultz, A Tropical Versailles:
Empire, Monarchy and the Portuguese Royal Court in Rio de Janeiro,
1808–1821 (New York, 2001).
21. El Argos Americano, 18 November 1811; Hamnett, La política española, pp.
73–101; Jaime E. Rodríguez O., The Independence of Spanish America
(Cambridge, 1998), pp. 82–91.
22. Michael P. Costeloe, ‘Spain and the Latin American Wars of
Independence:The Free Trade Controversy’, Hispanic American Historical
Review 61 (1981), 209–34; Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution, pp.
238–46.
23. Rodríguez, The Independence of Spanish America, ch. 3; Adelman,
Sovereignty and Revolution, ch. 5; Roderick Barman, Brazil:The Forging of
a Nation, 1798–1852 (Stanford, CA, 1988), pp. 43–55.
24. Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War
(New York, 1981).
25. Schultz, A Tropical Versailles; José da Silva Lisboa, Refutação das declamacões
contra o commercio inglez extrahida de escritores eminentes (Rio de Janeiro,
1810), p. iv.
26. Peter Blanchard, ‘The Slave Soldiers of Spanish South America: From
Independence to Abolition’, in Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D.
Morgan, eds, Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age (New
Haven, CT, 2006), pp. 261–6; Marixa Lasso, Myths of Harmony: Race and
Republicanism During the Age of Revolution, Colombia 1795–1831
(Pittsburgh, 2007); Peter Guardino, Time of Liberty: Popular Political
Culture in Oaxaca, 1750–1850 (Durham, NC, 2005); Ronald Fraser,
Napoleon’s Cursed War: Popular Resistance in the Spanish Peninsular War
(London, 2008), p. 469.
27. Lucía Sala de Touron, Nelson de la Torre and Julio C. Rodríguez, Artigas
y su revolución agraria, 1811–1820 (Montevideo, 1967), pp. 114–53;
Simón Bolívar,‘The Angostura Address’, in El Libertador: Selected Writings
of Simón Bolívar, ed. David Bushnell (New York, 2001), p. 52.
28. John Charles Chasteen, Americanos: Latin America’s Struggle for
Independence (New York, 2008); Margaret Woodward,‘The Spanish Army
and the Loss of America, 1810–1824’, Hispanic American Historical Review
240 Notes

48 (1968), 586–90; John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions,

1808–1826 (New York, 1986), pp. 212–14;Timothy E. Anna, Spain and
the Loss of America (Lincoln, NB, 1983).
29. Gazeta do Rio de Janeiro, 6 August 1822; Isabel Lustosa, Insultos impressos:
A guerra dos jornalistas na independência, 1821–1823 (São Paulo, 2000);
Barman, Brazil, pp. 70–1; Márcia Regina Berbel, A Nação como artefato:
Deputados do Brasil nas Cortes Portuguesas, 1821–1822 (São Paulo, 1999).
30. Albert O. Hirschman, Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public
Action (Princeton, NJ, 2002), pp. 4–5.
31. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, p. 83.
32. José Carlos Chiaramonte, ‘Modificaciones del Pacto Imperial’, in
Antonio Annino, Luis Castro Leiva and François-Xavier Guerra, eds, De
los imperios a las naciones: Iberoamérica (Zaragoza, 1994), esp. pp. 108–11;
José Murilho de Carvalho, A construção da ordem (Rio de Janeiro, 1996).

Chapter 5: The Caribbean in the Age of Revolution

1. Sidney Mintz, ‘The Caribbean as a Socio-Cultural Area’, Cahiers
d’Histoire Mondiale 9 (1966), 916–41. In this chapter, I follow Mintz in
defining the Caribbean as the West Indies, Bahamas, Guianas, and Belize.
2. David Geggus, ‘The Haitian Revolution in Atlantic Perspective’, in
Philip D. Morgan and Nicholas Canny, eds, The Atlantic World
c.1450–c.1820 (Oxford, forthcoming).
3. If antislavery and democratic politics had a shared origin in libertarian
ideology, they did not always share the same supporters or follow the
same chronology.The French Revolution gave only belated and hesitant
support to antislavery; the American Revolution, even less. The French
and Haitian Revolutions set back abolitionism in England by a decade,
because of the conservative reaction they caused.
4. France lost to Britain: St Kitts (1713); Grenada and the officially neutral
islands of St Vincent and Dominica (1763);Tobago and St Lucia (1803).
Britain also took Trinidad from Spain (1797) and much of the Guianas
from the Netherlands (1803).
5. The above figures involve extrapolation and guesswork using many
sources; by far the best is Stanley L. Engerman and Barry W. Higman,
‘The Demographic Structure of the Caribbean Slave Societies in the
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, in Franklin W. Knight, ed.,
General History of the Caribbean, III: The Slave Societies of the Caribbean
(London, 1997), pp. 45–104.
6. Data from David Eltis et al., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
(http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces), accessed 1 June 2009.
7. The emancipation act of 4 February 1794 could not be promulgated in
Martinique and St Lucia, because they were occupied by British forces.
8. Calculations derived from David Geggus, ‘The Caribbean’ (Spanish
figures adjusted) and ‘The French Caribbean’, in Paul Finkelman and
Notes 241

Joseph C. Miller, eds, The Macmillan Encyclopedia of World Slavery (New

York, 1998), pp. 149, 160.
9. Figures from Barry Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean,
1807–1834 (Baltimore, 1984), p. 3.As deaths generally outnumbered births
in Caribbean slave populations, they depended on the slave trade to grow.
10. Moreover, although the Haitian Revolution closed the largest slave
market in the Americas (accounting for some 40 per cent of the Africans
shipped to the Americas 1786–90), slave imports to the Caribbean fell
by less than 20 per cent in the 1790s from their peak level in the 1780s.
In the following decade abolition reduced them to only one-third of
their peak level.
11. In Jamaica by 56 per cent and in British Guiana by 43 per cent between
the years 1830–2 and 1839–41.These were the last years of slavery and
the first years of ‘full freedom’ following a forced labour ‘apprenticeship’
period. Data from Noël Deerr, The History of Sugar, 2 vols (London,
1949–50), I, pp. 198, 203. British Guiana’s decline was short-lived, unlike
those of Haiti and Jamaica.
12. David Eltis, ‘The Slave Economies of the Caribbean: Structure,
Performance, Evolution and Significance’, in Knight, ed., General History
of the Caribbean, III, pp. 111–23; David Geggus, ‘Slavery, War, and
Revolution in the Greater Caribbean’, in David Barry Gaspar and
Geggus, eds, A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater
Caribbean (Bloomington, IN, 1997), pp. 28–9.
13. West Indian output is detailed in David Watts, The West Indies: Patterns of
Development, Culture and Environmental Change since 1492 (Cambridge,
1987), p. 288; British Guiana’s, in Deerr, History of Sugar, I, p. 203.
14. J. R. Ward, Poverty and Progress in the Caribbean, 1800–1960 (London,
1985), p. 27.
15. Data in Francisco Pérez de la Riva, El Café: Historia de su cultivo y
explotación en Cuba (Havana, 1944), p. 51; James Leyburn, The Haitian
People (New Haven, CT, 1966), p. 320; Orlando Patterson, The Sociology
of Slavery (London, 1967), pp. 294–5.
16. Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El ingenio: Complejo económico social cubano del
azúcar, 3 vols (Havana, 1978), II, pp. 160, 162, 168, 173; Geggus,‘Slavery,
War, and Revolution’, 29; David Geggus, ‘Indigo and Slavery in Saint
Domingue’, in Verene A. Shepherd, ed., Slavery Without Sugar: Diversity in
Caribbean Economy and Society since the 17th Century (Gainesville, 2002),
pp. 19–35.
17. Lowell Ragatz, The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean,
1763–1833 (Washington, DC, 1928), pp. 340, 370; Alex van Stipriaan,
Surinaams Contrast: Roofbouw en Overleven in een Caraïbische
Plantagekolonie, 1750–1863 (Leiden, 1993), p. 265.
18. Ragatz, Fall of the Planter Class; Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery
(1944; London, 1964).
19. Elected assemblies with an advisory function were granted to
Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1787.
242 Notes

20. Of course, a definition of the Caribbean that includes its southern

‘rimland’, an alternative to the one used here, produces a rather differ-
ent result.This broader definition has generally received only lipservice
from scholars. It is invoked in the preface to the relevant volume of the
UNESCO General History of the Caribbean (III, p. vi) but ignored by all
the volume’s contributors. An expanded variant of it is employed in
Gaspar and Geggus, A Turbulent Time.
21. Geggus, ‘Slavery,War, and Revolution’, 5–20.
22. Edward Cox, Free Coloreds in the Slave Societies of St Kitts and Grenada,
1763–1833 (Knoxville, TN, 1984), pp. 96–110; Jerome Handler, The
Unappropriated People: Freedmen in the Slave Society of Barbados (Baltimore,
1974), ch. 4; Gad Heuman, Between Black and White: Race, Politics and the
Free Coloreds in Jamaica, 1792–1865 (Oxford, 1981), chs 2, 4; Ghislaine
Ornème,‘Identité et combat assimilationniste des libres de couleur de la
Martinique de 1789 à 1833’, in Marcel Dorigny, ed., Esclavage, résistances
et abolitions (Paris, 1999), pp. 295–304; Neville Hall, Slave Society in the
Danish West Indies (Mona, 1992), pp. 169–77.
23. A more apt term is ‘racial harmony’ according to Marixa Lasso, ‘Race,
War, and Nation in Caribbean Gran Colombia: Cartagena, 1810–1832’,
American Historical Review 111 (2006), 336.
24. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery; David B. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in
Western Culture (Ithaca, NY, 1966); Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age
of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY, 1975); Seymour Drescher,
Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh, 1977);
Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative
Perspective (New York, 1986). Christopher L. Brown’s Moral Capital:
Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006) combines
Drescher’s stress on mobilization with Williams’s emphasis on the
American Revolution as a watershed, and employs the concept of ‘moral
capital’ in a manner reminiscent of Davis’s use of ‘hegemony’.
25. Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières (Paris,
1971), ch. 3.
26. Gelien Matthews, Caribbean Slave Revolts and the British Abolitionist
Movement (Baton Rouge, LA, 2006). For British abolitionists who earlier
defended slaves’ right to rebellion, see David Geggus, ‘British Opinion
and the Emergence of Haiti, 1791–1805’, in James Walvin, ed., Slavery
and British Society, 1776–1848 (London, 1982), pp. 127–8, 145–6.
27. Michel Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West
Indies (London, 1982), minimizes antislavery’s influence on these rebellions
and depicts the rebellions as having only a negative impact on abolitionism.
28. Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848
(London, 1988), pp. 526–9, quotation on p. 527; Robin Blackburn,‘The
Force of Example’, in David Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian
Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, SC, 2001), pp. 15–20.
29. Drescher, Econocide, pp. 168–9; Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, pp.
96–9, 105–6.
Notes 243

30. Geggus, ‘British Opinion’, p. 130; David Geggus, ‘The Influence of the
Haitian Revolution on Blacks in Latin America and the Caribbean’, in
Nancy Naro, ed., Blacks, Coloureds and National Identity in Nineteenth-
Century Latin America (London, 2003), p. 47.
31. Only Spanish Louisiana suspended the import of slaves from Africa as a
security measure, and only temporarily: Paul Lachance, ‘The Politics of
Fear: French Louisianians and the Slave Trade’, Plantation Society in the
Americas 1 (1979), 162–97.
32. David Geggus, ‘Haiti and the Abolitionists: Opinion, Propaganda and
International Politics in Britain and France, 1804–1838’, in David
Richardson, ed., Abolition and its Aftermath: The Historical Context,
1790–1916 (London, 1985), p. 116.
33. Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1769–1810
(London, 1975), pp. 321–402; Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, pp.
96–9, 105–6.
34. Matthews, Caribbean Slave Revolts, pp. 160–4; Drescher, Capitalism and
Antislavery, pp. 108–9. More recently, Drescher has argued that the non-
violent tactics employed by the insurgent slaves in the Demerara rebel-
lion in 1823 elicited an empathy in Britain that boosted the abolitionist
movement: Seymour Drescher, ‘Civilizing Insurgency: Two Variants of
Slave Revolts in the Age of Revolution’, in Drescher and Pieter C.
Emmer, eds, Who Abolished Slavery? Slave Revolts and Abolitionism (New
York, 2010).
35. Davis, Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, pp. 117, 440; Blackburn,
Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, p. 145.
36. Léon Deschamps, Les colonies pendant la Révolution. La Constituante et la
Réforme coloniale (Paris, 1898), p. vi.
37. Jules Saintoyant, La colonisation française pendant la Révolution (Paris,
1930); C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins:Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San
Domingo Revolution (New York, 1938); Aimé Césaire, Toussaint-
Louverture: La Révolution française et le problème colonial (Paris, 1960).
38. Yves Benot, La Révolution française et la fin des colonies (Paris, 1988);
Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery. A sampling of the works listed
in Historical Abstracts suggests that, of the past half-century’s publications
on the Haitian Revolution, some 40 per cent appeared in the past
decade, and one-quarter in just the past five years.
39. However, nearly 10 per cent of the general cahiers de doléances mentioned
slavery or the slave trade.
40. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian
Revolution (Cambridge, 2004), p. 3; Dubois, A Colony of Citizens:
Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804
(Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), pp. 2–7.
41. Archives parlementaires de 1789 à 1860, ed. Jérôme Mavidal (Paris, 1862),
XXXI, p. 442.
42. Benot, Révolution, pp. 75, 86–7, 187 (violence), 200–4, 217; Blackburn,
Overthrow, p. 223; James, Black Jacobins, pp. 75–7, 120, 139; Florence
244 Notes

Gauthier, Triomphe et mort du droit naturel en révolution (Paris, 1992); Jean

Daniel Piquet, L’émancipation des noirs dans la Révolution française
(1789–1795) (Paris, 2002), esp. pp. 257, 266.
43. Jean Jaurès, Histoire socialiste, 1789–1900 (Paris, 1924), I, p. 574.
44. Seymour Drescher, ‘The Ending of the Slave Trade and Evolution of
European Scientific Racism’, Social Science History 14 (1990), 415–50.
45. Jeremy Popkin, ‘The French Revolution’s Other Island’, in David
Geggus and Norman Fiering, eds, The World of the Haitian Revolution
(Bloomington, IN, 2009), pp. 199–222, provides an incisive overview.
46. David Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington, IN, 2003),
ch. 5; Geggus, ‘Saint-Domingue on the Eve of Revolution’, in World of
the Haitian Revolution, pp. 3–20.
47. John Garrigus, Before Haiti (New York, 2006); Garrigus, ‘Opportunist or
Patriot? Julien Raimond (1744–1801) and the Haitian Revolution’,
Slavery and Abolition 28 (2007), 1–21.
48. Gabriel Debien, Les colons de Saint-Domingue et la Révolution française: essai
sur le Club Massiac (Paris, 1953); Charles Frostin, ‘L’Histoire de l’esprit
autonomiste colon à Saint-Domingue aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles’
(Thèse de doctorat d’état, Université de Paris I, 1972).
49. David Geggus, ‘Racial Equality, Slavery, and Colonial Secession, during
the Constituent Assembly’, American Historical Review 94 (1989),
1290–308.
50. Eugene Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave
Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge, LA, 1979);
Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in
the Age of Revolution (Durham, NC, 2004); Hilary Beckles, ‘The Two
Hundred Years War’, Jamaica Historical Review 13 (1982), 1–10.
51. R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of
Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ, 1959–64); Jacques
Godechot, France and the Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century,
1770–1799, trans. Herbert H. Rowen (London, 1965). Godechot and
Palmer make brief, scattered references to the revolution but do not
make clear whether they thought it belonged in their club of revolutions
‘of the West’. The closest indication we have is Palmer’s comment
regarding the late 1790s, ‘Toussaint Louverture seemed almost to be
succeeding in founding a free republic of a kind that some European
republicans of 1798, though hardly those of the United States, might
accept as akin to their own’: Palmer, Age of the Democratic Revolution, II,
p. 338.
52. David Geggus, ‘Print Culture and the Haitian Revolution:The Written
and the Spoken Word’, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 116,
2 (October 2006), 297–314.
53. David Geggus,‘Toussaint Louverture et l’abolition de l’esclavage à Saint-
Domingue’, in Liliane Chauleau , ed., Les abolitions dans les Amériques
(Fort de France, 2001), pp. 109–16.
54. Laurent Dubois, ‘An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the
Notes 245

Intellectual History of the French Atlantic’, Social History 31 (2006), 12;

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past (Boston, 1995), p. 89; Drescher
and Emmer, eds, Who Abolished Slavery?
55. Geggus, ‘Slavery,War, and Revolution’, 7–12.
56. Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, pp. 125–9, 197–8.
57. Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti (1847–8; Port-au-Prince, 1989–91), I,
pp. 431–2.
58. Robin Blackburn, ‘Haiti, Slavery, and the Age of the Democratic
Revolution’, William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 63 (2006), 643–73.
59. Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, p. 194; Dubois, ‘Enslaved
Enlightenment’, 11–12; Geggus ‘Print Culture’, 91–2.
60. Dubois,‘Enslaved Enlightenment’, 11–12; Dubois, Colony of Citizens, pp.
2–3. Curiously, he also attributes the March 1792 decree of racial equal-
ity to ‘the Republic’ (Colony of Citizens, p. 113), although it was passed
under the monarchy.
61. Archivo General de Simancas, Guerra Moderna 7157, Barthélemy to
Thomas, 24 October 1793, is a bizarre example.
62. Dubois, Colony of Citizens, pp. 5, 7 and passim.
63. See Claude Moïse, Constitutions et luttes de pouvoir en Haïti (1804–1987)
(Port-au-Prince, 1997), pp. 35–59. In the elections for the 1806 consti-
tutional convention, Christophe instructed his military commanders, ‘I
hardly need tell you to assist the people’s choice with your knowledge,
by pointing out to them, as needs be, those persons who are worthy of
public confidence.’
64. Hubert Cole, King Christophe of Haiti (London, 1967); The Armorial of
Haiti: Symbols of Nobility in the Reign of Henry Christophe, ed. Clive
Cheesman (London, 2007).
65. David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National
Independence in Haiti (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 57–60.
66. Strangely, while the ex-slave leaders rejected any attempt to export their
abolitionism, it was the free-born Alexandre Pétion who sought to
internationalize Haiti’s revolution in assisting Bolívar in 1816 and
Miranda in 1806, and participating (albeit accidentally) in an uprising in
Curaçao in 1799. Toussaint Louverture in 1799 betrayed an attempt by
French agents to raise Jamaican slaves – an ironic clash between the
French and Haitian Revolutions – and Christophe similarly denounced
a supposed plot by his enemy Pétion. See Geggus, ‘Slavery, War, and
Revolution’, p. 15.
67. David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History
(Cambridge, MA, 2007), pp. 114–15.
68. The most comprehensive account remains Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, III,
pp. 159–79. Since the start of the revolution, the colonists had treated
rebellious non-whites with the utmost brutality, and in the war of inde-
pendence, the French army had openly used genocidal tactics.
69. Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, II, pp. 179–83, 274–5.This provision was omitted
from Christophe’s two constitutions, but included in all others down to
246 Notes

1918.The omission is surprising, as Christophe is regarded as more mili-

tantly nationalist than Pétion. He was more uncompromising in negotia-
tions with the French about gaining recognition of Haitian independence,
but he also made greater efforts to obtain European assistance.
70. John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826 (London,
1973), pp. 202–3.
71. Leslie Manigat, Evolution et révolutions (Port-au-Prince, 2007), pp. 88, 96.
72. Moreover, although Simón Bolívar mentioned Haiti in his correspon-
dence usually as a site of anarchy and tyranny, in 1826 the increasingly
disillusioned Liberator praised the republic’s system of life presidency
with the right to name a successor as a source of stability. See Selected
Writings of Bolívar, ed. Harold A. Bierck (New York, 1951), pp. 140, 229,
267–8, 307–8, 499, 599, 624.

