In a tumultuous era of Atlantic revolutions, a remarkable group of African-born and African-descended individuals transformed themselves from slaves into active agents of their lives and times. Through prodigious archival research, Landers alters our vision of the breadth and extent of the Age of Revolution, and our understanding of its actors.

A bold new account of the Age of Revolution, one of the most complex and vast transformations in human history “A fresh and illuminating framework for understanding our past and imagining our future. Powerfully argued and engagingly written, Patrick Griffin’s timely account of revolutionary regime change and reaction shows how a world of empires became our world of nation-states.”—Peter S. Onuf, coauthor of Most Blessed of the Patriarchs “When we speak of an age of revolution, what do we mean? In this synoptic, compelling book, Patrick Griffin asks the difficult questions and invites readers to reconsider the answers.”—Eliga Gould, author of Among the Powers of the Earth The Age of Atlantic Revolution was a defining moment in western history. Our understanding of rights, of what makes the individual an individual, of how to define a citizen versus a subject, of what states should or should not do, of how labor, politics, and trade would be organized, of the relationship between the church and the state, and of our attachment to the nation all derive from this period (c. 1750–1850). Historian Patrick Griffin shows that the Age of Atlantic Revolution was rooted in how people in an interconnected world struggled through violence, liberation, and war to reimagine themselves and sovereignty. Tying together the revolutions, crises, and conflicts that undid British North America, transformed France, created Haiti, overturned Latin America, challenged Britain and Europe, vexed Ireland, and marginalized West Africa, Griffin tells a transnational tale of how empires became nations and how our world came into being.

Mutiny tore like wildfire through the wooden warships of the age of revolution. While commoners across Europe laid siege to the nobility and enslaved workers put the torch to plantation islands, out on the oceans, naval seamen by the tens of thousands turned their guns on the quarterdeck and overthrew the absolute rule of captains. By the early 1800s, anywhere between one-third and one-half of all naval seamen serving in the North Atlantic had participated in at least one mutiny, many of them in several, and some even on ships in different navies. In The Bloody Flag, historian Niklas Frykman explores in vivid prose how a decade of violent conflict onboard gave birth to a distinct form of radical politics that brought together the egalitarian culture of North Atlantic maritime communities with the revolutionary era’s constitutional republicanism. The attempt to build a radical maritime republic failed, but the red flag that flew from the masts of mutinous ships survived to become the most enduring global symbol of class struggle, economic justice, and republican liberty to this day.

Introduction: Empires at war -- Civil war in the British Empire : the American Revolution -- The war on privilege and dissension : the French Revolution -- From prize colony to black independence : the revolution in Haiti -- Multiple routes to sovereignty : the Spanish American revolutions -- The revolutions compared : causes, patterns, legacies

As the British, French and Spanish Atlantic empires were torn apart in the Age of Revolutions, Portugal steadily pursued reforms to tie its American, African and European territories more closely together. Eventually, after a period of revival and prosperity, the Luso-Brazilian world also succumbed to revolution, which ultimately resulted in Brazil's independence from Portugal. The first of its kind in the English language to examine the Portuguese Atlantic World in the period from 1750 to 1850, this book reveals that despite formal separation, the links and relationships that survived the demise of empire entwined the historical trajectories of Portugal and Brazil even more tightly than before. From constitutionalism to economic policy to the problem of slavery, Portuguese and Brazilian statesmen and political writers laboured under the long shadow of empire as they sought to begin anew and forge stable post-imperial orders on both sides of the Atlantic.

From the Sons of Liberty to British reformers, Irish patriots, French Jacobins, Haitian revolutionaries and American Democrats, the greatest social movements of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions grew as part of a common, interrelated pattern. In this new transnational history, Micah Alpaugh demonstrates the connections between the most prominent causes of the era, as they drew upon each other's models to seek unprecedented changes in government. As Friends of Freedom, activists shared ideas and strategies internationally, creating a chain of broad-based campaigns that mobilized the American Revolution, British Parliamentary Reform, Irish nationalism, movements for religious freedom, abolitionism, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and American party politics. Rather than a series of distinct national histories, Alpaugh shows how these movements jointly responded to the Atlantic trends of their era to create a new way to alter or overthrow governments: mobilizing massive social movements.

From 1750 to 1800, a critical period that saw the American Revolution, French Revolution, and Haitian Revolution, the Atlantic world experienced a series of environmental crises, including more frequent and severe hurricanes and extended drought. Drawing on historical climatology, environmental history, and Cuban and American colonial history, Sherry Johnson innovatively integrates the region's experience with extreme weather events and patterns into the history of the Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic world. By superimposing this history of natural disasters over the conventional timeline of sociopolitical and economic events in Caribbean colonial history, Johnson presents an alternative analysis in which some of the signal events of the Age of Revolution are seen as consequences of ecological crisis and of the resulting measures for disaster relief. For example, Johnson finds that the general adoption in 1778 of free trade in the Americas was catalyzed by recognition of the harsh realities of food scarcity and the needs of local colonists reeling from a series of natural disasters. Weather-induced environmental crises and slow responses from imperial authorities, Johnson argues, played an inextricable and, until now, largely unacknowledged role in the rise of revolutionary sentiments in the eighteenth-century Caribbean.