(A Critical Analysis of Two Recent Books in American Historiography)*

by Roberto Breña

To my dear friend Eric Van Young, for his warmth and his modesty.

ABSTRACT: This bibliographic essay critically reviews two recent books on the Atlantic Revolutions and the Age of Revolutions: The Age of Atlantic Revolution by Patrick Griffin (2023) and The Age of Revolutions by Nathan Perl-Rosenthal (2024). The essay argues that these works are indicative of present trends in American academia regarding the study of this crucial period of Western history. Discussing numerous historiographic issues through a detailed analysis of both books, the essay seeks to encourage a debate on how this era is examined and interpreted in the English-speaking world. In the last of the four sections in which the essay is divided, special emphasis is placed on the effects of the academic predominance of the English language in contemporary academia, as its implications for understanding the Age of Revolutions are intellectually significant, yet often overlooked.

I. By way of introduction

In 2023, Patrick Griffin published The Age of Atlantic Revolution. The following year saw the publication of Nathan Perl-Rosenthal’s The Age of Revolutions. Considering and analyzing these books together provides what I consider to be a useful way to delve into certain aspects of how certain sectors of contemporary American historiography addresses the quintessential revolutionary period in Western history: the “Age of Revolutions”. Although this review only covers two books, both texts share trends visible today in English-speaking academia that studies the age in question.[1] It is important to add that the present historiographic exercise and the critical perspective adopted here aim to foster an academic debate on the Atlantic Revolutions and, more generally, on the Age of Revolutions.

There are minor differences regarding the chronology of the Age of Revolutions among contemporary historians. This was not the case several decades ago, especially if we go as far back as The Age of the Democratic Revolution, 1760-1800 by Robert R. Palmer, the first volume of which was published in 1959.[2] As will become evident in the next paragraph, 1800 is a very early date to put an end to the Age of Revolutions. In any case, if, as is commonly argued, political modernity was its most important legacy, I think it is difficult not to begin with the “Glorious Revolution,” which took place in England in 1688 and 1689. However, it is much more common to start at a later date. For Griffin, everything begins in New York City in July 1776, with colonists expressing their disillusionment regarding the policies of the British crown by pulling down an equestrian statue of King George III. As for the end of this era, in various parts of his book, particularly in the epilogue, Griffin suggests the Age of Revolutions has not yet ended, that is, it continues even today. This interpretive proposal, as will be discussed in section II, appears problematic for various reasons. In the case of Perl-Rosenthal, his chronology is much more conventional; for him, the age under study began in 1765 and concluded in 1825.

The revolutions of 1848 are often considered a good endpoint for the Age of Revolutions.[3] In fact, many historians use that year as the closing date, and, if more historians do not do the same, it may be because, for the most part, the historiography of those revolutions in recent decades considers that almost all the revolutionary movements which began in 1848 ended in varying degrees of failure.[4] I will not delve here into the problem of using the notion of “failure” in historiography, nor will I designate a specific date as the start or the end of the Age of Revolutions. Not only because, very often, chronological issues do not enable us to understand a historical process (or set of processes), but also because the chosen dates are always closely tied to the assumptions and objectives that each historian establishes in each book or article. In any case, even limiting ourselves to the Atlantic Revolutions, the number of processes is so large (around twenty) that any attempt to encompass and explain all of them under a single, overarching and supposedly omni-explicative hypothesis seems to me a Sisyphean endeavor. Among other reasons, because, from my perspective, if enough attention is paid to the diversity of socio-political movements under study, what we might call “outliers” will tend to proliferate. However, as we will see in the next two sections, both Griffin’s and Perl-Rosenthal’s books adhere unconditionally to hypotheses of this kind.[5]

We will begin with The Age of Atlantic Revolution in section II. In the third one, we will address The Age of Revolutions. Finally, in the fourth and final section, I will put forward relevant methodological aspects discussed in the rest of the essay; this will lead to a couple of general observations on the study of history in general and the Age of Revolutions in particular that I consider very important. At the end of this double review, I will briefly mention a linguistic issue that, in my view, has deep implications for the way the Atlantic Revolutions and the Age of Revolutions are currently studied.[6] This academic issue, which has very significant consequences for the study of Latin American history in contemporary Western academia, can be described as “the (absolute) hegemony of the English language.”[7]