Chapter 6: The Dynamics of History in Africa and the Atlantic

‘Age of Revolutions’
1. R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of
Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ, 1959–64).
2. William R. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human
Community (Chicago, 1963); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World
System (New York, 1974); Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without
History (Berkeley, CA, 1982); C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British
Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London, 1989); Bayly, The Birth of the
Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford,
2004); Joseph C. Miller, ‘Beyond Blacks, Bondage, and Blame: Why a
Multi-centric World History Needs Africa’, Historically Speaking 5, 2
(2004), 7–31.
3. Joseph C. Miller, ‘History and Africa/Africa and History’, American
Historical Review 104 (1999), 1–32; Miller, ‘Life Begins at Fifty: African
Studies Enters its Second Half Century’, African Studies Review 50
(2007), 1–35.
4. Compare John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the
Atlantic World, 1500–1680, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1998); Herbert S.
Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1999).
5. Joseph C. Miller,‘A Theme in Variations:A Historical Schema of Slaving
in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean Regions’, in Gwyn Campbell, ed.,
‘The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia’, Slavery and
Abolition 24, 2 (2003), 169–94.
6. Or, in one of the most thoughtful and comprehensive treatments,
‘baroque to modern’: Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World
Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London, 1997).
7. In effect, I am here adding Africa to Bayly’s Imperial Meridian.
8. See studies in Michael L. Bush, ed., Serfdom and Slavery: Studies in Legal
Bondage (London, 1996).
Notes 247

9. Lauren Benton, ‘Legal Spaces of Empire: Piracy and the Origins of

Ocean Regionalism’, Comparative Studies in Society and History (2005),
700–24.
10. This synoptic focus on mercantile sources of financing monarchy in
Europe does not pause to consider the Spanish New World territories,
famously financed by mining silver and subcontracting its commercial
aspects to foreign merchants, until a new dynasty in Spain very belatedly
attempted the so-called ‘Bourbon reforms’, part of the Iberian experi-
ence of the Atlantic ‘Age of Revolution’. The Portuguese counterpart
came with English removal of the ruling house from Lisbon to Rio de
Janeiro in 1807 to escape Napoleon’s armies in Iberia.
11. Pernille Røge,‘“La clef de commerce” – The Changing Role of Africa in
France’s Atlantic Empire ca. 1760–1797’, in Allan Potofsky, ed., ‘New
Perspectives on the Atlantic’, History of European Ideas 34, 4 (2008), 431–43.
12. Joseph C. Miller, ‘The Slave Trade’, in Jacob Ernest Cooke, gen. ed.,
Encyclopedia of the North American Colonies, 2 vols (New York, 1993), II,
pp. 45–66.
13. Barbara L. Solow, ‘Capitalism and Slavery in the Exceedingly Long
Run’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17 (1987), 711–37.
14. Not ‘imperial’ in the integrated sense developed in the nineteenth
century, in ways that space limitations prevent me from developing here.
15. Philip Gould, Barbarous Traffic: Commerce and Anti-Slavery in the
Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA, 2003).
16. Orlando Patterson’s famed definition of slavery as ‘social death’ depends
on the premise of modern civic-style ‘social’ recognition or recogniz-
ability: Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study
(Cambridge, MA, 1982).
17. For an alternative statement, Jan Vansina, ‘Pathways of Political
Development in Equatorial Africa and Neo-evolutionary Theory’, in
Susan Keech McIntosh, ed., Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in
Africa (New York, 1999), pp. 166–72.
18. Susan Keech and Roderick J. McIntosh, ‘Finding West Africa’s Oldest
City’, National Geographic, 162, 3 (September 1982), 396–418; Susan
Keech McIntosh, ‘Urbanism in Sub-Saharan Africa’, in Joseph O.Vogel,
ed., Encyclopedia of Precolonial Africa: Archaeology, History, Languages, and
Environments (Walnut Creek, CA, 1997), pp. 461–72; Roderick J.
McIntosh, Ancient Middle Niger: Urbanism and the Self-organizing Landscape
(New York, 2005).
19. Credit extended south of the desert from Mediterranean cities has been
documented: Michael Brett,‘Ifriqiya as a Market for Saharan Trade from
the Tenth to the Twelfth Century A.D.’, Journal of African History 10
(1969), 347–64.
20. Compare Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History
(Cambridge, 1984).
21. George E. Brooks Jr, Landlords and Strangers: Ecology, Society and Trade in
Western Africa, 1000–1630 (Boulder, CO, 1994).
248 Notes

22. Paul E. Lovejoy and Toyin Falola, eds, Pawnship, Slavery, and Colonialism
in Africa, expanded edn (New Brunswick, NJ, 2003); Claude
Meillassoux, ‘The Role of Slavery in the Economic and Social History
of Sahelo-Sudanic Africa’, in Joseph E. Inikori, ed., Forced Migration:The
Impact of the Export Slave Trade on African Societies (London, 1981), pp.
74–99, usefully distinguishes mercantile strategies, but in a more struc-
tural vein than the historical dynamics emphasized here.
23. I am limiting the examples of this tendency, recurrent in every part of
Africa, to examples in touch with the maritime commercial economies
surrounding the continent.
24. Compare Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the
Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison,WI, 1988), esp. part I.
25. Thornton, Africa and Africans, has depicted Africa’s engagement with the
European ‘Atlantic’ in terms not inconsistent with the accents argued
here, though with emphases on rather different aspects of the similari-
ties.
26. David M. Anderson and Richard Rathbone, eds, Africa’s Urban Past
(Oxford, 2000).
27. The literature on the ‘canoe houses of the Niger Delta’ is classic; for
recent treatments, David Northrup, Trade without Rulers: Pre-colonial
Economic Development in South-Eastern Nigeria (Oxford, 1978), and Ralph
A. Austen and Jonathan Derrick, Middlemen of the Cameroons Rivers: the
Duala and their Hinterland, c.1600–c. 1960 (New York, 1999). For the
Congo River basin, Jan Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests:Toward a History
of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison, WI, 1990); Robert W.
Harms, River of Wealth, River of Sorrow:The Central Zaire Basin in the Era
of the Slave and Ivory Trade, 1500–1891 (New Haven, CT, 1981); Harms,
Games against Nature: An Eco-cultural History of the Nunu of Equatorial
Africa (New York, 1987).
28. The so-called Swahili towns of Africa’s northern Indian Ocean coast are
the best known examples, often treated as highly commercialized;
however, John Middleton, ‘Merchants: An Essay in Historical
Ethnography’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9 (2003),
509–26, shows the extent to which Africans converted the ‘coins’ minted
in towns along the Swahili coast, deeply embedded as they were in the
commercial culture of the Indian Ocean, into distinctive and durable
tokens of personal relationships, more characteristic of a communal
ethos than of a mercantile economy.
29. See Elizabeth Isichei, Voices of the Poor in Africa (Rochester, NY, 2002),
chs 2–6; Robert Martin Baum, Shrines of the Slave Trade: Diola Religion
and Society in Precolonial Senegambia (New York, 1999); Rosalind Shaw,
The Dangers of Temne Divination: Ritual Memories of the Slave Trade in West
Africa (Chicago, 2002).
30. Ernst van den Boogart, ‘The Trade between Western Africa and the
Atlantic World, 1600–90: Estimates of Trends in Composition and Value’,
Journal of African History 33 (1992), 369–85; David Eltis, ‘The Relative
Notes 249

Importance of Slaves and Commodities in the Atlantic Trade of

Seventeenth-century Africa’, Journal of African History 35 (1994), 237–49.
31. John K. Thornton, The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition,
1641–1718 (Madison,WI, 1983).
32. Joseph C. Miller, ‘Kings, Lists, and History in Kasanje’, History in Africa
6 (1979), 51–96; Jan Vansina, ‘Ambaca Society and the Slave Trade,
c.1760–1845’, Journal of African History 46 (2005), 1–27.
33. Robin C. C. Law, The Oyo Empire, c.1600–c.1836: A West African
Imperialism in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Oxford, 1977).
34. Robin Law,‘Francisco Felix de Souza in West Africa, 1820–1849’, in José
C. Curto and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds, Enslaving Connections: Changing
Cultures of Africa and Brazil during the Era of Slavery (Amherst, NY, 2003),
pp. 187–211; Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving
‘Port’, 1727–1892 (Athens, GA, 2004).
35. Jay Alan Coughtry, The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island and the African
Slave Trade, 1700–1807 (Philadelphia, 1981); Charles Rappleye, Sons of
Providence:The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution
(New York, 2006).
36. Joseph C. Miller, ‘A Marginal Institution on the Margin of the Atlantic
System:The Portuguese Southern Atlantic Slave Trade in the Eighteenth
Century’, in Barbara Solow, ed., Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System
(Cambridge, 1991), pp. 120–50.
37. Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, ‘Trust, Pawnship, and Atlantic
History:The Institutional Foundations of the Old Calabar Slave Trade’,
American Historical Review 104 (1999), 333–55; Lovejoy and Richardson,
‘The Business of Slaving: Pawnship in Western Africa, c.1600–1810’,
Journal of African History 41 (2001), 67–89; Lovejoy and Richardson,
‘“This Horrid Hole”: Royal Authority, Commerce and Credit at Bonny,
1690–1840’, Journal of African History 45 (2004), 363–92; Lovejoy and
Richardson, ‘African Agency and the Liverpool Slave Trade’, in David
Richardson, Suzanne Schwarz and Anthony Tibbles, eds, Liverpool and
Transatlantic Slavery (Liverpool, 2007), pp. 43–65.
38. For recent insight into this epistemology, see E. J. Alagoa,
‘Historiography: Oral’, in John Middleton and Joseph C. Miller, eds, New
Encyclopedia of Africa, 5 vols (Farmington Hills, MI, 2007), II, pp. 565–8.
39. I have found very provocative Jeremy Adelman, ‘An Age of Imperial
Revolutions’, American Historical Review 113 (2008), 319–40, and
Adelman, ‘Iberian Passages: Continuity and Change in the South
Atlantic’, ch. 4 in this volume, for the evidence he offers of the contra-
dictoriness of change envisaged in essentially structural abstractions of
‘empire’ and ‘democratic’ civic polities.
40. As highlighted in Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks:The
Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South
(Chapel Hill, NC, 1998).
41. Along these lines, Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle
Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA, 2007). Also
250 Notes

Joseph C. Miller, ‘Retention, Re-Invention, and Remembering:

Restoring Identities through Enslavement in Africa and Under Slavery
in Brazil’, in Curto and Lovejoy, eds, Enslaving Connections, pp. 81–121.
42. For the closest approximations to this definition, see Igor Kopytoff and
Suzanne Miers, ‘Introduction’, in Miers and Kopytoff, eds, Slavery in
Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison, WI, 1977);
Kopytoff, ‘Slavery’, Annual Review of Anthropology 11 (1982), 207–30.

Chapter 7: Playing Muslim: Bonaparte’s Army of the Orient

and Euro-Muslim Creolization
1. Isabel P. B. Feo Rodrigues, ‘Islands of Sexuality: Theories and Histories
of Creolization in Cape Verde’, International Journal of African Historical
Studies 36, 1, special issue, Colonial Encounters between Africa and Portugal
(2003), 83–103; for an argument about the difference between creoliza-
tion and hybridity and the reasons for which the latter has gained greater
currency in interdisciplinary work, see Deborah A. Kapchan and Pauline
Turner Strong,‘Theorizing the Hybrid’, Journal of American Folklore 112,
445, special issue, Theorizing the Hybrid (Summer 1999), 239–53.
2. Lionel Caplan, ‘Creole World, Purist Rhetoric: Anglo-Indian Cultural
Debates in Colonial and Contemporary Madras’, Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute 1 (1995), 743–62.
3. Mattison Mines, ‘Courts of Law and Styles of Self in Eighteenth-century
Madras: From Hybrid to Colonial Self ’, Modern Asian Studies 35 (2001), 56.
4. Ibid.
5. C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections
and Comparisons (Oxford, 2004), pp. 45, 76–106.
6. Jane Hathaway, The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt:The Rise of the
Qazdaglis (Cambridge, 2002).
7. Juan Cole, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York, 2007).
8. ’Abd al-Rahman Al-Jabarti, Ta’rikh Muddath al-faransis bi misr, ed.Abd al-
Rahim A.Abd al-Rahim (Cairo, 2000), pp. 33–41.Another translation is
Shmuel Moreh, Napoleon in Egypt: Al-Jabarti’s Chronicle of the French
Occupation, 1798 (Princeton, NJ, 1995), pp. 24–7.
9. ’Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, Muzhir al-taqdis bi dhihab dawlat al-faransis
(Cairo, 1969), pp. 36–9.
10. Isma‘il al-Khashshab, Ta’rikh al-musalsal fi hawadith al-Zaman wa waqa’i‘
al-Diwan (1800–1801), ed. Mohammad Afifi and André Raymond
(Cairo, 2003).
11. Pierre Amedée Jaubert/brother, 20 Messidor 6/8 July 1798, in Copies of
Original Letters from the Army of General Bonaparte in Egypt, intercepted by
the fleet under the command of Admiral Lord Nelson. Part the first. With an
English translation, 9th edn (London, 1798), p. 31.
12. Nicolas-Philibert Desvernois, Mémoires du Général Baron Desvernois, ed.
Albert Dufourcq (Paris, 1898), p. 135.
Notes 251

13. Napoléon Bonaparte, Correspondence de Napoléon I, 32 vols (Paris,

1858–70), IV, p. 420, no. 3148.
14. Jean Gabriel de Niello-Sargy, Mémoires secrets et inédits, pour servir à l’histoire
contemporaine, ed. Alphonse de Beauchamp, 2 vols (Paris, 1825), I, p. 308.
15. Joseph-Marie Moiret, Mémoires sur l’expédition d’Egypte (Paris, 1984), pp.
64–5.
16. Moiret, Mémoires, p. 80.
17. François Bernoyer, Avec Bonaparte en Egypte et en Syrie, 1798–1800: Dix-
neuf lettres inédites, ed. Christian Tortel (Abbeville, 1976), pp. 72, 76.
18. ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, ‘Aja’ib al-Athar fi al-Tarajim wa al-Akhbar, 2nd
edn, 4 vols (Bulaq, 1904), II, pp. 106–7; for the nudity of dervishes see
Victor Cousin, Fragments Philosophiques, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Paris, 1838), II,
p. 391, citing a letter of the Diwan to Menou.
19. Al-Jabarti, Muzhir, pp. 103, 105; al-Jabarti, ‘Aja’ib, III, pp. 39–40.
20. Michael Winter, Egyptian Society under Ottoman Rule, 1517–1798
(London, 1992), p. 74; al-Jabarti, ‘Aja’ib, II, pp. 17–19.
21. Bernoyer, Avec Bonaparte en Égypte et en Syrie, pp. 128–30.
22. Niello-Sargy, Mémoires secrets, I, pp. 340–3.
23. General Jean-Pierre Doguereau, Journal de l’expedition d’Egypte, ed.
Clément de la Jonquière (Paris, 1904), p. 266.
24. Rebecca Joubin, ‘Islam and Arabs through the Eyes of the Encyclopédie:
The “Other” as a Case of French Cultural Self-Criticism’, International
Journal of Middle East Studies 32 (2000), 198.
25. Abdullah al-Sharqawi, Tuhfat al-Nazirin fiman waliya misr min al-Muluk
wa al-Salatin, ed. Rihab Abd al-Hamid al-Qari (Cairo, 1996), pp. 122–3.
26. Averröes, On the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy: A Translation, with
Introduction and Notes of Ibn Rushd’s Kitāb fasl al-maqāl, trans. George F.
Hourani (London, 1961); for Abbasid Baghdad, see Hugh Kennedy,
When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World:The Rise and Fall of Islam’s Greatest
Dynasty (Cambridge, MA, 2005).
27. Peter Gran, The Islamic Roots of Capitalism: Egypt, 1760–1840 (Austin,
TX, 1979), chs 2, 3; Juan Cole, ‘Rifa‘ah al-Tahtawi and the Revival of
Practical Philosophy: An Examination of Neo-classicism in his “The
Paths of Egyptian Minds in the Joys of Modern Manners”’ (MA Thesis,
American University in Cairo, 1978), ch. 1.

Chapter 8: Imperial Revolutions and Global Repercussions:

South Asia and the World, c.1750–1850
I am very grateful to Peter Holquist, Lynn Hunt, Maya Jasanoff, Peter
Marshall, Philip Stern, Eric Tagliacozzo and especially to David Armitage and
Sanjay Subrahmanyam for advice about different aspects of this chapter.

1. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (London, 1962),

p. 4.
252 Notes

2. Ibid., p. 33
3. Ibid., p. 26.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. David Washbrook, ‘India in the Early Modern World Economy: Modes
of Production, Reproduction and Exchange’, Journal of Global History 2
(2007), 89.
7. Hobsbawm, Age of Revolution, p. 54. For a recent treatment of Roy’s
political thought, situating it within a broader global ‘moment’ of consti-
tutional liberalism, see C. A. Bayly, ‘Rammohan Roy and the Advent of
Constitutional Liberalism in India, 1800–30’, Modern Intellectual History
4 (2007), 25–41.
8. Hobsbawm, Age of Revolution, p. 139.
9. C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections
and Comparisons (Oxford, 2004), p. 1.
10. Ibid., pp. 86, 89. For another formulation of a connected ‘Eurasian revo-
lution’, in which a ‘long equilibrium of cultures and continents was
swept away’ by ‘a series of forced entries or forcible overthrows’, see John
Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empire (London,
2007), pp. 160–210.
11. For an earlier formulation of this Asian context for European imperial-
ism, emphasizing the new threats to land empires posed by ‘tribal break-
outs’ of nomadic groups from the frontiers of settled agriculture, see C.
A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 1780–1830
(London, 1989). For the significance of Nadir Shah, see Sanjay
Subrahmanyam, Penumbral Visions: Making Polities in Early Modern South
India (New Delhi, 2001), p. 15.
12. For a fine-grained account of this process in Bengal, see P. J. Marshall,
Bengal: The British Bridgehead: Eastern India, 1740–1828 (Cambridge,
1987).
13. Jeremy Adelman, ‘The Age of Imperial Revolutions’, American Historical
Review 113 (2008), 319–40. While adapting Adelman’s suggestive
concept, I do not attempt any sustained comparison here between impe-
rial trajectories in the Atlantic world and in Asia. Nonetheless, his
reframing of Atlantic revolutions, less as the collapse of defunct empires
and the rise of new nations, and more as an extended crisis within impe-
rial forms of sovereignty, involving a ‘prolonged effort to reassemble the
practices of sovereignty under empire’ (p. 337), appears to offer interest-
ing possibilities for further comparative analyses.
14. Sudipta Sen, A Distant Sovereignty: Nationalism, Imperialism and the Origins
of British India (New York, 2002), p. xiii.
15. For an emphasis on the recharging of British imperial nationalism
during the French wars, see Bayly, Imperial Meridian.
16. For an emphasis on the importance of European maritime strength in
enabling territorial conquests, see D. A.Washbrook, ‘From Comparative
Sociology to Global History: Britain and India in the Prehistory of
Notes 253

Modernity’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 40

(1997), 410–43.
17. See, for example, William Watts, Memoirs of the Revolution in Bengal
(London, 1760).
18. Burke’s Speech on Fox’s East India Bill (1 December 1783), reprinted in
Edmund Burke, On Empire, Liberty and Reform: Speeches and Letters, ed.
David Bromwich (New Haven, CT, 2000), pp. 298–9.
19. For a discussion of contemporary uses of this term see F. Lehman, ‘The
Eighteenth Century Transition in India: Responses of Some Bihar
Intellectuals’ (PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1967), p. 18. For
a later use of the term by critics of modernizing Muslim states in the
nineteenth century, see Amira K. Bennison, ‘Muslim Universalism and
Western Globalization’, in A. G. Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World
History (London, 2002), p. 92.
20. For surveys of contemporary Indian treatments of European conquests,
see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Penumbral Visions, ch. 1, and Kumkum
Chatterjee, ‘History as Self-Representation:The Recasting of a Political
Tradition in Bengal and Bihar’, Modern Asian Studies 32 (1998), 913–48.
21. From the Tuzak-i-Walajah, cited by Subrahmanyam, Penumbral Visions, p.
202.
22. Ghulam Husain Khan Tabataba’i, A Translation of the Sëir Mutaqherin; or
View of Modern Times, trans. Haji Mustafa, 3 vols (Calcutta, 1789–90), III,
p. 161.
23. Ibid., III, p. 27.
24. P. J. Marshall, A Free though Conquering People: Britain and Asia in the
Eighteenth Century (London, 1981).
25. For extended discussions of Burke’s views, see Robert Travers, Ideology
and Empire in Eighteenth Century India:The British in Bengal (Cambridge,
2007), pp. 217–23, and P. J. Marshall, ‘Edmund Burke and India’, in
Rudrangshu Mukherjee and Lakshmi Subramanian, eds, Politics and Trade
in the Indian Ocean World: Essays in Honor of Ashin Das Gupta (New Delhi,
1998), pp. 250–69.
26. David Bromwich, ‘Introduction’, in Burke, On Empire, Liberty and
Reform, ed. Bromwich, p. 17.
27. Hastings to George Vansittart, 5 March 1777, British Library, Additional
Manuscripts 48,370 fo. 41v.
28. For a longer explication of British views of the Mughal constitution, see
Travers, Ideology and Empire. And for a suggestion of certain broad over-
laps between conceptions of imperial virtue and corruption in different
parts of early modern Eurasia, especially the impulse to defend ‘ancient
traditions of community and the honor of the land’ from new forms of
commercialism and militarism, see Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, pp.
288–9.
29. Travers, Ideology and Empire, ch. 6. As Jon E.Wilson has recently empha-
sized, high imperial complacency coexisted with severe anxiety among
isolated British officials scattered across remote districts, as they struggled
254 Notes

to apply general administrative regulations in particular circumstances.

