The French Revolution in Global Perspective

Situating the French Revolution in the context of early modern globalization for the first time, this book offers a new approach to understanding its international origins and worldwide effects. A distinguished group of contributors shows that the political culture of the Revolution emerged out of a long history of global commerce, imperial competition, and the movement of people and ideas in places as far flung as India, Egypt, Guiana, and the Caribbean. This international approach helps to explain how the Revolution fused immense idealism with territorial ambition and combined the drive for human rights with various forms of exclusion. The essays examine topics including the role of smuggling and free trade in the origins of the French Revolution, the entwined nature of feminism and abolitionism, and the influence of the French revolutionary wars on the shape of American empire. The French Revolution in Global Perspective illuminates the dense connections among the cultural, social, and economic aspects of the French Revolution, revealing how new political forms-at once democratic and imperial, anticolonial and centralizing-were generated in and through continual transnational exchanges and dialogues. Contributors: Rafe Blaufarb, Florida State University; Ian Coller, La Trobe University; Denise Z. Davidson, Georgia State University; Suzanne Desan, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Lynn Hunt, University of California, Los Angeles; Andrew Jainchill, Queen's University; Michael Kwass, The Johns Hopkins University; William Max Nelson, University of Toronto; Pierre Serna, Universite Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne; Miranda Spieler, University of Arizona; Charles Walton, Yale University

Table of Contents:
Introduction by Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt, and William Max Nelson Part I. Origins 1. The Global Underground: Smuggling, Rebellion, and the Origins of the French Revolution by Michael Kwass 2. The Global Financial Origins of 1789 by Lynn Hunt 3. The Fall from Eden: The Free-Trade Origins of the French Revolution by Charles Walton 4. 1685 and the French Revolution by Andrew Jainchill Part II. "Internal" Dynamics 5. Colonizing France: Revolutionary Regeneration and the First French Empire by William Max Nelson 6 Foreigners, Cosmopolitanism, and French Revolutionary Universalism by Suzanne Desan 7. Feminism and Abolitionism: Transatlantic Trajectories by Denise Z. Davidson Part III. Consequences 8. Egypt in the French Revolution by Ian Coller 9. Abolition and Reenslavement in the Caribbean: The Revolution in French Guiana by Miranda Spieler 10 The French Revolutionary Wars and the Making of American Empire, 1783-1796 by Rafe Blaufarb Coda 11. Every Revolution Is a War of Independence by Pierre Serna, translated by Alexis Pernsteiner Notes List of Contributors Index

About the Author :
Suzanne Desan is Vilas-Shinners Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France, also from Cornell, and The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France. Lynn Hunt is the Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of several books, including Measuring Time, Making History and Inventing Human Rights. William Max Nelson is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Toronto and the author of a book manuscript and essays that focus on eighteenth-century intellectual history in France and the Atlantic world.

Review :
"The eleven contributions are clustered under the traditional headings of the origins, "internal" dynamics and consequences of the Revolution. Their analyses are far from traditional, however, consistently teasing out transnational connections and contrasts, and it is unusual to have a collection of such uniformly high quality which has such tightly linked concerns. The chapters are all closely documented, and the notes will be a treasure-trove for researchers as much as the text will engage students and teachers alike."-Peter McPhee,H-France Review(2013) "The French Revolution in Global Perspective is a timely, compelling, and lively book. This work will be of great interest to experts in the field, and the lively and lucid way in which it is written makes it suitable for adoption in courses on the French Revolution at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and for courses on European history, world history, and the history of globalization. I suspect that many in our field have been waiting for the appearance of a volume like this, which connects global themes to the dynamics of the French Revolution in a coherent and compelling way."-John Shovlin, New York University, author of The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution