The Atlantic world was a revolutionary world during the late 18th and early 19th centuries with revolutions in British America, Haiti, France, Spanish America, the Swiss Confederations, Belgium, and the Netherlands, These revolutions did much to create the modern world.
In The Age of Revolutions and the Generations That Made It (2024), historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal offers a new interpretation by presenting the period as a generational story. He argues that the first revolutionary generation, from 1750 to 1800 and motivated by the radical ideas of the Enlightenment, challenged the inequalities in European the American societies and sought to overthrow the old order. The first-generation actors had been reared in the hierarchical and fixed society of the old order, and they struggled to create form stable political movements across racial and social barriers. The results, by 1800, remained fragile. It took a second generation of revolutionaries, those who came of age after 1880, to create the mass political movements necessary to sustain revolutionary ideas.
In developing his generational approach, Perl-Rosenthal highlights the trajectories of specific actors, ranging from the well-known to the unknown, in their interactions with each other as they sought to change history. Perl-Rosenthal's interpretation offers us new insights in how we understand revolutions in general and The Age of Revolutions in particular.
This proposal is being submitted jointly by Alice Lewis and Sam Pryor and we will coordinate it if accepted.
The Age of Revolutions and the Generations That Made It, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, 2024