See Jon E. Wilson, The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in
Eastern India, 1780–1835 (Basingstoke, 2008).
30. Kenneth Balhatchet, Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes
and Policies and Their Critics (London, 1980). For a recent argument that
more ‘scientific’ conceptions of racial difference, combining notions of
culture, religion, and biology, were being articulated in the late eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Shruti Kapila, ‘Race Matters.
Orientalism and Religion in India and Beyond c.1770–1880’, Modern
Asian Studies 41 (2007), 471–513. Compare this with David Washbrook,
‘South India 1770–1840:The Colonial Transition’, Modern Asian Studies
38 (2004), 479–516, who suggests that British racial sensibilities in South
India were cut across by cross-cutting class hierarchies and elite social
interactions. ‘The binary oppositions and strict racial hierarchies’, he
suggests, ‘characteristic of late nineteenth century “colonialism”, were a
very long time reaching South India, if they ever did’ (p. 486).
31. Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley, CA, 1997);
Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire
(Basingstoke, 2002).
32. For the links between British legal regimes and Hindu social reformism in
early nineteenth-century Bengal, see Wilson, Domination of Strangers, ch. 6.
33. For important works along these lines, see Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of
Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab 1707–48 (Delhi,
1986); and André Wink, Land and Sovereignty in India:Agrarian Society and
Politics under the Eighteenth Century Maratha Svarajya (Cambridge, 1986).
34. Eric Stokes,‘The First Century of British Colonial Rule in India. Social
Revolution or Social Stagnation?’, Past and Present 58 (February 1973),
136–60. For a more elaborate synthesis, emphasizing the themes of conti-
nuity and Indian agency, but also pointing to new processes of ‘peasanti-
zation’ and ‘traditionalization’ under the colonial regime, see C. A. Bayly,
Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1998).
35. For collections of representative articles from these debates, see Seema
Alavi, ed., The Eighteenth Century in India (New Delhi, 2002), and P. J.
Marshall, ed., The Eighteenth Century in Indian History: Evolution or
Revolution? (New Delhi, 2003).
36. Frank Perlin, ‘State Formation Reconsidered’, in Perlin, The Invisible
City: Monetary, Administrative and Popular Infrastructure in Asia and Europe
1500–1900 (Aldershot, 1993), pp. 15–90.
37. For fine recent examples of this kind of new political history, see Sanjay
Subrahmanyam, Penumbral Visions, and Prachi Deshpande, Creative Pasts:
Historical Memory and Identity in Western India 1700–1960 (New Delhi,
2007).
38. Subrahmanyam, Penumbral Visions, pp. 20–1.
39. Perlin, ‘State Formation Reconsidered’, p. 39.
40. For caste, see Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the
Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge, 1999), and Nicholas B.
Notes 255

Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India

(Princeton, NJ, 2001); for historical narrative, see Velcheru Narayana
Rao, David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds, Textures of Time:
Writing History in South India 1600–1800 (Delhi, 2001); and for corpo-
rate groups and urban history, see C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and
Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870
(Cambridge, 1983).
41. For a subtle reading of new forms of temporality produced within a
‘modern’ colonial state as a ‘future-oriented project of state-formation’,
see Wilson, Domination of Strangers, p. 14.
42. Deshpande, Creative Pasts.
43. Norbert Peabody, Hindu Kingship and Polity in Precolonial India
(Cambridge, 2002).
44. Perlin, ‘State Formation Reconsidered’, pp. 88–90.
45. See, for example, David Washbrook, ‘Economic Depression and the
Making of “Traditional” Society in Colonial India’, Transactions of the
Royal Historical Society 6th ser. 3 (1993), 237–63.
46. Frank Perlin, Unbroken Landscape: Commodity, Category, Sign and Identity;
Their Production as Myth and Knowledge from 1500 (Aldershot, 1994), p.
80.
47. Jon E. Wilson, ‘Early Colonial India Beyond Empire’, The Historical
Journal 50 (2007), 951–70.
48. See in particular the two volumes of Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Explorations
in Connected History: Mughals and Franks (Delhi, 2005), and Explorations
in Connected History: From the Tagus to the Ganges (Delhi, 2005).
49. John Maynard Keynes, ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’
(1930), in Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, in Collected Writings of John
Maynard Keynes, 30 vols (London, 1971), IX, pp. 323–4.
50. For a summary and critique of what he calls ‘Europe-centered stories’ of
modern economic development, see Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great
Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy
(Princeton, NJ, 2000), pp. 10–17.
51. For two especially rich versions of such an approach , see Pomeranz,
ibid., and David Washbrook, ‘From Comparative Sociology to Global
History’.
52. Jan de Vries, ‘The Industrious Revolution and the Industrial
Revolution’, Journal of Economic History 54 (1994), 249–70.
53. P. K. O’Brien, ‘Inseparable Connections: Trade, Economy, Fiscal State
and the Expansion of Empire, 1688–1815’, in P. J. Marshall, ed., The
Oxford History of the British Empire, II: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford,
1998), pp. 53–77; Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People?
England, 1783–1846 (Oxford, 2006), p. 4.The classic work on the rise of
the ‘fiscal-military state’ remains John Brewer, The Sinews of Power:War,
Money and the English State 1688–1783 (London, 1989). For the influ-
ential argument that the economic underpinnings of British imperialism
from the late seventeenth century onwards rested on an alliance of
256 Notes

landed and commercial elites, termed ‘gentlemanly capitalism’, see P. J.

Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688–2000, 2nd edn (New
York, 2001).
54. For detailed statistical analyses of imperial trades, see Jacob Price, ‘The
Imperial Economy, 1700–1776’, in Marshall, ed., Oxford History of the
British Empire, II, pp. 78–105. Marshall notes that ‘trade statistics show
that Asia was a major source of imports, although always a smaller one
than the West Indies, throughout the eighteenth century, but that as a
destination for exports it lagged far behind North America, the gap
actually widening by the end of the century’. Marshall,‘Britain without
America – A Second Empire?’, in Marshall, ed., Oxford History of the
British Empire, II, p. 577.
55. O’Brien,‘Inseparable Connections’; Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, pp.
20–1.
56. These interconnections are emphasized by J. R. Ward, ‘The Industrial
Revolution and British Imperialism, 1750–1850’, Economic History
Review new ser. 47 (1994), 44–65, who argues that the East India
Company’s military expansionism from the 1780s onwards was enabled
not only by capturing local Indian resources, but also by tapping into
networks of trade and credit which themselves depended on the
growing wealth of an industrializing metropolis.
57. Marshall writes that by the end of the eighteenth century tea was
‘rivalling sugar as the most valuable import’ to Britain. ‘Tea was by far
the most valuable commodity in which the East India Company dealt,
and the duties levied on it provided the government with 6 or 7% of its
total revenue’: Marshall, ‘Britain without America’, p. 582.
58. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, pp. 192–3.
59. H. V. Bowen, Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics,
1757–1773 (Cambridge, 1999); Holden Furber, John Company at Work:
A Study of European Expansion in the Late Eighteenth Century (Cambridge,
MA, 1948).
60. Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People.
61. Javier Cuenca Esteban, ‘The British Balance of Payments, 1772–1820:
India Transfers and War Finance’, Economic History Review new ser. 54
(2001), 58–86.
62. Huw Bowen, The Business of Empire:The East India Company and Imperial
Britain, 1756–1833 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 260–95.
63. Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World that Trade Created:
Society, Culture and the World Economy, 2nd edn (New York, 2006), pp.
91–3.
64. For estimates of mortality rates, see P. J. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes.The
British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1976), pp. 218–19.
65. For India and the British question, see Bowen, Business of Empire, p. 275,
and Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven,
CT, 1992), pp. 127–9.
66. Philip Harling, The Waning of the Old Corruption:The Politics of Economical
Notes 257

Reform in Britain, 1779–1846 (Oxford, 1996), p. 39; Lucy Sutherland,

The East India Company in Eighteenth Century Politics (Oxford, 1952), pp.
411–13.
67. H.V. Bowen, ‘British India 1765–1813: The Metropolitan Context’, in
Marshall, ed., Oxford History of the British Empire, II, pp. 530–1.
68. For the idea of the ‘garrison state’, see Douglas Peers, Between Mars and
Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in India 1819–35
(London, 1995).
69. Bayly, Imperial Meridian; Hilton, Mad, Bad and Dangerous People?
70. Martha McLaren, ‘From Analysis to Prescription: Scottish Concepts of
Asiatic Despotism in Early Nineteenth Century British India’,
International History Review 15 (1993), 469–501.
71. Miles Taylor, ‘Queen Victoria and India, 1837–61’, Victorian Studies 46
(2004), 264–75. For a longer discussion of elite British notions of social
hierarchy in relation to imperial governance, see David Cannadine,
Ornamentalism: How the British Saw their Empire (Oxford, 2001).
72. For a good survey of changing gender relations in Britain, emphasizing
the intersections between domestic and imperial histories, see Susan
Kingsley Kent, Gender and Power in Britain, 1640–1990 (London, 1999).
73. Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate over Sati in Colonial India
(Berkeley, CA, 1998).
74. Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India:The Making of Empire
(Cambridge, 2006).
75. Miles Taylor,‘Joseph Hume and the Reformation of India, 1819–33’, in
Glenn Burgess and Matthew Festenstein, eds, English Radicalism
1550–1850 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 293–4, and the same author’s
‘Empire and Parliamentary Reform: The 1832 Reform Act Revisited’,
in Arthur Burns and Joanna Innes, eds, Rethinking the Age of Reform:
Britain 1780–1850 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 295–311.
76. The classic study is Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians in India (Oxford,
1959; repr. New Delhi, 1982); see also Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of
the Raj (Cambridge, 1994).
77. Bayly,‘Rammohan Roy and the Advent of Constitutional Liberalism in
India’.
78. Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain
and France (Princeton, NJ, 2005). For an emphasis on the durability of
Whiggish evolutionism in nineteenth-century Britain, see Peter
Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from
Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven, CT, 2007).
79. Marshall, Bengal:The British Bridgehead.
80. For a longer history of the Company as an early modern form of state,
see Philip J. Stern,‘“One Body Corporate and Politick”:The Growth of
the East India Company State in the Later Seventeenth Century’ (PhD
dissertation, Columbia University, 2004).
81. For Hastings’s Tibetan connection, see Kate Teltscher, The High Road to
China: George Bogle,The Panchen Lama, and the First British Expedition to
258 Notes

Tibet (New York, 2006); and for his Middle Eastern interests, see Edward
Ingram, In Defence of British India: Great Britain and the Middle East,
1775–1842 (London, 1984), p. 21.
82. Alan Frost, The Global Reach of Empire 1764–1815 (Carlton,Victoria,
2006).
83. Ministerial reticence about territorial conquests in India is emphasized
in P. J. Marshall, ‘British Expansion in India: A Historical Revision’,
History 60 (1975), 19–43.
84. Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons:The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global
Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2006), pp. 36–71.
85. Ibid., and Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian
Ocean Arena, 1860–1920 (Berkeley, CA, 2007).
86. For Tipu’s embassy, see Jean-Marie Lafont, Indika: Essays in Indo-French
Relations (New Delhi, 2000), and for the wider context of Anglo-
French imperial conflict, Robert Tombs and Isabella Tombs, That Sweet
Enemy:The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present (New
York, 2007).
87. Cited in Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, p. 227.
88. Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture and Conquest in the East
1750–1850 (New York, 2005); Juan Cole, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the
Middle East (New York, 2007).
89. Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, p. 239; Lafont, Indika, pp. 209–10.
90. Alex Marshall, The Russian General Staff and Asia, 1800–1917 (Oxford,
2006), p. 12.
91. For a discussion of these different views, see Roderick McGrew, Paul I
of Russia, 1754–1801 (Oxford, 1992), p. 316.
92. Cited in Cole, Napoleon’s Egypt, p. 13
93. Marshall, Russian General Staff and Asia, p. 36.
94. Malcolm Yapp, Strategies of British India: Britain, Iran and Afghanistan,
1798–1850 (Oxford, 1980).
95. Michael Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China, 1800–42
(Cambridge, 1951); Pomeranz and Topik, The World that Trade Created,
pp. 90–4. But see the argument of Pomeranz in this volume that impe-
rial China’s major challenges in this period were mainly internally
generated.
96. For problems of structural dependency, see Washbrook, ‘India in the
Early Modern World Economy’; and for the long build-up of an
English East India Company polity in Asia, well before the conquests
of the mid-eighteenth century, see Philip J. Stern, ‘“A Politie of Civill
and Military Power”: Political Thought and the Late Seventeenth
Century Foundations of the East India Company State’, Journal of
British Studies 47 (2008), 253–83.
97. For a collection of essays emphasizing the layered character of phases
of globalization, from ‘archaic’ to ‘proto-modern’ to modern and post-
modern, see Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World History.
98. Washbrook, ‘India in the Early Modern World Economy’, p. 90.
Notes 259

99. Tirthankar Roy focuses on the creative adaption and survival of arti-
sanal manufacturing in Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial
India (Cambridge, 1999).
100. Prasannan Parthasarathi, The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers,
Peasants and Kings in South India (Cambridge, 2001); see also Hameeda
Hossain, The Company Weavers of Bengal:The East India Company and the
Organization of Textile Production in Bengal, 1750–1813 (Delhi, 1988).
101. Other European traders also provided an important vehicle for remit-
tances back to Europe of British private fortunes made in India. See
Marshall, Bengal:The British Bridgehead, pp. 105–6.
102. Washbrook,‘South India 1770–1840’, p. 508, and Washbrook,‘The Two
Faces of Colonialism: India 1818–1860’, in Andrew Porter, ed., The
Oxford History of the British Empire, III:The Nineteenth Century (Oxford,
1999), pp. 395–421.
103. Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, p. 35.
104. C. A. Bayly, ‘The Age of Hiatus: The North Indian Economy and
Society, 1830–50’, in Asiya Siddiqi, ed., Trade and Finance in Colonial
India, 1750–1860 (Delhi 1995), pp. 218–49, and K. N. Chaudhuri,
‘India’s Foreign Trade and the Cessation of the East India Company’s
Trading Activities, 1828–40’, in ibid., pp. 290–320.
105. Anthony Webster, The Richest East India Merchant:The Life and Business
of John Palmer of Calcutta, 1767–1836 (Woodbridge, 2007).The follow-
ing two paragraphs are based on Webster’s account.
106. Bose, A Hundred Horizons, p. 74; Rajat K. Ray,‘Asian Capital in the Age
of European Domination:The Rise of the Bazaar, 1800–1914’, Modern
Asian Studies 29 (1995), 449–554.
107. Claude Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947:
Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama (Cambridge, 2000).
108. Bennison, ‘Muslim Universalism and Western Globalization’.
109. Tim Harper, ‘Empire, Diaspora and the Languages of Globalism,
1850–1914’, in Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World History, p. 145. For
a fine recent treatment of the Hadhrami diaspora, which, as the author
notes, predated the Portuguese and outlasted the British Empire in the
Indian Ocean, see Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and
Mobility Across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley, CA, 2006).
110. For the Awadh case, see Michael H. Fisher, A Clash of Cultures: Awadh,
the British and the Mughals (Delhi, 1987), and Juan Cole, Roots of North
Indian Shi’ism in Iran and Iraq (Berkeley, CA, 1989).
111. Bose, A Hundred Horizons, p. 65.
112. Thomas R. Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s
Raj (Oxford, 2002). Bernard S. Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in
Victorian India’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds, The
Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 165–209.
113. Juan Cole,‘Iranian Culture in South Asia, 1500–1900’, in Nikki Keddie
and Rudi Matthee, eds, Iran and the Surrounding World: Interactions in
Culture and Cultural Politics (Washington, DC, 2002), pp. 15–16.
260 Notes

114. Mahomad Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism

and Historioraphy (New York, 2001), pp. 18–34.
115. Cole, ‘Iranian Culture’, pp. 30–1.
116. Edward Ingram, Britain’s Persian Connection 1798–1828: Prelude to the
Great Game in Asia (Oxford, 1993).
117. Cited in Elmer Cutts, ‘The Background to Macaulay’s Minute’,
American Historical Review 58 (1953), 829.
118. Marshall, Bengal:The British Bridgehead, p. 115.
119. Thomas Munro, Liberty of the Press in India:A Minute Written by Thomas
Munro, 35 Years Ago (London, 1857), pp. 3, 4, 7.
120. Washbrook, ‘South India: 1770–1840’, p. 510.
121. For ‘expatriate nationalism’ and ‘competing universalisms’, see Bose, A
Hundred Horizons, especially chs 5 and 7; for the importance of ‘circu-
lation’ and mobility as a theme in South Asian history, despite colonial
attempts to ‘demobilize’ circulatory regimes, see Claude Markovits,
Jacques Pouchepadass and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds, Society and
Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia, 1750–1950
(New Delhi, 2003).
122. For a recent treatment emphasizing these themes, see Durba Ghosh and
Dane Kennedy, eds, Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial
World (Hyderabad, 2006).

Chapter 9: Revolutionary Europe and the Destruction of Java’s

Old Order, 1808–1830
1. John Hoffman,‘A Foreign Investment: Indies Malay to 1901’, Indonesia
27 (1979), 65–92.
2. Simon Schama, Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands,
1780–1813 (London, 1977), pp. 342–3.
3. Peter Carey, The Power of Prophecy: Prince Dipanagara and the End of an
Old Order in Java (1825–1830) (Leiden, 2007), p. 166; H.W. Daendels,
Staat der Nederlandsche Oostindische bezittingen, onder het bestuur van den
Gouverneur-Generaal Herman Willem Daendels, ridder, luitenant-generaal &c.
in de jaren 1808–1811 (’s-Gravenhage, 1814), p. 94.
4. Carey, Power of Prophecy, pp. 171, 309–10.
5. De Opkomst van het Nederlandsch Gezag in Oost-Indië: verzameling van
onuitgegeven stukken uit het oud-koloniaal archief, ed. J. K. J. de Jonge and
M. L. van Deventer, 18 vols (’s-Gravenhage, 1888), XIII, p. 128.
6. When he succeeded as sultan, the Crown Prince (the future Sultan
Hamengkubuwana III, reigned 1812–14) continued his custom of
serving European-style food including wheat bread and butter, foods
normally eaten only by Europeans at this time, during court entertain-
ments: The British in Java: A Javanese Account, 1812–1816, ed. Peter
Carey (Oxford, 1992), p. 467 n. 320.
7. Carey, Power of Prophecy, p. 180.
8. Ibid., p. 199.
Notes 261

9. V. J. H. Houben, Kraton and Kumpeni: Surakarta and Yogyakarta 1830–1870

(Leiden, 1994), pp. 81–2; Ricklefs, Mangkubumi, pp. 274–6; The British in
Java, ed. Carey, p. 467 n. 321.
10. Carey, Power of Prophecy, p. 200.
11. Ibid., p. 215
12. Raffles’s letters to various Indonesian rulers from Melaka are described
in Ahmat bin Adam, ‘A Descriptive Account of the Malay Letters sent
by Thomas Stamford Raffles in Malacca in 1810 and 1811 to the Various
Rulers of the Indigenous States of the Malay Archipelago’ (MA thesis,
Department of History, School of Oriental and African Studies, 1971).
See also Carey, Power of Prophecy, p. 280.
13. C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World,
1780–1830 (London, 1989).
14. John Bastin, The Native Policies of Sir Stamford Raffles in Java and Sumatra:
An Economic Interpretation (Oxford, 1957), p. xx.
15. Carey, Power of Prophecy, p. 283 n. 91.
16. Ibid., p. 285.
17. Ibid., p. 340.
18. Ibid., p. 347.
19. Ibid., p. 377.
20. Ibid., p. 383.
21. The late Dutch legal historian G. J. (‘Han’) Resink (1911–97) defined
‘government law’ as a mixture of Javanese customary law (adat) and
Dutch colonial law, the latter being described by Raffles as ‘the laws of
the Dutch States General and the statutes passed in Holland and Batavia
with particular application to Java’: ibid., p. 385 n. 103.
22. Ibid., p. 254 n. 205.
23. Carey, British in Java, pp. 90, 241. The British confiscation of all the kris
of the senior Yogyakarta officials and princes would certainly have been
experienced as a form of unmanning given the special symbolic impor-
tance of the kris in Javanese culture, where the weapon can represent the
presence of a male owner at a wedding.
24. P. J. F. Louw, De Java-Oorlog van 1825–30, 6 vols (’s-Gravenhage and
Batavia, 1897), II, pp. 685–7.
25. Quoted in Carey, Power of Prophecy, p. 389.
26. Ibid., pp. 834–9.
27. Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia (henceforth ANRI), Solo Brieven
(henceforth S.Br.) 170, J. I. van Sevenhoven, H. MacGillivray and A. H.
Smissaert (Commissarissen belast met het onderzoek in de regering der
tolpoorten, de administratie der vogelnestjes en het oprigten eenen
landraad in de Residentiën Soerakarta en Jogjokarta’, henceforth
‘Commissioners’) (Yogyakarta/Surakarta) to G. A. G. Ph. van der
Capellen (Batavia/Bogor), 24 October 1824.
28. This detail was pointed out by Van Sevenhoven’s colleague as commis-
sioner, Hendrik Mauritz MacGillivray, who served as Acting Resident of
Surakarta (1823–4) just before Van Sevenhoven’s one-year incumbency
262 Notes

(1824–5); see MvK 4132, MacGillivray, ‘Nota omtrent den staat der
Javasche vorstenlanden, de thans bestaande onlusten en de middelen
welke tot herstel en verzekering der rust kunnen worden aangewend’
(henceforth MacGillivray, ‘Nota’), Surakarta, 13 May 1826.
MacGillivray’s report was later published: C. E. van Kesteren,
‘Waarschuwingen vóór den Java-oorlog’, De Indische Gids 14, 2 (1892),
973–96.
29. KITLV H 503,Van Sevenhoven,‘Aanteekeningen’, p. 77;AvJ, G.A. G. Ph.
van der Capellen (Batavia/Bogor) to A. H. Smissaert (Yogyakarta), 9 May
1824.
30. MvK 4132, MacGillivray, ‘Nota’, 13 May 1826, gives the following
figures for the value of goods stolen from the bandar in the period
1817–24: 1817: f. 2,278; 1818: f. 3,005; 1819: f. 2,442; 1820: f. 4,240;
1821: f. 8,791; 1822: f. 15,623; 1823: f. 15,660; 1824: f. 32,100 (estimate).
31. Archief Nationaal (The Hague) H. M. de Kock private collection
(henceforth dK) 197, A. H. Smissaert (Yogyakarta) to H. M. de Kock
(Surakarta), 30 July 1825. On the situation in the eastern mancanagara, see
further Peter Carey ‘Changing Javanese Perceptions of the Chinese
Communities in Central Java, 1755–1825’, Indonesia 37 (1984), 1–2.
32. Soeripto, Ontwikkelingsgang der vorstenlandsche wetboeken (Leiden, 1929),
pp. 88, 268; The Archive of Yogyakarta, I: Documents Relating to Politics and
Internal Court Affairs, ed. Peter Carey (Oxford, 1980), pp. 126–8, 130 n. 1.
33. Babad Dipanagara: An Account of the Outbreak of the Java War (1825–30),
ed. Peter Carey (Kuala Lumpur, 1981), p. 243 n. 36.
34. S.Br.170, Commissioners (Yogyakarta/Surakarta) to G.A. G. Ph. van der
Capellen (Batavia/Bogor), 24 October 1824.
35. Archief Nationaal (The Hague), G. J. Schneither private collection 92,
Pieter le Clercq, ‘Algemeen verslag der Residentie Kadoe over het jaar
1824’, 30 May 1825. The bandar along the Brantas and Madiun rivers
were also abolished in December 1823, KITLV H 395, Chevallier,
‘Rapport’, 13 June 1824. On the importance of river networks in east
Java for trade, see Thomas Stamford Raffles, History of Java, 2 vols
(London, 1817), I, p. 196.
36. S.Br.170, Commissioners (Yogyakarta/Surakarta) to G.A. G. Ph. van der
Capellen (Batavia/Bogor), 24 October 1824.
37. MvK 4132, MacGillivray, ‘Nota’, 13 May 1826. See further Louw, De
Java-oorlog van 1825–30, I, p. 13; P. H. van der Kemp, ‘Dipanegara, eene
geschiedkundige Hamlettype’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde
46 (1896), 386.
38. The Commissioners’ remarks about the ‘good-natured and peaceful
Javanese’, who were liable to run amok if aroused, constitute a classic
expression of the widespread and self-deluding Dutch colonial view of
‘De Javaan als het zachste volk ter aarde’ (the Javanese as the gentlest people
in the world). See further Peter Carey and Vincent Houben, ‘Spirited
Srikandhis and Sly Sumbadras:The Social, Political and Economic Role
of Women in the Central Javanese Courts in the 18th and Early 19th
Notes 263

Centuries’, in Elsbeth Locher-Scholten and Anke Niehof, eds, Indonesian

Women in Focus: Past and Present Notions (Dordrecht, 1987), pp. 12–42.
39. S.Br.170, Commissioners (Yogyakarta/Surakarta) to G.A. G. Ph. van der
Capellen (Batavia/Bogor), 24 October 1824.
40. P. H. van der Kemp, ed.,‘Brieven van den Gouverneur-Generaal Van der
Capellen over Dipanagara’s opstand zoomede eene wederlegging van
den Minister Elout’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 46
(1896), pp. 44–5.
41. Dj.Br.59, Gan Hiang Sing (Bantul) to A. H. Smissaert (Yogyakarta), 9
November 1824.
42. KITLV H 395, Chevallier, ‘Rapport’, 15 June 1824.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. S.Br. 170, Commissioners (Yogyakarta/Surakarta) to G.A. G. Ph. van der
Capellen (Batavia/Bogor), 24 October 1824. The expression in the
Dutch original was ‘linie van douanen’. The Javanese phrase was ‘bangsa
bandar’.
46. S.Br. 122, H. G. Nahuys van Burgst (Yogyakarta) to G. A. G. Ph. van der
Capellen (Batavia/Bogor), 29 September 1822.
47. India Office Library, Mackenzie Private collection 21 part 10, Lt H. G.
Jourdan, ‘Report on Japan and Wirosobo’, 28 April 1813, 361.
48. Carey, ‘Changing Javanese Perceptions’, 17 n. 76; Ong Tae Hae, The
Chinaman Abroad: Or a Desultory Account of the Malayan Archipelago,
Particularly of Java, ed. and trans.W. H. Medhurst (Shanghai, 1849), p. 13.
49. KITLV H 503,Van Sevenhoven, ‘Aanteekeningen’, pp. 135–6.
50. J. J. Hasselman, ‘Nota omtrent de opium-pacht op Java en Madoera’,
Handelingen en Geschriften van het Indisch Genootschap 5 (1858), 18–37.
51. J. J.Wiselius, De opium in Nederlandsch- en Britsch-Indië, economisch, critisch,
historisch (The Hague, 1886), p. 6.
52. James Rush, Opium to Java: Revenue Farming and Chinese Enterprise in
Colonial Indonesia, 1860–1910 (Jakarta, 2007), pp. 26–30.
53. Raffles, History, I, pp. 102–3.
54. KITLV H 503,Van Sevenhoven. ‘Aanteekeningen’, p. 73.
55. Ibid., pp. 79-80.
56. Carey, ‘Changing Javanese perceptions’, p. 35 n. 160.
57. R.A. Kern,‘Uit oude beschieden (geschiedenis van de afdeeling Patjitan
in de eerste helft der 19e eeuw) met bijlage’, Tijdschrift van het
Binnenlands Bestuur 34 (1908), 163.
58. Rush, Opium to Java, p. 34.
59. Carey, Power of Prophecy, p. 610.
60. Ibid., p. 480.
61. Universiteits Bibliotheek Leiden, Bibliotheca Publica Latina 616
Portfolio 9 part 3, H. G. Nahuys van Burgst, ‘Onlusten op Java’
(Maastricht, 1826).
62. Carey, Power of Prophecy, pp. 342–3.
264 Notes

Chapter 10: Their Own Path to Crisis? Social Change, State-

building and the Limits of Qing Expansion, c.1770–1840
1. The empire’s majority ethnic group, with over 90 per cent of the total
population.
2. See Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European
Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1981), pp. 17–57.
3. See, for instance, William Lavely and R. Bin Wong, ‘Revising the
Malthusian Narrative:The Comparative Study of Population Dynamics
in Late Imperial China’, Journal of Asian Studies 57 (1998), 714–48;
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making
of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ, 2000).
4. For a general discussion, see Pomeranz, Great Divergence; Pomeranz,
‘Beyond the East–West Binary: Resituating Development Paths in the
Eighteenth-century World’, Journal of Asian Studies 61 (2002), 539–90;
and Pomeranz, ‘Standards of Living in Rural and Urban China:
Preliminary Estimates for the Mid Eighteenth and Early Twentieth
Centuries’ (paper for Panel 77 of International Economic History
Association Conference, Helsinki, 2006); Debin Ma,‘Modern Economic
Growth in the Lower Yangzi in 1911–1937: A Quantitative, Historical,
and Institutional Analysis’ (Discussion paper 2004-06-002, Foundation
for Advanced Studies on International Development,Tokyo, 2004), p. 6;
Jan Luiten Van Zanden, ‘Estimating Early Modern Economic Growth’
(Working Paper, International Institute of Social History, University of
Utrecht, 2004, available at http://www.iisg.nl/research/jvz-estimat-
ing.pdf, accessed 17 December 2007), pp. 22–3; Robert C. Allen, ‘Mr
Lockyer Meets the Index Number Problem: The Standard of Living in
Canton and London in 1704’; Allen, ‘Agricultural Productivity and
Rural Incomes in England and the Yangzi Delta, ca. 1620–1820’ (2005)
(both available at http://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/Members/robert.
allen/default.htm). For market integration, see Wolfgang Koller and
Carol Shiue,‘Markets in China and Europe on the Eve of the Industrial
Revolution’ (NBER Working paper 10778, September 2004).
5. On real wages, see Robert C. Allen, Jean-Pascal Bassino, Debin Ma,
Christine Moll-Murata and Jan Luiten Van Zanden, ‘Wages, Prices and
Living Standards in China, Japan, and Europe, 1738–1925’
(http://www.econ.yale.edu/seminars/echist/eh06-07/Ma040407.pdf);
for more discussion and data on the earnings of tenants versus proletar-
ians, see Pomeranz, ‘Standards of Living’.
6. For some eighteenth-century data see Li Wenzhi and Jiang Taixin,
Zhongguo dizhu zhi jingji lun (An Economic Discourse on China’s Landlord
System) (Beijing, 2005), pp. 303, 310. For twentieth-century data see John
L. Buck, Land Utilization in China (1937; New York, 1964), especially p.
293. Joseph Esherick,‘Number Games: A Note on Land Distribution in
Pre-Revolutionary China’, Modern China 7 (1981), 387–412, finds many
problems with Buck, but does not change the general northern and
Notes 265

southern patterns. For specific regions see Robert Marks, Revolution in

South China: Peasants and the Making of History in Haifeng County,
1570–1930 (Madison,WI, 1984), p. 44, and Chen Hanseng, Landlord and
Peasant in China:A Study of the Agrarian Crisis in South China (New York,
1936), p. 19, on the far south; Philip Huang, The Peasant Family and Rural
Development in the Lower Yangzi Region, 1350–1988 (Stanford, CA, 1990),
p. 103, on the Lower Yangzi; Jing Su and Luo Lun, Qing dai Shandong
jingying dizhu jingnji yanjiu (1958; Jinan, 1986), pp. 34–5, and Philip
Huang, The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (Stanford,
CA, 1985), p. 103, on the North China plain.The south-west may have
had unusually high tenancy rates for a poor region, and unusually harsh
terms; by the early twentieth century, its land distribution (along with
that of Manchuria, which had few settlers until the late nineteenth
century) was the most unequal in the country. See, for example,
Madeleine Zelin, ‘The Rights of Tenants in Mid-Qing Sichuan’, Journal
of Asian Studies 45 (1986) 499–526, and Wu Tingyu et al., eds, Xian dai
Zhongguo nong cun jing ji de yan bian (Changchun, 1993), p. 150.
7. There is a vast literature on this phenomenon. Kenneth Pomeranz,‘Land
Markets in Late Imperial and Republican China’, Continuity and Change
22 (2008), 1–50, gives my own views, and includes a partial bibliography.
8. For an overview of the period, see Timothy Brook, The Confusions of
Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley, CA, 1998). For
land rights in particular, see Yang Guozhen, Ming Qing tudi qiyue yanjiu
(Beijing, 1988), pp. 8–43.
9. See Pomeranz, ‘Land Markets’, for a summary.
10. Sifa Xingzhengbu, Zhongguo min shang shi xiguan diaocha lu (Originally
compiled 1912; published Nanjing, 1930; reprinted Taibei, 1969).
Pomeranz, ‘Land Markets’, 107–8, briefly describes the survey.
11. Pomeranz, ‘Land Markets’, 136–8, and accompanying notes (especially
147 n. 142), provides a summary. See also Yang, Ming Qing tudi, Li and
Jiang, Zhongguo dizhu.
12. For data from the eighteenth-century Lower Yangzi, see Li and Jiang,
Zhongguo dizhu, p. 291; Han Hengyu, ‘Shilun Qingdai qianqi diannong
yongdianquan de youlai ji qi xingzhi’ (‘An Introductory Discussion of
the Origins and Nature of Tenants’ Rights of Permanent Tenancy
During the First Half of the Qing Dynasty’), Qingshi luncong 1 (1979),
38, 45; for the twentieth century, see Kathryn Bernhardt, Rents,Taxes, and
Peasant Resistance: The Lower Yangzi Region, 1840–1950 (Stanford, CA,
1992), p. 220. See also Li Wenzhi, Ming Qing shidai fengjian tudi guanxi de
songjie (The Loosening of Feudal Land Relationships in the Ming-Qing period)
(Beijing, 1993), p. 98; for Fujian and Taiwan see Chen Qiukun, Qingdai
Taiwan tu zhu diquan: guanliao, Handian yu an lishe ren de tudi bianqian
(Taibei, 1997), p. 161. All told, a secure tenant probably earned about 70
per cent of what a smallholder with a similar sized plot earned.
13. R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of
European Experience (Ithaca, NY, 1997), pp. 135–6.
266 Notes

14. Liu Cuirong, ‘Demographic Constraint and Family Structure in

Traditional Chinese Lineages, ca. 1200–1900’, in Stevan Harrell, ed.,
Chinese Historical Microdemography (Berkeley, CA, 1995), p. 130, suggests
3.7 per cent.
15. James Lee and Cameron Campbell, Fate and Fortune in Rural China: Social
Organization and Population Behavior in Liaoning, 1774–1873
(Cambridge, 1997), pp. 58–83; James Lee and Wang Feng, One Quarter of
Humanity: Malthusian Mythologies and Chinese Realities (Cambridge, MA,
1999), pp. 47–51.
16. Lee and Wang, One Quarter of Humanity, p. 50.
17. Elizabeth Perry, Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China, 1845–1945
(Stanford, CA, 1980), p. 51.
18. For how some ‘bare sticks’ created unconventional marriages (with two
men, one usually disabled, and one woman), see Matthew Sommer,
‘Making Sex Work: Polyandry as a Survival Strategy in Qing Dynasty
China’, in Bryna Goodman and Wendy Larson, eds, Gender in Motion:
Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China
(Lanham, MD, 2005), pp. 29–54.
19. Charles Tilly, ‘Demographic Origins of the European Proletariat’, in
David Levine, ed., Proletarianization and Family History (Orlando, FL,
1984), pp. 39–44.
20. See, for instance, James Millward, Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and
Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759–1864 (Stanford, CA, 1998), pp. 206–7,
226, for the Qing preferring that not only soldiers but merchants on the
Xinjiang frontier not bring their families; David Ownby, Brotherhoods and
Secret Societies in Early and Mid-Qing China: The Formation of a Tradition
(Stanford, CA, 1996), p. 13, for the Qing attempt to keep men from
bringing their families to Taiwan.
21. On wages in China see Allen et al.,‘ Wages, Prices, and Living Standards’,
pp. 51–2; on the earnings of tenants versus proletarians, see Pomeranz,
‘Living Standards’.
22. G. William Skinner, ‘Regional Urbanization in Nineteenth Century
China’, in G. William Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial China
(Stanford, CA, 1977), p. 226.
23. Li Bozhong, ‘Cong “fufu bing zuo” dao “nan geng nu zhi”’ (‘From
“Husband and Wife Work Together” to “Man Ploughs, Woman
Weaves”’), Zhongguo jingji shi yanjiu 11 (1996), 99–107.
24. See, for instance, Kenneth Pomeranz,‘Women’s Work and the Economics of
Respectability’, in Goodman and Larson, eds, Gender in Motion, pp. 234–9.
25. Susan Mann, ‘Household Handicrafts and State Policy in Qing Times’,
in Jane Kate Leonard and John Watt, eds, To Achieve Security and Wealth:
The Qing State and the Economy (Ithaca, NY, 1992), pp. 75–96; Francesca
Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China
(Berkeley, CA, 1997), pp. 242–72.
26. Mann, ‘Household Handicrafts’, pp. 84–91.
27. Debin Ma, ‘Modern Economic Growth’, p. 6.
Notes 267

28. Allen et al., ‘Wages, Prices, and Living Standards’, pp. 51–2.
29. Pomeranz, ‘Land Markets’, 132; Anne Osborne, ‘Property, Taxes, and
State Protection of Rights’, in Madeleine Zelin, Johnathan Ocko and
Robert Gardella, eds, Contract and Property in Early Modern China
(Stanford, CA, 2004), pp. 122–32.
30. Lee and Wang, One Quarter of Humanity, pp. 115–18.
31. Wang Yeh-chien, Land Taxation in Imperial China, 1750–1911
(Cambridge, MA, 1973), pp. 84–109; Wong, China Transformed, pp.
118–22.
32. See, for example, Kenneth Pomeranz, The Making of a Hinterland: State,
Society, and Economy in Inland North China, 1853–1937 (Berkeley, CA,
1993), pp. 128–32, 154–6; Lillian Li, Fighting Famine in North China:
State, Market, and Environmental Decline, 1690s–1990s (Stanford, CA,
2007), pp. 38–73; Wong, China Transformed, pp. 113–18; Susan Naquin
and Evelyn Rawski, Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century (New
Haven, CT, 1987), p. 24; Sun Xiaofen, Qingdai qianqi de yimin zhen
(Migration to Sichuan in the First Half of the Qing Dynasty) (Chengdu,
1997), pp. 30–4.
33. In addition to changes in Western science, at least north-west European
handicrafts were more likely to be clustered in specialized districts and
staffed by full-time workers fully detached from agriculture; these condi-
tions encouraged information exchange, as did the journeyman system.
See, for instance, Saito Osamu, Puroto-Kōgyōka no jidai: Seiō to Nihon no
hikakushi (The Age of Proto-Industrialization: A Comparative History of
Western Europe and Japan) (Tokyo, 1985); Markus Cerman and Sheilagh
Ogilvie, eds, European Proto-Industrialization (Cambridge, 1996); S. R.
Epstein and Maarten Prak, eds, Guilds, Innovation, and the European
Economy, 1400–1800 (Cambridge, 2008).
34. Pomeranz, Great Divergence, pp. 63–4, 225–6; Li Bozhong, Jiangnan de
zaoqi gongyehua (The Early Industrialization of the Yangzi Delta Region)
(Beijing, 2000), pp. 272–342.
35. Pomeranz, Great Divergence, pp. 62–5.
36. Data from Allen, ‘Mr Lockyer Meets the Index Number Problem’, pp.
6, 17.These numbers may differ from true averages, but not enough to
affect the point being made here about the extremely high relative cost
of fuel.
37. Wang Yeh-chien,‘Food Supply and Grain Prices in the Yangtze Delta in
the Eighteenth Century’, in The Second Conference on Modern Chinese
History (Taibei, 1989), p. 429; Pomeranz, Great Divergence, pp. 34–5; Xu
Dixin and Wu Chengming, Zhongguo zibenzhuyi de mengya (The Sprouts
of Capitalism in China) (Beijing, 1985), pp. 272, 277.
38. Pomeranz, Great Divergence, pp. 323–6.
39. Ibid., pp. 244–6, 288, and accompanying notes.
40. Lillian Li, Fighting Famine in North China, pp. 38–73, 250–82.
41. Peter Perdue, Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan,
1500–1850 (Cambridge, MA, 1987); Anne Osborne,‘The Local Politics
268 Notes

of Land Reclamation in the Lower Yangzi Highlands’, Late Imperial

China 15 (1994), 1–46.
42. Hakka are considered to be Han Chinese, but they constitute a fairly
clearly marked subgroup with a different dialect and very little inter-
marriage with other Han. See Sow-Theng Leong, Migration and Ethnicity
in Chinese History: Hakkas, Pengmin, and Their Neighbors, ed. Tim Wright
(Stanford, CA, 1997).
43. This account of the origins of the White Lotus owes much to Wang
Wensheng, ‘White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: Social Crises
and Political Changes in the Qing Empire, 1796–1810’ (PhD disserta-
tion, University of California, Irvine, 2008), pp. 70–148. See also Blaine
Gaustad, ‘Religious Sectarianism and the State in Mid-Qing China:
Background to the White Lotus Uprising of 1796–1804’ (PhD disserta-
tion, University of California, Berkeley, 1994).
44. Ke Zhiming, Fan tou jia: Qingdai Taiwan zuqun zhengzhi yu shufan diquan
(Aboriginal Leaders: Ethnic Policy and the Land Rights of ‘Cooked’Aborigines
in Qing Dynasty Taiwan) (Taibei, 2001), especially pp. 237–75; John
Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier,
1600–1800 (Stanford, CA, 1993), pp. 308–62.
45. Millward, Beyond the Pass, pp. 219–25.
46. Compare David Atwill, The Chinese Sultanate: Islam, Ethnicity and the
Panthay Rebellion in Southwest China, 1856–1873 (Stanford, CA, 2006),
pp. 48–83. For roughly parallel phenomena in Shaanxi, see Jonathan
Lipman, Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China
(Seattle, 1997), pp. 103–15, 119.
47. See, for instance, Ownby, Brotherhoods and Secret Societies in Early and Mid-
Qing China, pp. 29–54, 187–8, on the Lin Shuangwen Rebellion on
Taiwan.
48. Lee and Wang, One Quarter of Humanity, p. 118.
49. Ping-ti Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953 (Cambridge,
1959), pp. 145–8.
50. On staff sizes see Bradly W. Reed, Talons and Teeth: County Clerks and
Runners in the Qing Dynasty (Stanford, CA, 2000), pp. 45–51, 144–9.
Reed’s late nineteenth-century numbers are undoubtedly higher than
averages for our period would be.There were 1,303 local governments
for all of China in the mid to late Qing, governing a population of
roughly 400,000,000. See Ch’u t’ung-tsu, Local Government Under the
Ch’ing (Stanford, CA, 1962), p. 3.
51. A classic example is Susan Mann Jones and Philip Kuhn, ‘Dynastic
Decline and the Roots of Rebellion’, in John K. Fairbank, ed., The
Cambridge History of China, X.1 (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 110–13. For one
of many surveys of ‘gentry’ activities in relation to local government, see
Ch’u, Local Government, pp. 168–92.
52. See, for instance, Tsing Yuan, ‘Urban Riots and Disturbances’, in
Jonathan Spence and John E.Wills Jr, eds, From Ming to Ch’ing: Conquest,
Region, and Continuity in Seventeenth-century China (New Haven, CT,
1979), pp. 277–320; Atwill, Chinese Sultanate, pp. 67–9.
Notes 269

