Reinterpreting The French Revolution A Global Historical Perspective

Stone draws on the latest scholarship on diplomatic, political, social, economic, and cultural history of eighteenth-century and revolutionary France to attribute the outbreak of the French Revolution and later developments to pressures of international and domestic politics on those national leaders attempting to govern France and to modernize its institutions.

This book provides a synthesis of the most recent scholarly literature on the diplomatic, political, social, economic, and cultural history of eighteenth-century and revolutionary France. On the basis of that synthesis, and current theoretical writing on major modern revolutions, the book argues that the outbreak of the French Revolution, and the dramatic developments of the subsequent ten years, were attributable to the interacting pressures of international and domestic politics on those national leaders attempting to govern France and to modernize its institutions. The book furthermore contends that the Revolution of 1789–1799, reconceptualized in this fashion, needs to be placed in the larger contexts of 'early modern' and 'modern' French history and modern 'progressive' sociopolitical revolutions. In staking out these positions, the book offers a unique interpretation of the French Revolution, one that dissents from both the Marxian socioeconomic orthodoxy of earlier times and more recent 'political-cultural' analyses.

This book offers a unique synthesis of the long- and short-term causes of the French Revolution. Instead of focusing exclusively on developments within France, it places the country, and its revolution, within an international setting from the start. This book argues that the French Revolution stemmed from the pre-revolutionary state's converging failures in international and domestic affairs. The monarchy failed not only to remain in touch with changing social, intellectual, and political realities at home, but also to harness its citizens' ambitions and talents to the purpose of maintaining the country's international power and prestige. This analysis also provides a key to comprehending the course of events in revolutionary and post-revolutionary France--and an insight into why revolutionary movements broke out in the former USSR and its surrounding countries.

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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 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, Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne; Miranda Spieler, University of Arizona; Charles Walton, Yale University

The Routledge Companion to the French Revolution in World History engages with some of the most recent trends in French revolutionary scholarship by considering the Revolution in its global context. Across seventeen chapters an international team of contributors examine the impact of the Revolution not only on its European neighbours but on Latin America, North America and Africa, assess how far events there impacted on the Revolution in France, and suggest something of the Revolution’s enduring legacy in the modern world. The Companion views the French Revolution through a deliberately wide lens. The first section deals with its global repercussions from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean and includes a discussion of major insurrections such as those in Haiti and Venezuela. Three chapters then dissect the often complex and entangled relations with other revolutionary movements, in seventeenth-century Britain, the American colonies and Meiji Japan. The focus then switches to international involvement in the events of 1789 and the circulation of ideas, people, goods and capital. In a final section contributors throw light on how the Revolution was and is still remembered across the globe, with chapters on Russia, China and Australasia. An introduction by the editors places the Revolution in its political, historical and historiographical context. The Routledge Companion to the French Revolution in World History is a timely and important contribution to scholarship of the French Revolution.

A distinguished international team of historians examines the dynamics of global and regional change in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Providing uniquely broad coverage, encompassing North and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and China, the chapters shed new light on this pivotal period of world history. Offering fresh perspectives on: - The American, French, and Haitian Revolutions - The break-up of the Iberian empires - The Napoleonic Wars The volume also presents ground-breaking treatments of world history from an African perspective, of South Asia's age of revolutions, and of stability and instability in China. The first truly global account of the causes and consequences of the transformative 'Age of Revolutions', this collection presents a strikingly novel and comprehensive view of the revolutionary era as well as rich examples of global history in practice.