53. C. K. Yang , ‘Some Preliminary Statistical Patterns of Mass Actions in

Nineteenth-century China’, in Frederic Wakeman Jr and Carolyn Grant,
eds, Conflict and Control in Late Imperial China (Berkeley, CA, 1975), pp.
186–7.
54. See, for instance, Charles Tilly, ‘Town and Country in Revolution’, in
John Wilson Lewis, ed., Peasant Rebellion and Communist Revolution in
Asia (Stanford, CA, 1974), pp. 271–302, esp. pp. 288–91.
55. For Fujian, see Melissa Macauley, Social Power and Legal Culture: Litigation
Masters in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA, 1998), pp. 274–5. For some
comparisons, see, for example, David Fryson, ‘Blows and Scratches,
Swords and Guns:Violence Between Men as Material Reality and Lived
Experience in Early Nineteenth Century Lower Canada’, paper
presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association,
Sherbrooke, 1999 (http://www.hst.ulaval.ca/profs/dfyson/Violence.
htm), accessed 23 March 2007, citing data for England, France, Canada,
and the United States.
56. Thomas Gottschaung and Diana Lary, Swallows and Settlers: The Great
Migration from North China to Manchuria (Ann Arbor, MI, 2000), p. 2.
57. Randall Dodgen,‘Hydraulic Evolution and Dynastic Decline: the Yellow
River Conservancy, 1796–1855’, Late Imperial China 12 (1991), 36–63;
Lillian Li, Fighting Famine in North China, pp. 38–73, 250–66.
58. Chang Hsin-pao, Commissioner Lin and the Opium War (New York, 1970),
pp. 19, 21, 34–5. All figures are very rough estimates. See also Jonathan
Spence,‘Opium Smoking in Ch’ing China’, in Wakeman and Grant, eds,
Conflict and Control in Late Imperial China, pp. 148–54.
59. See generally David Bello, Opium and the Limits of Empire: Drug
Prohibition in the Chinese Interior, 1729–1850 (Cambridge, MA, 2005).
60. Chang, Commissioner Lin, pp. 36–46; Peng Zeyi,‘Yapian Zhan hou shini-
anjian yin gui qianjian bodong xia de Zhongguo jingji yu jieji guanxi’
(‘The Chinese Economy and Class Relations under the Impact of
Trends towards Expensive Silver and Cheap Copper Cash in the Decade
after the Opium War’), Lishi yanjiu 6 (1961), 40–68. For a contrary view,
see Man-houng Lin, China Upside Down: Currency, Society, and Ideologies,
1808–1856 (Cambridge, MA, 2006), pp. 72–114.
61. Compare, for instance, John Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge,
1993), p. 86; Thomas Smith, The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan
(Stanford, CA, 1959), p. 160. See P. H. H.Vries, ‘Governing Growth: A
Comparative Analysis of the Role of the State in the Rise of the West’,
Journal of World History 13 (2002), 97 n. 92, for references to other esti-
mates.
62. See, for example, Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD
990–1992 (Malden, MA, 1992), pp. 122–6.
63. Millward, Beyond the Pass, pp. 225–35.
64. Fredric Wakeman Jr, ‘Drury’s Occupation of Macao and China’s
Response to Early Modern Imperialism’, East Asian History 28 (2004),
27–34; Wang, ‘White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates’, pp.
492–508.
270 Notes

65. Perdue, China Marches West, pp. 165, 409, 429–57.

66. Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise; Perdue, China Marches West.
67. For Yongzheng era ambitions, see William Rowe, Saving the World: Chen
Hongmou and Elite Consciousness in Eighteenth Century China (Stanford,
CA, 2001), pp. 427–37, and Charles Patterson Giersch, Asian Borderlands:
The Transformation of Qing China’s Yunnan Frontier (Cambridge, MA,
2006), pp. 43–63; for the retreat, see Donald Sutton, ‘Violence and
Ethnicity on a Qing Colonial Frontier: Customary and Statutory Law in
the Eighteenth-century Miao Pale’, Modern Asian Studies 37 (2003),
71–7, who dates it to the accession of Qianlong in 1736, and Giersch,
Asian Borderlands, pp. 111–22, who dates it significantly later.
68. James Millward, ‘Coming onto the Map: Western Regions, Geography
and Cartographic Nomenclature in the Making of Chinese Empire in
Xinjiang’, Late Imperial China 20 (1999), 61–98.
69. I discuss some of these briefly, and in comparative perspective, in
Kenneth Pomeranz, ‘Imperialism, Development, and “Civilizing”
Missions, Past and Present’, Daedalus 134 (April 2005), 34–8. See also
Millward, ‘Coming onto the Map’; Kuhn and Mann Jones, ‘Dynastic
Decline’, pp. 156–60.
70. Bernhardt, Rents,Taxes, and Peasant Resistance, pp. 44–6.
71. Wang Yeh-chien, Land Taxation, p. 127; Dwight Perkins,‘Government as
an Obstacle to Industrialization: The Case of Nineteenth-Century
China’, Journal of Economic History 27 (1967), 487, using late nineteenth-
century data. By that time, revenue had probably tripled since the mid-
eighteenth century, and population perhaps doubled.
72. Meaning those that belonged to the state rather than the imperial family
– though the distinction was often blurry and became more so with time.
73. Evelyn Rawski,‘The Qing Formation and the Early Modern Period’, in
Lynn Struve, ed., The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time
(Cambridge, MA, 2004), p. 214;Wang, Land Taxation, p. 80.
74. On flood control costs see Dodgen, ‘Hydraulic Evolution and Dynastic
Decline’; Dodgen, Controlling the Dragon: Confucian Engineers and the
Yellow River in Late Imperial China (Honolulu, 2001); Li, Fighting Famine
in North China, pp. 38–73. On stipends for bannermen, see Mark Elliott,
The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial
China (Stanford, CA, 2001), pp. 306–12, esp. p. 311.
75. Thomas Metzger, The Internal Organization of the Chinese Bureaucracy
(Cambridge, MA, 1973), pp. 53–4, 58–61, 78–9, 291–3.
76. For a similar phenomenon of British propagandists railing against
mercantilist measures (in this case in South Asia) not unlike those they
engaged in at home, see C. A. Bayly Imperial Meridian:The British Empire
and the World, 1780–1830 (London, 1989), pp. 69–73.
77. Paul van Dyke, The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast,
1700–1845 (Hong Kong, 2005), pp. 95–115, 119.
78. Wang Yeh-chien, Land Taxation, p. 9.
79. Han Seunghyun, ‘Re-inventing Local Tradition: Politics, Culture, and
Notes 271

Identity in Early Nineteenth-century Suzhou’ (PhD dissertation,

Harvard University, 2005).
80. Wong, China Transformed, p. 155; see also Rawski, ‘Qing Formation’, p.
214.
81. Sevket Pamuk, ‘The Evolution of Financial Institutions in the Ottoman
Empire, 1600–1914’, Financial History Review 11 (2004), 18–19, indicates
an increase from about 2–3 per cent of GDP in the eighteenth century
to 5–6 per cent by the mid-nineteenth.
82. Gabriel Ardant, ‘Financial Policy and Economic Infrastructure of
Modern States and Nations’, in Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of
National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ, 1975), p. 221.
83. Vries, ‘Governing Growth’, p. 95, and accompanying notes.
84. Central government silver revenues rose almost eightfold between 1850
and the fall of the dynasty in 1911, and quadrupled again by 1937. Even
in gold that is more than a tripling by 1911, and almost a further
doubling by 1937.The increase after 1901 was much larger still, because
provincial and local revenues, which were trivial until the twentieth
century, made up about 60 per cent of central government expenditures
in 1936; that makes total government revenues in gold about ten times
what they had been in 1850.The data come from scattered sources too
numerous to list here, but principally Wei Guangqi, ‘Qingdai houqi
zhongyang jiquan caizheng tizhi de wajie’ (‘The Collapse of the Central
Authority over the Fiscal System in the Late Qing Period’), Jindai shi
yanjiu 1 (1986), 207–30, and Arthur N. Young, China’s Nation-building
Effort, 1927–1937: The Financial and Economic Record (Stanford, CA,
1971), esp. pp. 71, 435. Conversions to gold made using ‘The Price of
Gold, 1257–2007’ (http://www.measuringworth.org/gold/), accessed 1
June 2009.
85. Wang Wensheng, ‘White Lotus Rebels and South Coast Pirates’, pp.
236–368. See esp. p. 302, noting that the three years of ineffective
campaigning prior to Jiaqing’s reforms cost more than the six years that
followed.
86. Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, pp. 103–26, 185–6.
87. A similar point is made with respect to events in 1730s China by Pierre
Etienne Will in his review essay on Beatrice S. Bartlett, Monarchs and
Ministers: The Grand Council in Mid-Ch’ing China, 1723–1820 (1991),
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 54 (1994), 320–2.
88. Wong, China Transformed, pp. 113–16, 119–22.
89. Susan Mann, Local Merchants and the Chinese Bureaucracy (Stanford, CA,
1987), pp. 94–199; Wong, China Transformed, pp. 155–6; Wei Guangqi,
‘Qingdai houqi’.
90. Pomeranz, Making of a Hinterland, pp. 138–52, 154–64, 201–11, 267–76.
91. On the expansion of sub-bureaucracies, see Reed, Talons and Teeth, pp.
45–61, 144–9. Exactly how relations between the state and local elites
changed remains one of the most complex questions in nineteenth-
century Chinese history; one influential formulation is Philip Kuhn,
272 Notes

Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social
Structure, 1796–1864 (Cambridge, MA, 1970).

The Age of Revolutions in Global Context: An Afterword

I have considered some of the issues I raise here in more detail in C.A. Bayly,
‘An End to Revolution: “Reform” and “Reaction” in the Colonial World
1780–1830’, in Richard Bessel, Nicholas Guyatt and Jane Rendall, eds, War,
Empire and Slavery, 1770–1830 (Basingstoke, forthcoming). I am grateful to
the participants in this volume and in the preceding conference at the
University of York for their insights.

1. I am grateful to Professor Crossley for elucidating this. See Pamela

Crossley, A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology
(Berkeley, CA, 1999).
2. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State,
1688–1783 (London, 1989).
3. T. C. W. Blanning and Peter Warde, eds, Reform in Great Britain and
Germany 1750–1850 (Oxford, 1999); compare Blanning, The French
Revolution in Germany: Occupation and Resistance in the Rhineland
1792–1802 (Oxford, 1983).
4. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History
(Berkeley, CA, 2005).
5. David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History
(Cambridge, MA, 2007).
6. J. G. A Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and
the Atlantic Republican Tradition, 2nd edn (Princeton, NJ, 2003).
7. C. A. Bayly, ‘Rammohan Roy and the Advent of Constitutional
Liberalism in India’, Modern Intellectual History 4 (2007), 25–41.
8. On which see the essays in C. A. Bayly and Eugenio Biagini, eds,
Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalization of Democratic Nationalism,
1830–1920 (Oxford, 2008).
9. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British
Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006).
10. Philip A. Kuhn, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768
(Cambridge, MA, 1990).
Further Reading

Introduction: The Age of Revolutions in Global Context,

c.1760–1840 – Global Causation, Connection, and Comparison
The classic studies of the Age of Revolutions remain R. R. Palmer, The Age
of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America,
1760–1800, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ, 1959–64), and Eric Hobsbawm, The Age
of Revolution, 1789–1848 (London, 1962). Neither engaged much with the
broader literature on revolutions in world history but they can be usefully
read alongside such important later works as Theda Skocpol, States and Social
Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge,
1979), Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World
(Berkeley, CA, 1991), and Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Historical Criteria of the
Modern Concept of Revolution’, in Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics
of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA, 1985), pp. 39–54.
Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches:Technological Creativity and Economic Progress
(New York, 1990), provides a useful overview of economic changes in the
period.The more specific question of the ‘Industrial Revolution’ is discussed
in Pat Hudson, The Industrial Revolution (London, 1992). Important perspec-
tives from the history of science can be found in Lissa L. Roberts, Simon
Schaffer and Peter Dear, eds, The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the
Late Renaissance to Early Industrialization (Amsterdam, 2007). Richard H.
Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the
Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge, 1995), is a pioneering
work on ecology and empire in the period. Martin J. S. Rudwick, Bursting
the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution
(Chicago, 2005), and Chenxi Tang, The Geographic Imagination of Modernity:
Geography, Literature, and Philosophy in German Romanticism (Stanford, CA,
2008), explore changing conceptions of time and space.
In recent years, comparative studies of the Age of Revolutions in Europe
and America have been mostly the province of cultural historians: see, for
example, Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman, eds, The Age of Cultural Revolutions,
1750–1850 (Berkeley, CA, 2002) and Leora Auslander, Cultural Revolutions:
Everyday Life and Politics in Britain, North America, and France (Berkeley, CA,
2009). However, for a recent political synthesis in critical dialogue with
Palmer, see Wim Klooster, Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative
History (New York, 2009) and for novel perspectives on intellectual history,
see Manuela Albertone and Antonino De Francesco, eds, Rethinking the
Atlantic World: Europe and America in the Age of Democratic Revolutions
(Basingstoke, 2009).
There have been various efforts to expand the analytical frameworks for
considering the American, French, and Latin American revolutions in our

273
274 Further Reading

period.The most profound are Franco Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in
Europe, 1768–1776:The First Crisis, trans. R. Burr Litchfield (Princeton, NJ,
1989), and Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1776–1789, trans.
Litchfield, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ, 1991). On the American Revolution, see,
for example, David Brion Davis, Revolutions: Reflections on American Equality
and Foreign Liberations (Cambridge, MA, 1990), Eliga H. Gould and Peter S.
Onuf, eds, Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World
(Baltimore, 2005), P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain,
India, and America c.1750–1783 (Oxford, 2005), and David Armitage, The
Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA, 2007). On the
French Revolution, see R. R. Palmer, The World of the French Revolution (New
York, 1971), Joseph Klaits and Michael H. Haltzel, eds, The Global
Ramifications of the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1994), two synthetic studies
by Bailey Stone, The Genesis of the French Revolution: A Global-Historical
Perspective (Cambridge, 1994) and Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A
Global-Historical Perspective (Cambridge, 2002), and Juan Cole, Napoleon’s
Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York, 2007). And on Iberian America in
this period, see Lester D. Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution,
1750–1850 (New Haven, CT, 1996), Jaime E. Rodríguez O., The
Independence of Spanish America (Cambridge, 1998), Jeremy Adelman,
Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton, NJ, 2006), and,
especially, Adelman, ‘An Age of Imperial Revolutions’, American Historical
Review 113 (2008), 319–40. Important starting points for integrating the
Haitian Revolution into the Age of Revolutions are C. L. R. James, The Black
Jacobins:Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd edn (New
York, 1963), and Robin Blackburn,‘Haiti, Slavery, and the Age of Democratic
Revolution’, William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 63 (2006), 643–74. For
comparisons among the American revolutions see ‘AHR Forum: Revolutions
in the Americas’, American Historical Review 105 (2000), 92–152.
For the Middle East, Thomas Naff and Roger Owen, eds, Studies in
Eighteenth-century Islamic History (Carbondale, IL, 1977), remains important,
while Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922, 2nd edn
(Cambridge, 2005), considers Ottoman developments. For South Asia, see
the important if controversial work of André Wink, Land and Sovereignty in
India:Agrarian Society and Politics under the Eighteenth-century Maratha Svarā jya
(Cambridge, 1986), as well as Jamal Malik, ed., Perspectives of Mutual
Encounters in South Asian History, 1760–1860 (Leiden, 2000). For useful
comparative perspectives on Asia, see Leonard Blussé and Femme S. Gaastra,
eds, On the Eighteenth Century as a Category of Asian History: Van Leur in
Retrospect (Aldershot, 1998), and Jack A. Goldstone, ‘Neither Late Imperial
nor Early Modern: Efflorescences and the Qing Formation in World
History’, in Lynn A. Struve, ed., The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time
(Cambridge, MA, 2004), pp. 242–302. In a global context, the classic work
on ‘European expansion’ from a military-fiscal perspective remains that of
Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the
West, 1500–1800, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1996).
Further Reading 275

The most illuminating attempts so far to place the Age of Revolutions in

a wider global context are C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World,
1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford, 2004), ch. 3,
‘Converging Revolutions, 1780–1820’, and John Darwin, After Tamerlane:The
Rise and Fall of Global Empire (London, 2007), ch. 4, ‘The Eurasian
Revolution’. Also indispensable are C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian:The British
Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London, 1989), and Bayly, ‘The First Age
of Global Imperialism, c.1760–1830’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth
History 26 (1998), 28–47. More recent works also see the decades on either
side of 1800 as pivotal for the global economy and the fortunes of empires:
for example, Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the
Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ, 2000), Alan Frost, The
Global Reach of Empire: Britain’s Maritime Expansion in the Indian and Pacific
Oceans, 1764–1815 (Carlton,Victoria, 2003), Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire:
Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850 (New York, 2005), Jennifer
Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France
(Princeton, NJ, 2005), Leonard Blussé, Visible Cities: Canton, Nagasaki, and
Batavia and the Coming of the Americans (Cambridge, MA, 2008), Lisa Ford,
Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia,
1788–1836 (Cambridge, MA, 2010), and Richard Bessel, Nicholas Guyatt
and Jane Rendall, eds, War, Empire and Slavery, 1770–1830 (Basingstoke,
forthcoming).

Chapter 1: Sparks from the Altar of ’76: International

Repercussions and Reconsiderations of the American
Revolution
The classic work on the global influence of the American Revolution,
published several decades before Atlantic basin studies came into vogue, is R.
R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution:A Political History of Europe and
America, 1760–1800, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ, 1959–64).Among books inspired
by Palmer are Michael Durey, Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American
Republic (Lawrence, KS, 1997), Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, An Empire
Divided:The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 2000),
Lester D. Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1850 (New
Haven, CT, 1996), and David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A
Global History (Cambridge, MA, 2007). Important recent books have spatially
and temporally extended Palmer’s Age of the Democratic Revolution. The
most comprehensive and important are C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern
World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford, 2004), and P.
J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America,
c.1750–1783 (Oxford, 2005).
How African Americans and Afro-Britons carried revolutionary ideology
outside the new United States or influenced Europeans in extending univer-
salistic concepts of freedom to the emancipation of serfs are explored in
276 Further Reading

Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution
(New York, 2006), Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves
of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston, 2006),
Vincent Carretta, Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-made Man (Athens,
GA, 2005), Unchained Voices:An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-speak-
ing World of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Carretta (Lexington, KY, 1996), and
Gary B. Nash and Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Friends of Liberty: Thomas
Jefferson, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, and Agrippa Hull: Three Patriots, Two Revolutions,
and a Tragic Betrayal in the New Nation (New York, 2008).

Chapter 2: The French Revolution in Global Context

New work on the French slave colonies during the French Revolution is
appearing at a rapid rate. For an excellent introduction, see Laurent Dubois,
Avengers of the New World:The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA,
2004). A more focused and even more recent overview can be found in
Miranda Frances Spieler, ‘The Legal Structure of Colonial Rule during the
French Revolution’, William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 66 (2009), 365–408.
Although the influence of the French Revolution on the rest of Europe, the
United States, and the Middle East has long been recognized, the European
and Middle Eastern impact has not drawn as much as attention of late as the
influence on slavery and the slave colonies. Some reflections on the long-
term resonance of the French Revolution, including in twentieth-century
Turkey, can be found in Carolina Armenteros,Tim Blanning, Isabel DiVanna
and Dawn Dodds, eds, Historicising the French Revolution (Newcastle upon
Tyne, 2008). Despite the flurry of recent research, much can be gained still
from reading R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political
History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ, 1959–64).
Palmer was the first to develop a coherent interwoven narrative of the events
unfolding on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Chapter 3: Revolutionary Exiles: The American Loyalist and

French Émigré Diasporas
Within the vast historiographies of the American and French Revolutions,
the literature on loyalist refugees and émigrés constitutes a decidedly small
subfield. Ernest Daudet, Histoire de l’émigration pendant la révolution française
(Paris, 1904–7), still stands out as a classic account of the emigration.The best
overview of the emigration in English remains Donald Greer’s The Incidence
of the Emigration During the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1951). Kirsty
Carpenter, Refugees of the French Revolution: Émigrés in London, 1789–1802
(Basingstoke, 1999), offers a splendid investigation of the émigré experience
in Britain. Emigration to other parts of Europe is helpfully surveyed in Kirsty
Carpenter and Philip Mansel, eds, The French Émigrés in Europe and the
Struggle Against Revolution, 1789–1814 (London, 1999). For émigrés in the
Further Reading 277

United States, Frances Sergeant Childs, French Refugee Life in the United States,
1790–1800 (Baltimore, 1940), provides a useful if somewhat outdated touch-
stone; for more recent reflections see R. Darrell Meadows, ‘Engineering
Exile: Social Networks and the French Atlantic Community, 1789–1809’,
French Historical Studies 23 (2000), 67–102.The question of compensation for
émigrés has been exhaustively treated by André Gain, La Restauration et les
biens des émigrés: la législation concernant les biens nationaux de seconde origine et
son application dans l’Est de la France (1814–1832) (Nancy, 1928); and by
Almut Franke, Le Milliard des émigrés: die Entschädigung der Emigranten im
Frankreich der Restauration (1814–1830) (Bochum, 1999).
Most of the foundational American scholarship on loyalism – such as
Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, MA, 1974),
and Robert M. Calhoon, The Loyalists in Revolutionary America (New York,
1973) – explores loyalist intellectual and social history before and during the
war.There is as yet no global history of the loyalist diaspora, but several works
investigate the loyalist emigration in specific parts of the British Empire.
Canada as a site of exodus has generated by far the most attention, and the
best recent studies include Ann Gorman Condon, The Loyalist Dream for New
Brunswick: The Envy of the American States (Fredericton, 1984), Norman J.
Knowles, Inventing the Loyalists:The Ontario Loyalist Tradition and the Creation
of Usable Pasts (Toronto, 1997), Neil MacKinnon, This Unfriendly Soil: The
Loyalist Experience in Nova Scotia, 1783–1791 (Kingston, 1986), and Janice
Potter-MacKinnon, While the Women Only Wept: Loyalist Refugee Women
(Montreal and Kingston, 1993). For loyalist refugees in Britain, see Mary
Beth Norton, The British-Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England,
1774–1789 (Boston, 1972). For the Caribbean and Bahamas, see Wilbur H.
Siebert, The Legacy of the American Revolution to the West Indies and Bahamas
(Columbus, OH, 1913), and Gail Saunders, Bahamian Loyalists and Their Slaves
(London, 1983). Mohawk loyalism has been most recently addressed by Alan
Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the
American Revolution (New York, 2006).Two pathbreaking studies of the black
loyalist refugees written by James W. St G. Walker, The Black Loyalists: The
Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783–1870
(London, 1976), and Ellen Gibson Wilson, The Loyal Blacks (New York,
1976), have been supplemented by Cassandra Pybus’s innovative Epic Journeys
of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest
for Liberty (Boston, 2006), which traces black loyalist trajectories to Sierra
Leone and Australia.
In addition to these scholarly works, many of the revolutionary refugees’
own memoirs, diaries, and papers have been published. A few representative
French émigré memoirs include Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Journal
de voyage en Amérique et d’un séjour à Philadelphie, 1 octobre 1794–18 avril 1795,
ed. Jean Marchand (Baltimore, 1940), Marquise de la Tour du Pin, Journal
d’une femme de cinquante ans, 1778–1815, ed. Aymar de Liedekerke-Beaufort,
2 vols (Paris, 1913), and Adèle d’Osmond de Boigne, Mémoires de la comtesse
de Boigne, née d’Osmond, ed. Jean-Claude Berchet, 2 vols (Paris, 1986).
278 Further Reading

Important editions of American loyalist refugee papers include Samuel

Curwen, The Journal of Samuel Curwen, Loyalist, ed. Andrew Oliver, 2 vols
(Cambridge, MA, 1972), William Smith, The Diary and Selected Papers,
1784–1793, ed. L. F. S. Upton, 2 vols (Toronto, 1963–5), and Winslow Papers,
AD 1776–1826, ed.W. O. Raymond, intr. George Athan Billias (Boston, 1972).

Chapter 4: Iberian Passages: Continuity and Change in the

South Atlantic
The study of Iberian empires in the eighteenth century has been undergo-
ing a large-scale renewal in recent years. But it has not altogether lost touch
with classic formulations, which tended to emphasize the endurance of
archaic patterns. For useful syntheses, see the essays by Dauril Alden, ‘Late
Colonial Brazil’, in Leslie Bethell, ed., The Cambridge History of Latin America,
II: Colonial Latin America (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 601–60, and John Lynch,
‘The Origins of Spanish American Independence’, in Bethell, ed., The
Cambridge History of Latin America, III: From Independence to c.1870
(Cambridge, 1985), pp. 3–50. There is little, however, that compares them
explicitly. John Elliott’s majestic Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain
in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven, CT, 2006) compares the Spanish and
British empires: see in particular chs 9–12 on the eighteenth century. For
closer examination of the trials of reform, see Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H.
Stein, Apogee of Empire: Spain and New Spain in the Age of Charles III
(Baltimore, 2003), Gabriel B. Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform
in Spain and its Empire, 1759–1808 (Basingstoke, 2008), and on the
Portuguese empire, Kenneth Maxwell, Conflicts and Conspiracies: Brazil and
Portugal, 1750–1808 (New York, 1970).
The ‘revolutions’ after 1810 have created a veritable mini-industry of
books and monographs. The broadest is Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and
Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton, NJ, 2006), which casts the process
in imperial terms. See also John Chasteen, Americanos: Latin America’s Struggle
for Independence (New York, 2008). Much of the recent debate has focused on
Jaime Rodriguez O., The Independence of Spanish America (Cambridge, 1998).
Among recent interpretations of the Portuguese empire see especially
Kirsten Schultz, Tropical Versailles: Empire, Monarchy, and the Portuguese Royal
Court in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1821 (New York, 2001). Examples of recent
efforts to include the stories of slaves and indigenous peoples in the revolu-
tionary process include Peter Blanchard, Under the Flags of Freedom: Slave
Soldiers and the Wars of Independence in Spanish South America (Pittsburgh,
2008), Marixa Lasso, Myths of Harmony: Race and Republicanism During the Age
of Revolution, Colombia 1795–1831 (Pittsburgh, 2007), and Eric Van Young,
The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology and the Mexican Struggle for
Independence, 1810–1821 (Stanford, CA, 2001).
Further Reading 279

Chapter 5: The Caribbean in the Age of Revolution

Important overviews of Caribbean demography and economy in this period
are provided in Stanley L. Engerman and Barry W. Higman, ‘The
Demographic Structure of the Caribbean Slave Societies in the Eighteenth
and Nineteenth Centuries’, and David Eltis, ‘The Slave Economies of the
Caribbean: Structure, Performance, Evolution and Significance’, in Franklin
W. Knight, ed., General History of the Caribbean, III (London, 1997), pp.
45–104, 111–23. For the political economy of slavery, see Part 2 of Robin
Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern,
1492–1800 (London, 1997). Cuba’s transformation is charted in Manuel
Moreno Fraginals, The Sugarmill:The Socioeconomic Complex of Sugar in Cuba,
trans. Cedric Belfrage (New York, 1976), Pablo Tornero Tinajero, Crecimiento
económico y transformaciones sociales: Esclavos, hacendados y comerciantes en la Cuba
colonial (1760–1840) (Madrid, 1996), and Allan Kuethe, Cuba, 1753–1815:
Crown, Military, and Society (Knoxville,TN, 1986). Other valuable local studies
include Barry Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807–1834
(Cambridge, 1976), Alex van Stipriaan, Surinaams Contrast: Roofbouw en
Overleven in een Caraïbische Plantagekolonie, 1750–1863 (Leiden, 1993),
Frédéric Régent, La France et ses esclaves: De la colonisation aux abolitions (Paris,
2007), and Dale Tomich, Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar: Martinique and the World
Economy, 1830–1848 (Baltimore, 1990). The ‘decline thesis’ advanced in
Lowell Ragatz, The Fall of the Planter Class in the British West Indies,
1763–1834 (Washington, DC, 1928), is dismantled in Seymour Drescher,
Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh, 1977), and
defended in Selwyn Carrington, The Sugar Industry and the Abolition of the
Slave Trade, 1775–1810 (Gainesville, FL, 2002).
Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944; London, 1964), remains central
to discussions of antislavery.Alternative analyses are offered in David B. Davis’s
The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY, 1966) and The Problem of
Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY, 1975), Seymour
Drescher’s Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative
Perspective (New York, 1986) and The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus
Slavery in the British Emancipation (New York, 2002). Less Anglo-focused are
Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London,
1988), and Marcel Dorigny, ed., The Abolitions of Slavery: From Léger-Félicité
Sonthonax to Victor Schoelcher, 1793, 1794, 1848 (New York, 2003).
Revolutionary France’s impact on the Caribbean is treated in David
Barry Gaspar and David Geggus, eds, A Turbulent Time:The French Revolution
and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington, IN, 1997). For the colonial question
in the French Revolution, see Yves Benot’s La Révolution française et la fin des
colonies (Paris, 1988) and La démence coloniale sous Napoléon (Paris, 1992), Jean
Daniel Piquet, L’émancipation des noirs dans la Révolution française (1789–1795)
(Paris, 2002), and Yves Benot and Marcel Dorigny, eds, Rétablissement de
l’esclavage dans les colonies françaises, 1802: Ruptures et continuités de la politique
coloniale française, 1800–1830: Aux origines d’Haïti (Paris, 2003).
280 Further Reading

Still essential reading on the Haitian Revolution are Thomas Madiou,

Histoire d’Haïti (1847–8; rpt Port-au-Prince, 1989–91), and Beaubrun
Ardouin, Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti (1853; rpt Port-au-Prince, 2007). The
best modern narrative is Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World:The Story
of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2004). An older classic is C. L. R.
James, The Black Jacobins:Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
(New York, 1938). Good collections of primary sources include Jacques
Thibau, Le temps de Saint-Domingue (Paris, 1989), and Jeremy D. Popkin,
Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Insurrection
(Chicago, 2008). On the revolution in Guadeloupe, see Laurent Dubois, A
Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean,
1787–1804 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), and Frédéric Régent, Esclavage, métis-
sage, liberté: La révolution française en Guadeloupe, 1789–1802 (Paris, 2004). For
military matters, see Michael Duffy, Soldiers, Sugar and Seapower: The British
Expeditions to the West Indies and the War against Revolutionary France (Oxford,
1987), and for repercussions elsewhere, David Geggus, ed., The Impact of the
Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, SC, 2001), David Geggus
and Norman Fiering, eds, The World of the Haitian Revolution (Bloomington,
IN, 2009), and Eleázar Córdova-Bello, La independencia de Haití y su influen-
cia en Hispanoamérica (Caracas, 1967). Slave resistance elsewhere is analysed in
Seymour Drescher and Pieter Emmer, eds, Who Abolished Slavery? Slave
Revolts and Abolitionism (New York, 2010), Michel Craton, Testing the Chains:
Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (London, 1982), Emilia Viotti da
Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823
(New York, 1994), and Matt Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and
the Struggle Against Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006).

Chapter 6: The Dynamics of History in Africa and the Atlantic

‘Age of Revolutions’
The approach to Africa’s past sketched in this chapter will not be found in
an integrated form in the current literature on Africa. Existing survey treat-
ments exhibit the projections of modern conceptualizations of ‘states’,‘state-
less societies’, and other structural abstractions – including the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries as dominated by ‘the Atlantic slave trade’ – that this
treatment aims to replace with concepts closer to those of the people in
Africa engaged with European and other merchants. My own statement of
the epistemological principles at stake may be found in Joseph C. Miller,
‘Beyond Blacks, Bondage, and Blame: Why a Multi-centric World History
Needs Africa’, Historically Speaking 5, 2 (2004), 7–31, with responses from
several world historians. Further statements of these principles in the
contexts of the modern historiography of Africa appear in Joseph C. Miller,
‘History and Africa/Africa and History’, American Historical Review 104
(1999), 1–32, and Miller, ‘Life Begins at Fifty: African Studies Enters Its
Second Half Century’, African Studies Review 50 (2007), 1–35.
Further Reading 281

With regard to Africans’ positions in the Atlantic world, the present

chapter derives from a framework contextualizing Africans’ ways in a
concentric set of widening historical contexts in Miller, Way of Death:
Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison, WI,
1988). Among the other, and growing numbers of, approaches to locating
Africa in Atlantic contexts are John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the
Making of the Atlantic World, 1500–1680, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1998), which
takes account of Africa’s differences from early-modern Europe in European
terms but emphasizes military, economic, and political similarities (prior to
about the end of the seventeenth century), and continuities in cultural terms
from Africa into the Americas. Linda M. Heywood and Thornton have
recently developed this emphasis on Africa’s position in an Atlantic world
through cultural continuities in their Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the
Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (Cambridge, 2007).
Africa’s ‘Atlantic presence’ first emerged in the 1930s as a matter of African
cultures in the Americas and has generated complex ongoing debates among
anthropologists and historians, often phrased in terms of an ill (or multiply)
defined notion of ‘creolization’.The touchstone for those who emphasize the
cultural destructiveness of the slave trade is Sidney Mintz and Richard Price,
An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past (Philadelphia, 1976),
republished as The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological
Perspective (Boston, 1992). Another – no less contentious – approach to
emphasizing transatlantic continuity is through ‘ethnicity’, referring to the
appearance of allegedly African ethnic labels among Africans enslaved in the
Americas. Recent and exemplary contributions along these lines include
Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of
African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998),
and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas:
Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill, NC, 2005). For this author’s approach, see
my ‘Retention, Re-invention, and Remembering: Restoring Identities
through Enslavement in Africa and Under Slavery in Brazil’, in José C. Curto
and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds, Enslaving Connections: Changing Cultures of Africa and
Brazil during the Era of Slavery (Amherst, NY, 2003), pp. 81–121.
Since the 1970s, Africa has entered Atlantic history largely through its
position as the source of the captives taken into slavery in the Americas.The
paradigmatic work remains Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade:A Census
(Madison,WI, 1969). Forty years of close demographic work on the volume
and directions of the maritime trade have culminated in a searchable website
detailing nearly 35,000 ships known to have carried slaves into the Atlantic
from African shores (see http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces).
These data, based on an earlier and less-complete version of the database, are
summarized in Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1999).
One may get a feel for the enhancements in the current database in the
collection of papers edited by the two principal coordinators of this massive
and extremely careful compilation, David Eltis and David Richardson, eds,
Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database
282 Further Reading

(New Haven, CT, 2008). For a radically innovative and provocative sense of
what this Middle Passage may have meant to those carried in the holds of
these slaving ships, see Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle
Passage from Africa to the American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA, 2007).
The terrors of this era in Africa, related to slaving, are now being eluci-
dated in Africans’ terms. Among a fast-growing literature see Sandra E.
Greene, Gender, Ethnicity and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast:A History
of the Anlo-Ewe (Portsmouth, NH, 1996), Robert Martin Baum, Shrines of the
Slave Trade: Diola Religion and Society in Precolonial Senegambia (Oxford, 1999),
Elizabeth Isichei, Voices of the Poor in Africa (Rochester, NY, 2002), and
Rosalind Shaw, The Dangers of Temne Divination: Ritual Memories of the Slave
Trade in West Africa (Chicago, 2002). The enabling importance of European
commercial capital remains to be explored fully, but see Paul E. Lovejoy and
David Richardson, ‘Trust, Pawnship, and Atlantic History: The Institutional
Foundations of the Old Calabar Slave Trade’, American Historical Review 104
(1999), 333–55, and their ‘African Agency and the Liverpool Slave Trade’, in
David Richardson, Suzanne Schwarz and Anthony Tibbles, eds, Liverpool and
Transatlantic Slavery (Liverpool, 2007), pp. 43–65.The political strategies and
processes that form the focus of this chapter remain largely obscured by the
fascination in the literature with ‘kingdoms’ and ‘empires’. A recent and
accessible survey exemplifying the limitations of including Africa in world
history by rendering it in pseudo-modern terms is Erik Gilbert and Jonathan
T. Reynolds, Africa in World History from Prehistory to the Present (Upper Saddle
River, NJ, 2004). A comprehensive survey of the recent specialized literature
on Africa’s ‘Atlantic era’ is Philip D. Morgan, ‘Africa and the Atlantic, c.1450
to 1820’, in Jack P. Greene and Morgan, eds, Atlantic History: A Critical
Appraisal (New York, 2009), pp. 223–48.

Chapter 7: Playing Muslim: Bonaparte’s Army of the Orient

and Euro-Muslim Creolization
More background on modern Egypt can be found in Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid
Marsot, A History of Egypt: From the Arab Conquest to the Present, 2nd edn
(Cambridge, 2007), and the same author’s Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali
(Cambridge, 1984). See also the relevant chapters in M. W. Daly, ed., The
Cambridge History of Egypt, II: Modern Egypt, from 1517 to the End of the
Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1998). For the Mamluk beys, see Jane
Hathaway, The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt:The Rise of the Qazdaglis
(Cambridge, 2002).The French occupation is chronicled in Abd al-Rahman
al-Jabarti, Napoleon in Egypt: Al-Jabarti’s Chronicle of the First Seven Months of
the French Occupation, 1798, trans. Shmuel Moreh (Princeton, NJ, 1995) and
discussed at greater length in Juan Cole, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle
East (New York, 2007).
For late eighteenth-century France as a context for the invasion and
occupation of Egypt, see Howard G. Brown, Ending the French Revolution:
Further Reading 283

Violence, Justice, and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon (Charlottesville,VA,

2006). On imperial France and the Near East, see especially L. Carl Brown
and Matthew S. Gordon, eds, Franco-Arab Encounters: Studies in Memory of
David C. Gordon (Beirut, 1996), and Leila Tarazi Fawaz and C. A. Bayly, with
Robert Ilbert, eds, Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian
Ocean (New York, 2002).

Chapter 8: Imperial Revolutions and Global Repercussions:

South Asia and the World, c.1750–1850
Readers will find references to many relevant works in the endnotes to my
chapter. Rather than repeating myself, I will mainly list different works here,
some of which point to themes that are neglected in my piece. A different
approach to South Asia in the Age of Revolutions might have focused more
on changing forms of resistance, social protest and violent rebellion. Notable
works include Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in
Colonial India (Oxford, 1983), Eric Stokes, The Peasant Armed: The Indian
Revolt of 1857 (Oxford, 1986), Ajay Skaria, Hybrid Histories: Frontiers, Forests
and Wildness in Western India (Delhi, 1999), Willam R. Pinch, Warrior Ascetics
and Indian Empires (Cambridge, 2006), and C.A. Bayly,‘The British Military-
Fiscal State and Indigenous Resistance’, in Lawrence Stone, ed., An Imperial
State at War 1689–1815 (London, 1994), pp. 322–54. C. A. Bayly, Origins of
Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of
Modern India (Delhi, 1998), and Rajat Ray, The Felt Community: Commonalty
and Mentality Before the Emergence of Indian Nationalism (Delhi, 2003), locate
the roots of national sentiment in discourses of ethical government and in
‘regional patriotisms’ forged in the age of imperial revolutions.
For a helpful introduction to the history of the Mughal Empire, see
Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds, The Mughal State, 1526–1750
(Delhi, 1998). For South Asia in relation to early modern Indian ocean
networks, see K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East
India Company 1600–1760 (Cambridge, 1978), and Ashin Das Gupta, India
and the Indian Ocean World:Trade and Politics (Delhi, 2004). For a survey of the
rise of British power in India, together with interesting visual materials, see
C. A. Bayly, ed., The Raj: India and the British, 1600–1947 (London, 1990).
‘The Colonial Transition: South Asia 1780–1840’, was reconsidered in a
special issue of Modern Asian Studies 38 (2004), edited by Ian J. Barrow and
Douglas E. Haynes. Samples from a vast and contentious literature on the
economic impact of colonial conquests in South Asia are included in Asiya
Siddiqi, ed., Trade and Finance in Colonial India, 1750–1860 (Delhi, 1995), and
G. Balachandran, ed., India and the World Economy, 1850–1950 (Delhi, 2003).
For British India’s role within global networks of scientific knowledge, see
Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the
‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven, CT, 2000), Richard H. Grove, Green
Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of
284 Further Reading

Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge, 1995), and Kapil Raj, Relocating

Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and
Europe (Basingstoke, 2007).
Too few works have treated the rich subject of intra-European encoun-
ters in South Asia, and how conceptions of ‘Europeanness’ were articulated
in the region; notable exceptions include Holden Furber, Rival Empires of
Trade in the Orient (Minneapolis, 1976), Furber, Private Fortunes and Company
Profits in the India Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Aldershot, 1997), and Maya
Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850
(New York, 2005). European observers with ringside seats on the ‘imperial
revolutions’ of South Asia can be studied in A European Experience of the
Mughal Orient: The I’jaz-i Arsalani: Persian Letters (1773–1779) of Antoine-
Louis Henri Polier, ed. Muzaffar Alam and Seema Alavi (Delhi, 2001), A Man
of the Enlightenment in Eighteenth Century India: The Letters of Claude Martin
1766–1800, ed. Rosie Llewellyn-Jones (Delhi, 2003), and Linda Colley, The
Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (London, 2007). For
Indian travellers and travel writers in this period see Muzaffar Alam and
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries 1400–1800
(Cambridge, 2007), Michael Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian
Travellers and Settlers in Britain (Delhi, 2004), and Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe
Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth Century Bengal, 2nd edn
(Delhi, 2002). Increasing numbers of Indians were coerced into travelling
overseas as convicts, slaves, or indentured labourers: for convicts, see Clare
Anderson, ‘Sepoys, Servants and Settlers: Convict Transportation in the
Indian Ocean, 1787–1945’, in Frank Dikotter and Ian Brown, eds, Cultures of
Confinement: A History of the Prison in Africa, Asia and Latin America (London,
2007), pp. 185–220; on slavery, see Indrani Chatterjee and Richard Maxwell
Eaton, eds, Slavery and South Asian History (Bloomington, IN, 2006).
An important strand of recent research is rethinking the place of South
Asia within global intellectual history, moving away from conventional
emphases on the diffusion or imposition of ‘colonizing ideas’ from Europe:
see the special issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle
East 24 (2004), on ‘Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern South Asia’, edited
by Sheldon Pollock; a special edition of Modern Intellectual History 4 (2007),
on ‘An Intellectual History for India’, edited by Shruti Kapila; Jon E.Wilson,
The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India (Basingstoke,
2008); and Michael S. Dodson, Orientalism, Empire and National Culture: India
1770–1870 (Basingstoke, 2007).

Chapter 9: Revolutionary Europe and the Destruction of Java’s

Old Order, 1808–1830
For further reading on the process of cultural and mystic synthesis between
Islam and Javanese society exemplified by the life of Prince Diponegoro
(1785–1855), see M. C. Ricklefs, Mystic Synthesis in Java: A History of
Further Reading 285

Islamization from the Fourteenth to the Early Nineteenth Centuries (Norwalk, CT,
2006), Ricklefs, Polarising Javanese Society: Islamic and Other Visions
(c.1893–1930) (Singapore, 2007), and Peter Carey, The Power of Prophecy:
Prince Dipanagara and the End of an Old Order in Java, 1785–1855 (Leiden,
2007).The wider global effects of the colonial ‘tsunami’ wrought by the twin
industrial and political revolutions of late eighteenth-century Europe can
best be explored in C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian:The British Empire and the
World, 1780–1830 (London, 1989), Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World,
1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford, 2004), and Kenneth
Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern
World Economy (Princeton, NJ, 2000). For comparative studies of the transi-
tions from mestizo ‘cultural’ fusion between Europe and Asia and the ‘high’
colonial period, see William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in
Eighteenth-century India (London, 2002), Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World
of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia (Madison,WI, 1983), and Ulbe
Bosma and Remko Raben, Being ‘Dutch’ in the Indies:A History of Creolization
and Empire, 1500–1920 (Singapore, 2008).
On the role of the Chinese in Java, see Peter Carey, ‘Changing Javanese
Perceptions of the Chinese in Central Java, 1755–1825’, Indonesia 37 (1984),
1–48, and the fascinating memoir of a schoolteacher from Fujien province
who lived on the north coast of Java in the mid-eighteenth century: Ong Tae-
Hae [Wang Dahai],The Chinaman Abroad: Or a Desultory Account of the Malayan
Archipelago, ed. and trans.W. H. Medhurst (Shanghai, 1849), available online at
http://digital.library.cor nell.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=sea;idno=
sea056. James Rush, Opium to Java: Revenue Farming and Chinese Enterprise in
Colonial Indonesia, 1860–1910 (Ithaca, NY, 1990), has important information
on the origins of the colonial opium farm. M. C. Ricklefs, Jogjakarta under
Sultan Mangkubumi, 1749–1792: A History of the Division of Java (Oxford,
1974), ch. IX, explores the Javanese understanding of the role of the pre-nine-
teenth century Dutch in Java and the political division of the island. For a
masterly overview of the traditional Javanese administration, see Soemarsaid
Moertono, State and Statecraft in Old Java: A Study of the Later Mataram Period,
16th to 19th Century (Ithaca, NY, 1968). John Bastin’s two monographs on the
period of the British administration (1811–16), Raffles’ Ideas on the Land Rent
System and the Mackenzie Land Tenure Commission (‘s-Gravenhage, 1954) and
The Native Policies of Sir Stamford Raffles in Java and Sumatra (Oxford, 1957),
are still useful.Vincent Houben, Kraton and Kumpeni: Surakarta and Yogyakarta
1830–1870 (Leiden, 1994), covers the immediate aftermath of the Java War
on the basis of both Dutch and Javanese sources.

Chapter 10: Their Own Path to Crisis? Social Change, State-

building and the Limits of Qing Expansion, c.1770–1840
On the White Lotus, see Barend Ter Haar, The White Lotus Teaching in Chinese
Religious History (Honolulu, 1999); on their largest uprising, see Blaine
286 Further Reading

Gaustad, ‘Religious Sectarianism and the State in Mid-Qing

China: Background to the White Lotus Uprising of 1796–1804’ (PhD disser-
tation, University of California, Berkeley, 1994). A very provocative discus-
sion of Qing reactions to the White Lotus and subsequent reforms is Wang
Wensheng, ‘White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: Social Crises and
Political Changes in the Qing Empire, 1796–1810’ (PhD dissertation,
University of California, Irvine, 2008).A detailed account of another, smaller,
White Lotus uprising in our period is Susan Naquin, Millenarian Rebellion in
China:The Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813 (New Haven, CT, 1976). Military
affairs during this period have been understudied, but Philip Kuhn, Rebellion
and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure,
1796–1864 (Cambridge, MA, 1970), is a landmark study of the relationships
among local militia, Qing armies, state policy, and the transformation of the
rural elite.
There are many good case studies of Qing policy on frontiers and ethnic
minorities, but no single synthetic work. On Taiwan, see John Shepherd,
Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600–1800 (Stanford,
CA, 1993). On the Miao, see Donald Sutton, ‘Violence and Ethnicity on a
Qing Colonial Frontier: Customary and Statutory Law in the Eighteenth-
century Miao Pale’, Modern Asian Studies 37 (2003), 41–80. For Yunnan, see
David Atwill, The Chinese Sultanate: Islam, Ethnicity, and the Panthay Rebellion
in Southwest China, 1856–1873 (Stanford, CA, 2005); though focused on a
later period, its background chapters have much to say about ours. For the
north-west, see James Millward, Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire
in Qing Central Asia, 1759–1864 (Stanford, CA, 1998), and Peter Perdue,
China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA,
2005); Perdue’s work mostly covers an earlier period, but is extraordinarily
rich. Joseph Fletcher,‘Ch’ing Inner Asia c.1800’, in John K. Fairbank, ed., The
Cambridge History of China, X.1 (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 35–106, remains a
very useful general survey.The Qing rulers belonged to an ethnic minority
themselves, and Manchu studies have boomed in the past twenty years.Two
important works with different viewpoints are Pamela Crossley, A Translucent
Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology (Berkeley, CA, 1999), and
Mark Elliott, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late
Imperial China (Stanford, CA, 2001).
This chapter’s analysis of Qing political economy is developed further in
Kenneth Pomeranz, ‘Chinese Development in Long-run Perspective’,
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 152 (2008), 83–100; a book-
length version is in progress. On Qing economic and political ideas, see R.
Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European
Experience (Ithaca, NY, 1997), and Pierre Etienne Will,‘Discussions about the
Market-place and the Market Principle in Eighteenth-Century Guangdong’,
Zhongguo haiyang fazhan shilun wenji 7 (Taibei, 1989), pp. 323–89. The best
English treatment of taxation remains Wang Yeh-chien, Land Taxation in
Imperial China, 1750–1911 (Cambridge, MA, 1973), though there is impor-
tant later work in Chinese. On trends, see Robert Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk,
Further Reading 287

and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China (Cambridge,
1997), Peter Perdue, Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan,
1500–1850 (Cambridge, MA, 1987), Anne Osborne, ‘The Local Politics of
Land Reclamation in the Lower Yangzi Highlands’, Late Imperial China 15
(1994), 1–46, and, for a grand historical sweep, Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the
Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven, CT, 2004). The
issue is placed in a global framework by Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great
Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of a Modern World Economy
(Princeton, NJ, 2000). On Qing attempts to stabilize both ecology and
society in the pre-Taiping period, see Randall Dodgen, Controlling the
Dragon: Confucian Engineers and the Yellow River in Late Imperial China
(Honolulu, 2001), Pierre-Etienne Will and R. Bin Wong, Nourish the
People: The State Civilian Granary System in China, 1650–1850 (Ann Arbor,
MI, 1991), Lillian Li, Fighting Famine in North China: State, Market, and
Environmental Decline, 1690s–1990s (Stanford, CA, 2007), and the sources
noted above.
The defining works on the Qing monarchy generally emphasize the
period slightly before ours. For how government worked at its most effec-
tive, see Beatrice Bartlett, Monarchs and Ministers:The Grand Council in Mid-
Ch’ing China, 1723–1820 (Berkeley, CA, 1991); a revealing and beautifully
written case study from the early part of that era is Jonathan Spence, Treason
by the Book (New York, 2001). Philip Kuhn, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery
Scare of 1768 (Cambridge, MA, 1990), uses another case study to illuminate
later, more troubled, emperor–bureaucrat relationships. William Rowe,
Saving the World: Chen Hongmou and Elite Consciousness in Eighteenth-century
China (Stanford, CA, 2001), looks at administration and ideology through a
biography of one of the era’s most important officials. Wang Wensheng’s
analyses of post-1796 reform, noted above, build on two important inquiries
into why Qing statecraft became much less effective by the end of our
period (while partly dissenting from their pessimism). James Polachek, The
Inner Opium War (Cambridge, MA, 1992), argues that the increasing influ-
ence of elite literati networks helped to produce disastrous policies. Susan
Mann Jones and Philip Kuhn, ‘Dynastic Decline and the Roots of
Rebellion’, in Fairbank, ed., Cambridge History of China, X.1, pp. 107–62, is a
remarkably broad-ranging overview of how the mid-nineteenth century
turned disastrous; though subsequent research has modified many of its
details, it remains essential for anyone interested in this period.
Index

abolitionism Algeria 210

and the Caribbean 88–91 Aliens Act (1793) 48, 49
dominant Europe-centred narratives Allen, Richard 9
on 88 American loyalists 37–58
influence of Haitian Revolution on absence of in United States
27, 41, 86, 89, 90, 91 historiography 39
Adams, John xiii, 7, 8, 14, 40–1 black 41, 46, 47, 57
Adelman, Jeremy xxii, 56, 59, 146 in Britain 55
Africa xviii, 101–24, 210 British relief programme for 46–7
and Atlantic commercialization/ comparison with French émigrés
commerce 101, 102, 105, 50–7
114–19, 121–2, 124 destination of migrants 46, 47
commodities traded with Europeans impact of in new settings 47
115 indemnification for property losses
‘communal ethos’ 101, 105, 111, 46–7
112–13, 114, 117, 118, 119, 123, migration of and numbers involved
124 38–9, 41, 42, 46
development of major trading parallels and differences between
networks 116 French émigrés and 50–1
early trade in 111 persecution of and legislation against
emergence of warrior polities 42–3
117–18 reasons for migrating 42
European commercial investment in response to measures against 43
108 role played in reconfiguration of
financing of African merchants by imperial government in Canada
European credit 117–18, 119, 47, 53
120, 123 similarities with Saint Domingue
gold sources 108, 115 émigrés 51–2
historical dynamics of commercial stereotyping of 39
capital in 110–14 American Revolution xii, xiii, xv,
historical dynamics of debt 119–20 xxix, 1–9, 37, 51, 211
increase in competitive individuation contrast between French Revolution
and violence 116–17 and 38, 51
parallels with Europe 121–4 impact of on British Empire 52–3,
populist uprisings 117 56
slavery 108, 110, 117–18, 119, 121, international impact of 2–3
124 migration of American loyalists see
and Soninke traders 111–12, 116 American loyalists
‘Age of Revolutions’ Palmer’s view of 1
origin of term xii–xiii perception of as civil war 39

288
Index 289

American Revolution – continued ‘bare sticks’ 192

reasons for muted resonance in Batavian Legion 172
Atlantic world and beyond Batavian Republic 21, 168
4–5 Batsányi, István
and slavery issue 3, 4–19 ‘On the Changes in France’ xxiii
spread of key elements of ideology of Bayly, C. A. xix, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 61,
1 126, 157–8, 176, 209
American War of Independence 2–3 The Birth of the Modern World 3–4,
Americas 62, 81, 106, 108 145–6
map 67 Bazin, Louis xvi
slave trade 66 Beaumetz, Bon Albert de 49
unrest in 1780s 64 Beaumont, Élie de 8
see also individual countries Beccaria, Cesare 31
Amiens, Peace of (1802) 50, 68, 169 Belgrano, Manuel 69
Anderson, Benedict 35 Benezet, Anthony 7, 9
Anglo-Dutch War, Fourth (1780–4) Bengal xvi, 146, 158, 211
168 conquest of by East India Company
Anglo-Mysore War (1787–9) 178 xii–xiii, 145, 147, 149
Arblay, general Alexandre d’ 49 Benot,Yves 92, 93
Aristotle 139, 140 La Révolution française 23
Armistead, James 10–11 Bentham, Jeremy 6
Armitage, David xii, 31, 98, 213 Benton, Lauren 61
The Declaration of Independence: A Bernier, François xv, xvi
Global History 2 Bernoyer, François 134, 143
The Ideological Origins of the British Biassou, Georges 97
Empire 28–9 black loyalists 41, 46, 47, 57
Arnold, Benedict 37, 47 Blackburn, Robin 26, 27, 89, 92, 93,
Artigas, José 78 96, 97
Atlantic commerce/commercialization Blanning,T. C.W. 212
and Africa 101, 102, 105, 114–19, Bogle, George 160
121–2, 124 Boigne, Adèle d’Osmond de 49
Auckland, George Eden, 1st earl of Bolívar, Simón 27, 75, 78–9, 99
156 Bonaparte, Joseph xxx
Aurangzeb, Emperor 146 Bonaparte, Louis 169
Averröes (Ibn Rushd) 139 Bonaparte, Napoleon see Napoleon
Avicenna (Ibn Sina) 139 ‘Book of Negroes,The’ 46
Azimabad xiii Bose, Sugata 159, 163
Bosnia xxvii
Bahamas Botany Bay 53
settlement of American loyalists Bowen, Huw 155
47 Boxer Rebellion (1898–1901) xxxii
Bailyn, Bernard 41–2 Brazil 64, 66, 71, 74, 76–7, 78, 80, 86,
al-Bakri, Sheikh ‘Ali 134–5 107
Balkans xxviii Brewer, John 211
Bancroft, Edward 17 ‘brig men’ 113
290 Index
Brissot de Warville, Jacques Pierre 16 and abolitionism 88–91
Britain colonial rule 83–4, 99
abolition of slavery in colonies (1833) decline in economic and geopolitical
84, 85, 91 importance 85–6, 100
abolition of slave trade (1807) 19, decline in slave population 86
212 free coloured activism 87, 88, 93,
American loyalists in and relief 94
programme for 46–7, 55 impact of abolition of legal racial
and American Revolution 2 discrimination in colonies
cotton industry 144 87–8
French émigrés in 48–9, 52, 54, influence of events in on French
55–6 politics 28
and India see India map 90
industrialization 144 revolutionary change 86–7
invasion and occupation of Java and slavery 27, 28, 83, 84–5, 88–91,
(1811–16) 56, 167, 169, 175, 100
176–80, 187 sugar production 85, 86
sponsoring of émigré landing at see also Haitian Revolution; Saint
Quiberon (1795) 48 Domingue
support of French Catholic priests Cartwright, John 7
55 Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, viscount
trade with Asia 154 78
British Empire 52, 56–7, 147, Catherine II the Great, Empress xvii,
210–11 212
expansion of 56 Catholics
impact of American Revolution on targeting of in Britain 55
52–3, 56 see also non-juring priests
impact of French wars on 56 causation xix, xxix–xxx
Brown, Christopher L. 215 Césaire, Aimé 92
Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, comte Ceylon 211, 213, 216
de 12 Chapelain, Jean xv–xvi
Burke, Edmund 25, 32, 55, 147, 148 Charles IV, King of Spain xxx
Burlamaqui, Jean-Jacques 31 Charles X, King of France (Comte
Burma 162, 189, 215 d’Artois) 44, 48, 50
Burney, Charles 55 Chastellux, François Jean, marquis de
Burney, Fanny (Madame d’Arblay) 49, 12
55 Chevallier, Pierre Frederic Henri 184
China xxvi, 160
Cádiz, constitution of (1810) 213 map 198–9
Calcutta 162 see also Qing empire
Camus, Albert 210 Chinese, in Java 180–6
Canada Christophe, Henry 97, 98
black loyalists in 47, 53 Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790)
Carey, Peter xxvi, 167 42, 44
Caribbean xviii–xix, 83–100 civil war(s)
Index 291

African 116 see also General Crisis,World Crisis

American 216 Crossley, Pamela 211
American and French Revolutions as Crouzet, François xxv
38, 39, 51 Cuba 27, 84, 85, 86
English 42 Cugoano, Ottobah 16
Spanish American 60, 70–1, 81–2 Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of
Clarkson,Thomas 16 Slavery 16
Clive, Robert xiii, xvi, 187 cultural factors xxv
Coatsworth, John H. 2
Cobb, Richard 40 Daendels,Willem 167, 169, 172–6,
Cole, Juan xxvi, 125, 159, 164 178, 187
Colwill, Elizabeth 26, 28 Danton, Georges 29
commercialization Darwin, John xix
Africa and Atlantic 101, 102, 105, Davis, David Brion 15, 88
114–19, 121–2, 124 Day,Thomas 7, 8
history of process xviii, 101, 105–10 Declaration of Independence, US
Committee for the Affairs of East (1776) 4, 6, 17, 21, 213
Indian Trade and Colonies 168 Declaration of Independence, Haitian
Committee of Public Safety 49 (1804) 98
‘communal ethos’, African 101, 105, Declaration of the Rights of Man and
111, 112–13, 114, 117, 118, 119, Citizen (1789) 22, 31, 36, 94–5
123, 124 decolonization xii, 83
Compagnie des Indes 29, 159 Démeunier, Jean Nicolas 15
comparison xxiii, xxxi, 152, 165–6, Deschamps, Léon 91
203–8 Deshpande, Prachi 151
Condorcet, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Dessalines, Jean-Jacques 97, 98
Caritat, marquis de 8, 12, 13, 16, Desvernois, Nicolas Philibert, baron 131
28 Diponegoro, Pangéran 170, 171–2,
Reflections on Negro Slavery 8 180, 187
Constant, Benjamin 214 divine-right monarchy 129
Constitutional Act (1791) 53 Doguereau, Jean-Pierre 138
Constitutional Convention (US) 9–10 Dominican Republic (Santo Domingo)
constitutionalism 60, 61 84
constitutions xii, 213–14 Douglass, Frederick 19
Continental Friends of Liberty 6 Drake, Francis 62
Cortés, Hernán 107 Drescher, Seymour 88, 89, 91, 93
Cosway, Maria 15–16 dress
Cosway, Richard 16 and French Revolution 34–5
Council of the Indies (Spanish) 66 Dubois, Laurent 28, 93, 97
Coutinho, José Joaquim da Cunha Duchet, Michèle 88
Azeredo 69 Dundas, Henry, 1st viscount Melville
Craton, Michael 89 158
creolization, French-Muslim xxvii, Dunmore, John Murray, 4th earl of 6
125–42 Durkheim, Emile 34
crisis, model of xix, xxii Dutch see Holland
292 Index
Dutch East India Company (VOC) Engelhard, Nicolaus 174
167, 168 Engels, Friedrich xxiv
Dutch West India Company 107 England see Britain
Equiano, Olaudah 16
East Asia xxvi Esteban, Javier Cuenca 155
East India Company xiii, 49, 148, 153, Étang, Antoine de l’ 49
162, 211 ‘Eurasian Revolution’ xix
American loyalists in army of 47 Europe 104, 105–10
closer supervision of under India Act domination of xvii, 144, 145–6
53
conquest and rule of Bengal Fabre d’Eglantine, Philippe François
xii–xiii, 145, 147, 149 Nazaire 29
dismantling of commercial monopoly Fatih, Sayyid Badawi ibn 136
156 Ferdinand VII, King 71, 72, 76, 77–8
extension of operations 158–9 firearms
as major pillar in London stock in private hands in China 201–2
market 154–5 First World War xxviii
reform of 157 Flügel, J. C. 34
war with Burma (1825–6) 162 Founding Fathers, American 5, 6
see also Dutch East India Company France 107, 159
East Indies 169 abolition of slavery (1794) 21, 26,
economic 92–3
and political xxiv–xxv conquest of Algeria 210
Egypt xxvi, 125–43, 211 and India 159
attitudes towards Islam by French revenues 205
officers and civilians 141–2 Franklin, Benjamin 7–10
condemnation of Islam by militant Free African Society 9
partisans 133–4 free trade imperialism 215
condemnation of Sufis by al-Jabarti French colonies 21, 23, 28–9, 36
135–7 influence of events in on French
conquest of by Napoleon 21, 125, Revolution 28–9
128, 159 and slavery 23–4
criticism of Sufi spectacles by see also Saint Domingue
Bernoyer 134–5, 137 French émigrés 37–58
Greek theology in Islamic debate amnesty given to and return to
139–40, 143 France 50
invasion of by Britain 56 in Britain 48–9, 52, 54, 55–6
Mahdist revolt against French 137–8 composition 41
Napoleon’s Islam policy 126, depiction of in historiography
128–32, 138, 141, 142 39–40
Ottoman rule 127 emigration to India 49
sharing of cynicism about Sufi geographical distribution of Third
practices between Bernoyer and Estate emigration 45
elite Egyptians 135–7, 143 measures taken against 44–5
émigrés see French émigrés French émigrés – continued
Index 293

migration of and numbers involved Friend of the People,The 20

38–9, 41, 45 Friends of Liberty 18
monitoring of activities in European Frost, Alan 158
states 48 Fujian 197, 200
pace of migration 43–4 Furet, François xxxii, 34
parallels and differences with Interpreting the French Revolution 23
American loyalists 50–7
property claims 50 Galib, Sheyh xxviii
reasons for migration 42 Garrigus, John 28
sheltering of in foreign states 47–8 Garrison,William Lloyd 12
in United States 49 Gauthier, Florence 26, 93
and women 45 Geggus, David xviii–xix, xxii, 22, 28,
French Revolution xii, xiii, xvii, xxiii, 83
20–36, 51 General Crisis xix, xxii
Burke on 25 Genovese, Eugene 95, 97
commercialization of politics 32–3 global history xiv
connections to the broader world global ‘turn’, in historical studies
20–2 33–4, 36, 209
contrast between American globalization xiv, 145, 158, 161, 164–5
Revolution and 38, 51 Godechot, Jacques xvi
and Declaration of the Rights of France and the Atlantic Revolution
Man and Citizen 22, 31, 36, 95
94–5 gold, African 107, 115
and dress 34–5 Gold Coast 108, 115, 116, 117
as experienced in Afro-Asia 126 Goldstone, Jack xxv
expulsion of non-juring priests 44, Gordon Riots (1780) 55
49, 55 Gordon,William 11
and Haitian Revolution 3, 22, ‘Great Masculine Renunciation’ 34
26–7, 28, 91–9, 100 Greek learning
and Indies Company 29 and Islam 139–40
influence of events in French Grégoire, Henri, abbé 12, 28
colonies on 28–30 Grenada 87
internalist accounts 20, 22–4, 32, 52 ‘Grito de Ipiranga’ (1822) 80
international influence of xxx, 25 Grotius, Hugo 31
migration of French émigrés see Guadeloupe 28
French émigrés Guiana 49
neglect of colonial dimension of Guizhou 189
23–4 gunpowder revolution 106
politicization of daily life 32, 33 Gusmão, Alexandre de 63
and rights of free blacks 28
rivalry with Britain as cause 24, 29 Habermas, Jürgen 215
role of global framework in Habsburgs xxvii, 107
precipitating 30 Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) xvii,
September massacres 44, 54 4, 23, 25, 26–8, 85, 86, 10
sources for the Rights of Man 31–2 Haitian Revolution – continued
294 Index
and French Revolution 3, 22, 26–7, Hyderabad, Nizam of 56, 162
28, 91–9, 100
influence on abolitionism 27, 41, Iberian empires 59–82
86, 89, 90, 91 defensive positions of 62–3
lack of impact of American demise and reasons 76–80
Revolution on 3 driving out of French 75
and United States 27 erupting of civil wars 75
Haiti xv, 22, 98–9, 212 flourishing of trade within 68
Declaration of Independence (1804) impact of Revolutionary Wars
98 68–9, 71
massacre of French colonists 98 internal discord within 75–80
US recognition 3 linking of interests of metropole with
see also Saint Domingue colonies 68–9
Hamilton, Alexander 49 militarization of politics 80
Han Chinese 189, 195 Napoleon’s campaign against and
Hanover, House of xxx response to occupation 71–5,
Harper,Tim 163 210
Hartley, David 8, 9 and property 70
Hasan al-Kafrawi, Sheikh 137 reconstruction strategies after French
Hastings,Warren 25, 53, 149, 158 occupation 76–8
Havana, Masonic plots in 87 reforms and provoking of unrest
Heber, Reginald 215 63–5
Hegel, G.W. F. xviii and slave trade 65–6
Hemings, Sally 17 sources of friction in colonies
Hidalgo Revolt (1810) 74 73–5
Hilton, Boyd 155, 157 steps taken to preserve regimes under
Hobsbawm, Eric xix, xxiv attack from Napoleon 72–3
The Age of Revolution xvii–xviii, trade reforms 63–4
144–5 and Treaty of Tordesillas 62
Ho Chi Minh 21–2 Ibrahim Bey 127–8
Holland ideology xxv
French occupation of 56 ‘imperial revolutions’
and Java War 170 age of xxii, 56
rule in Java 167, 168, 169, 170, and state formation in South Asia
172–6 144–52
war with Britain (1780–3) 168 Indemnity Bill (1825) 50
Hong Kong 159 independence 31
human rights 31–2, 38, 214 India xii, 21, 56, 144–52, 187, 213,
Hunan 189 216
Hunt, Lynn xxx, 50, 52, 212 Anglo-French conflict in southern
Husayn (grandson of Muhammad) 147
135 bankruptcy of agency houses in
Hutchinson,Thomas 43 Calcutta 162–3
hybrid legitimacy 61 British rule and expansion in 145,
Hyder Ali 159 147, 149, 150, 163–4
Index 295

India – continued and Java 170, 171–2

decline of Mughal empire 146, 147, and Napoleon’s policy in Egypt
149–50 126, 128–32, 138, 141, 142
decline in textile exports 161 and Qing empire 202
demand for imperial reform 157–8
East India Company’s conquest of al-Jabarti, ‘Abd al-Rahman 129–30,
Bengal xii–xiii, 145, 147, 149 131, 132, 134–6, 140, 141, 142
effect of colonial governance 151–2 al-Jabarti, Hasan 140
emigration of American loyalists to Jacobins 38
47 Jahangir (Mughal emperor) 202
and France 159 Jamaica 85
global repercussions of British ‘Christmas Rebellion’ (1831) 3, 91
conquest of 153 slave rebellion (1776) 3
influence on British domestic and slavery 27
political affairs 155–7 sugar and coffee production 86
invasion of by Cossacks (1801) 160 James, C. L. R. 92
and opium trade 201 The Black Jacobins 26, 28
Persian connection 164 Janissaries 127, 211
poor Britons serving in British forces Japan xxvi, xxxi, 216
in 155–6 Jasanoff, Maya xxvi, 37, 159
presence of French émigrés in 49 Jaubert, Pierre Amedée 131
role of in British trade and value of Jaurès, Jean 23, 93
to Britain 154–5 Java xxvi, 56, 167–88
India Act (1784) 53, 156 British invasion and occupation
Indian Ocean 146 (1811–16) 56, 159, 167, 169,
Indian Rebellion (1857–8) xiii, xxxii, 175, 176–80, 187
145 Chinese in 180–6
indigo 86 and Diponegoro 170, 171–2, 180,
individualism 108–9 187
Indochina 216 divisions at courts during Dutch rule
Indonesia 171, 188 173–4
independence from Dutch (1945) and Dutch East India Company
170, 172 167
see also Java Dutch occupation (1794–5) 168
Industrial Revolution xii, xvii, xxiv, Edict on Ceremonial and Etiquette
144 (1808) 182–3
infanticide Franco-Dutch regime of Daendels
China and selective 191–2 (1808–11) 167, 168, 169, 170,
Iran xvi, 211 172–6, 178, 187
Ireland 55, 210 impact of 1812 treaties on 178–9
Irish rebellion (1798) 210 and Islam 170, 171–2
Islam legal reforms under Raffles 178–9
engagement with Greek learning looting of Yogyakarta kraton by
139–40 British 177–8, 179–80
five pillars of 130–1 and opium retail trade 185–6
296 Index
Java – continued Lib Sing 184
pre-1808 history 168–9 Lind, John
tiger and buffalo fights 175–6 Three Letters to Dr Price 6
tollgates (bandar) and impact of Loango 116, 118
180–4, 185 Louis XVI, King of France xxvii, 44,
Java War (1825–30) 169–70, 171, 179, 96
180, 186 Louis XVIII (Comte de Provence) 48
Jay, John 7 Louis-Philippe, King of France 50,
Jean-François (Haitian general) 97 159
Jefferson,Thomas 2, 7 Louisiana 4, 21, 27
and Maria Cosway 15–16 Louverture,Toussaint 92, 96, 97, 98
and Haitian Revolution 27 Loyalist Associations 56
Notes on the State of Virginia 17 Loyalist Claims Commission 47, 55
and slavery 12–15, 18, 19 loyalists, American see American loyalists
João VI, Prince 75 loyalty oaths 43, 44
Jones, Absalom 9 Luanda 66, 116, 117, 118
Jones, Sir William 164
José I, King 64 Macartney, George, 1st earl Macartney
Joubin, Rebecca 138 160
Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchor de 71 Macaulay,Thomas Babington 165
MacGillivray, Mauritz 183
al-Kabir,Yusuf Bey 137 Madiou,Thomas 96
‘Kew Letters’ 168 Madison, James 14, 18, 61
Keynes, John Maynard 153–4 Mahdi 137–8, 142
Knox, Henry 49 Mahmud II, Sultan xvi
Kokandis 189, 195 Malesherbes, Chrétien Guillaume de
Koselleck, Reinhart xv Lamoignon de 8
Kuhn, Philip Malthus,Thomas xxiv
Soulstealers 216 Manchuria 194, 200
Manigat, Leslie 99
La Marche, Jean François de 54 Marat, Jean-Paul 20
La Rochefoucault-Liancourt, François- Marathas 147, 151
Alexandre-Frédéric, duc de 12, Markovits, Claude 163
49 Marshall, P. J. 52
Lafayette, Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch The Making and Unmaking of Empires
Gilbert Du Motier, marquis de 2
10–11, 12, 14–15, 16, 18, 28, 38 Martinique 95
Langley, Lester Marx, Karl 33
The Americas in the Age of Revolution al-Masiri, Sheikh 131
2 Matthews, Gelien 89
Latin America 1, 2, 25, 56, 61, 99 Mauritius 176
Law, John 29 Mayo, Joseph 11, 17
Lear,Tobias 12 Mecca xxviii
Lee, Richard Henry 7 Medina xxviii
Levant Company 153 Merapi, Mount (Java) 169
Index 297

merchant capitalists Continental Blockade 215

Iberian empires 64–5, 66, 67, 68, and Iberian campaign 71–5, 210
69, 70, 77 and India 159
merchant guilds 64 Islam policy 126, 128–31, 138, 141,
Metcalf,Thomas 159 142
Mexico 65, 73–4, 81 Napoleonic wars 59, 169
Miller, Joseph C. xviii, 101, 210 Nash, Gary B. xv, 1
Millikan, Max xvii nation-state 215
Mines, Mattison 126 National Assembly, French 92
Ming empire xxii National Convention, French 21
Minto, Gilbert Elliot, 1st earl of 177, ‘national honour’, concept of 53
187 nationalism xii, 35
Mintz, Sidney 83 New Brunswick 47
Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, newspapers 215–16
comte de 28 Ngabèhi, Pangéran 179
Miranda, Francisco de 56 Nicholls, David 98
Mississippi Bubble 29 Niello-Sargy, Jean-Gabriel de 137
Mohawk Indians 41 non-juring priests 44, 49, 50, 55
Moiret, Joseph-Marie 132, 133 North Briton,The 32
monarchical rule 105–6, 108, 109 Nova Scotia 47, 53
Monroe, James 27
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, O’Brien, Patrick 154
baron de 61 Olavide, Pablo de 62
More, Hannah 55 opium trade 160, 162, 201
Morillo, general Pablo 77 in Java 185–6
Mughal Empire xv, xxix, 146–7, 209 Opium War (1839–42) xii, 162, 189,
decline of 146, 147, 149–50 216
invasion of by Nadir Shah (1738–9) Oswald, Richard 8, 9
146 Othello (slave) 8
Munro, Sir Thomas 165 Ottoman Empire xxvii–xviii, 21, 56,
Muntinghe, Harman Warner 187 107, 127, 131–2, 146, 209
Murad Bey 127–8 Islamic law courts 132
Muslims 111, 125 see also Islam Janissary infantry 127
Mustafa, Haji xvi survival of and reasons xxviii–xxix,
Mustafa IV, Sultan xvi, xxvii 211
Mysore 21, 56, 211 Ouidah 119

Nadir Shah xiii, xvi, 146 Pacific Ocean xxiii

Naples 21 Páez, José Antonio 78
Napoleon xxi, 21, 27, 33, 50, 57, 71, Paine,Thomas xiii, xvi, 1–2, 6, 19, 38,
92 214
attempt to re-establish slavery in Common Sense 1–2
Caribbean 26, 29, 85 ‘Letters To the Citizens of the United
conquest and occupation of Egypt States’ 19
21, 125, 128, 159 Palmer, John 162–3
298 Index
Palmer, R. R. 17, 20, 23 Price, Dr Richard 5–6, 7, 8, 13
The Age of the Democratic Revolution Observations on the American Revolution
xvi–xvii, xviii, 95 5–6, 6–7
Paris,Treaty of (1783) 46 Protestantism, millenarian 202
Parthasarathi, Prasannan 161 Prussia
Paul I,Tsar 160 and French émigrés 48
pawns, slaves as 112 public sphere 216
Pax Britannica xxiv–xxv Puerto Rico 84
Peabody, Norbert 151–2 Pufendorf, Samuel 31
Pedro I, Regent of Brazil 80 Punjab 147, 159, 211, 214
Pellerin, Jean-Charles 33
Pennsylvania Abolition Society 10 Qing empire 189–208, 211, 214, 216
Pepperell, Sir William 54 absence of foreign threats and urban
Perlin, Frank 150–1, 152 uprisings 197
Persian language 164 defeat of in Opium War 189
Pétion, Alexandre 27, 98–9 foreign trade 200
Philadelphia 9 frontiers 195–6
Philippines 213 influence of foreign ideas 202
Piar, Manuel 78 Jahangir’s invasion (1826) 202
Piattoli, Scipione 16 land and tenancy 190–1
Pichegru, general Jean-Charles 168 migration 193
Pindaris 215 obstacles to industrial growth
Piquet, Jean-Daniel 93 193–4
Pitt,William, the Elder 211 and opium trade 201
Pitt the Younger,William 55, 156, 158 political and demographic
Place, Lionel 126, 141 reinforcement 191–2
Plassey, Battle of (1757) xiii proliferation of firearms in private
Pocock, J. G. A. 213 hands 201–2
Polish revolution (1794) 23 rebellions 189, 195–6, 200
political outcomes reforms 206
and economic outcomes xxiv–xxv regional differences 193
political thought 212–13 revenue-raising 203–6
Pombal, Sebastião José de Carvalho e road towards crisis 193–4
Melo, marquês de 64 rural unrest 197
Pombo, José Ignacio de 69 successes 207
Pomeranz, Kenneth xxiv, xxvi, 154, wage labourers 190
162, 189, 211, 216 and White Lotus Rebellion 189,
Popkin, Jeremy 26 195, 204, 206, 207
Portugal/Portuguese Empire 59 Quebec 47, 53
commercial system 63 Quiberon Bay, Battle of (1795) 48
internal discord 79–80
resistance to reforms 64 Raffles, Sir Thomas Stamford 167,
response to Napoleon’s campaign 169, 176, 177, 178, 185, 187
against 71 Ragatz, Lowell 86
see also Iberian empires Raimond, Julien 26, 94, 95
Index 299

Rainsford, Marcus 28 slave resistance in 93–4

Rajput kingship 151–2 slave uprising (1791) 21, 23, 26,
Ramayana xxviii 95–7
Ranjit Singh 147, 159, 211 wealth of 26
al-Rashid, Harun 139 white settler autonomism 93, 94
Ray, Rajat Kanta 163 see also Haitian Revolution
Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas-François, Saint-Just 49–50
abbé xvi, 8, 12–13, 15 St Vincent 87
Histoire des deux Indes 28 Saintoyant, Jules 92
republicanism xv, xxxii, 56 Sanger, Abner 43
Restoration, French 40 Santo Domingo 83–4
Réveillon Riot (1789) (Paris) xxvii Schama, Simon
revolution, concept and meaning of Citizens 23
xiv–xvi Schmitt, Carl 60
revolutions, European (1848) 216 Schultz, Kirsten 76
Revolutionary Wars 53, 56, 68, 169 Scottish Association of the Friends of
Richelieu, Armand-Emmanuel du the People 20
Plessis, duc de 48 Sedition Act (1798) 49
rights 214, 215 see also human rights Selim III, Sultan xxvii–xxviii, xvi, 128
Rio de Janeiro 64, 66, 71, 72, 73, Sen, Sudipta 147
76–7, 79 Senegambia 108, 116
River Plate 56, 75 September Massacres (1792) 44, 54
Robespierre, Maximilian de 49–50 Serbia xxvii
Rodrigues, Feo 125 Seven Years War (1756–63) xiii, xxx, 4,
Rome,Treaty of (2006) 213 24, 209, 216
Rostow,W.W. xvii Sharp, Granville 7, 13
Rothschild, Emma 29 al-Sharqawi, Sheikh ‘Abdullah 139,
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques xxii, 34 140, 141
Émile xiii Sheikha 134–5
Roy, Rammohan 145, 158, 213, 214 Shovlin, John 29
Rush, Benjamin 7, 9 Sierra Leone 13, 47, 53, 54, 57
Russia xxvii, xxxi, 212 Sikh movements 214
Cossack invasion of India 160 Silva Lisboa, José da 77
Russian Revolution (1917) xxxii silver 107, 201
Silverman, Kaja 35
Safavid empire 146, 209 Singapore 159
Saint-Denys, Jucherau de Siraj-ud-daula xiii
Révolutions de Constantinople xvi Skocpol,Theda 24
Saint Domingue (later Haiti) 83, 86–7 slave trade xii, 114, 212
coffee production 85 abolition of in Britain (1807) 19,
émigrés 49, 51–2 212
free coloured population 28, 94, 95, abolition of in United States (1807)
97 17
independence of 97, 98 and Iberian empires 65–6
slave population 26, 66 slave-soldiery 127
300 Index
slavery 65–6 sovereignty 59–61, 109, 213
abolition of in British colonies Spain/Spanish Empire 25, 59, 62, 107
(1833) 83, 84, 85, 91 demise and reasons 76–9
abolition of by France (1794) 21, internal discord 77–9
26, 92–3 reforms and unrest provoked by
and Africa 108, 110, 117–18, 119, 64–5
121, 124 response to Napoleon’s campaign
and American Revolution 3, 4–19 against 71–2
and Caribbean 27, 28, 83, 84–5, and Revolutionary Wars 68
88–91, 100 and slave trade 66
Cugoano’s attack on 16 trade boom 65
and Franklin 7–10 see also Iberian empires
and French colonies 23–4 Spanish America xv, xxvi, 27, 73, 75,
growth of in American South 19 81–2
and Haitian Revolution see Haitian Spanish West Indies 84, 99
Revolution Spanish-American revolutions xiii
and Jefferson 12–17, 18, 19 standard of living, divergences in
and Lafayette 10–11, 12, 18 xxiv
Napoleon’s efforts to re-establish in state 210
Caribbean 26, 29, 85 early formation of in South Asia
population 66 144–52
settlement of slaves in Sierra Leone statehood 61
plan 13, 47 Stokes, Eric 150
uprising in Saint Domingue (1791) Stone, Bailey 24
21, 23, 26, 95–7 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay xii, 150
and Washington 10, 11–12 Sufis 134
Smith, Adam 34 Suleiman the Magnificent 132
Société des Amis des Noirs 16–17, 28
Société des Colons Américains 93 Tabataba’i, Ghulam Husain Khan xiii,
Society for the Abolition of the Slave xvi, 148
Trade 53 Taiping Rebellion (1851–64) xiii,
Soninke 111–12, 116 xxxii, 202, 205, 207–8, 214–15
Sons of Liberty 42 Taiwan
Sonthonax, Léger-Félicité 96, 97 Lin Shuangwen rebellion 189, 195,
Sousa, Francisco Felix de 119 196
South Asia Talleyrand, Charles-Maurice de, prince
global connections of 161–6 de Bénévent 37–8, 49, 140
imperial repercussions 153–60 Tamerlane xiii, xv
imperial revolutions and early Taylor, Miles 157
modern state formation in Tenmei Famine (1782–7) xxvi
144–52 Thailand 211
see also India Thompson, E. P. 39, 40
South-east Asia xxvi, xxxi see also Java Thornton, Henry 54
Souza Coutinho, Rodrigo de 71, 72, Tibet 160, 189
75, 77 Tilly, Charles 61, 206
Index 301

Tipu Sultan of Mysore 21, 56, 147, Vienna,Treaty of (1815) 167

178, 211 Vietnam 21, 189
Tiradentes revolt (1789) 64 Virginia 14, 15, 85
Tocqueville, Alexis de 23–4, 33 Vodou 94
Democracy in America 24 Volney, Constantin-François 12
The Old Regime and the French Voltaire xxxii, 8
Revolution 23
Todd, James 152 Wahhabis xxviii, 211, 214
Tokugawa Ieharu xxvi War of the Spanish Succession
tollgates (bandar) 180–4, 185 (1701–14) xxii, 62
Tordesillas,Treaty of (1494) 62 warrior-kings 122
Torres, Camilo 74 Washbrook, David 145, 161, 165
Travers, Robert xvii, xxxi, 144, 214 Washington, George 7, 38
Trouillot, Michel-Rolphe 26 and slavery 10, 11–12
Túpac Amaru revolt (1780) 64 Watson, Brook 54
Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, baron de Weber, Max 34, 60
l’Aulne 8 Webster, Anthony 162
Wellesley, Henry, 1st baron Cowley
ulema (Muslim clergy) 132–3, 142 77–8
Union of Britain and Ireland (1801) Wellesley, Richard, 1st marquess
210 Wellesley 156, 178
United States West, Benjamin 55
abolition of slave trade 17 White Lotus Rebellion (1796–1805)
French émigrés in 49 189, 195, 204, 205, 206, 207, 214
and French Revolution 20 Wiencek, Henry 11, 12
and Haitian Revolution 27 Wilberforce,William 13, 54, 57–8, 212
slave population 26 Wilkes, John 32
see also American Revolution Williams, Eric 86, 88
Uruguay 78 Wilmot Committee 54
Utrecht,Treaty of (1713) 62 Wilmot, John Eardley 47, 54, 55
Wilson, Jon E. 152
van Braam, Jacob Andries 175 Windward Isles 87
van Burgst, Huibert Gerard Nahuys women
184, 186 and clothing 34
van den Bosch, Governor-general as French émigrés 45
Johannes 170 selling of in China 191
van der Capellen, Governor-general Wong, R. Bin 207
Godert 169, 183, 185 Woolman, John 7
van Hogendorp,Willem 180 World Crisis xxiii, xix, 58
van Sevenhoven, Jan Isäak 181, 182, Wythe, George 15
183, 185, 186
Vaughan, Benjamin 8, 9 Yeh-chen,Wang 205
Venezuela 84 Yogyakarta 177–8, 179–80, 187
Victoria, Queen 157 Yunnan, rebellion (1817–18) 195