In short, this essay aims to highlight some aspects of how the Age of Revolutions is studied at present in American academia, with the ultimate goal of promoting what I consider to be a necessary historiographic debate. Some of the topics that merit discussion are the following: general hypotheses to explain an extended, varied, and very complex historical period; the causal connections often established among the various Atlantic Revolutions; the notable differences among some of the most important revolutionary processes that make up the Age of Revolutions; the notion of “influence” as it is often accepted, used or presupposed by Atlantic and Global history; the decisive weight these two historiographies place on parallels, similarities, and continuities among revolutionary processes; the way Spanish-America is frequently framed within a purported single “Atlantic revolutionary cycle”;[8]  the inclination to increasingly include more processes from more parts of the world within the “Age of Revolutions”; the tendency to emphasize the social revolutionary nature of processes that, in core aspects, were not socially revolutionary;[9] the trend to empty liberalism of its “historicity” (which involves not only viewing it from a twenty-first century perspective, but also attributing to it a consistency that it simply could not have possessed during the half-century that goes from 1775 to 1825); the view of American independence and the French Revolution as models that all the other revolutionary movements of the era replicated or imitated in one way or another; and, the asynchronism of the diverse paces or rhythms of the various modernities that emerged or were envisioned during the revolutionary era.[10]

Griffin’s book has various merits, no doubt, including its interpretive ambition, the number of sources reviewed, and the notable effort of synthesis made by the author. His approach is also compelling in the way it combines two fundamental topics of the period —imperial crises and slavery— from multiple angles. Regarding the first topic, it is worth noting that the author does not dismiss the Spanish empire of the late eighteenth century as an unmitigated example of decadence, as it was relatively common until fairly recently.[11] In fact, in chapter 2 of his book, he acknowledges that its power had not declined dramatically, thanks to the Bourbon reforms and that, therefore, Spain was still a power on the world stage in the second half of the eighteenth century.[12] Additionally, Griffin includes Brazil in his book and, thus, the Portuguese monarchy’s trajectory during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.[13] Lastly, in general, the author tries not to present his interpretations as the final word on the numerous subjects he addresses, instead leaving room for readers to explore by themselves. At times, he takes this a bit too far (like when he presents the revolutionary era as a never-ending process), but in general I think this is a commendable attitude by the author of The Age of Atlantic Revolution.

The purpose of the next section is to delve critically into some aspects of Griffin’s book that, from my perspective, tend to simplify the Age of Revolutions and even to obscure some of its aspects, to some extent at least. In the end, part of the immense complexity that characterizes this era of Western history gets lost on the way. The complexity in question is inherent to the topic itself: a densely interwoven but also dissimilar series of political, social, military, diplomatic, and economic movements spanning over a considerably extended period and with a very broad geographical range, even if we limit the analysis to the Atlantic context. Consequently, numerous and very diverse societies were involved. In my view, the same critical notions expressed in this paragraph apply to Perl-Rosenthal’s book.

Disagreements with both authors relate to certain historiographic choices, particularly with hypotheses that seem overly ambitious in terms of the number and variety of cases and issues they attempt to explain. As will become clear by the end of this essay, calling them “all-encompassing” is no exaggeration. In each of the two books reviewed, these hypotheses aim to make intelligible the entire Age of Revolutions. Before proceeding, it is important to insist on a point already made: I think that this period should be viewed not solely or primarily through the lens of resemblances, affinities, and analogies, like Atlantic and Global historiographies tend to do. Instead, even if it is more labor-intensive regarding the amount and diversity of readings and even if it inevitably complicates any overarching hypothesis, attention should also be given to certain characteristic features of, at least, some of the major revolutionary movements that are part of the Age of Revolutions.

In the case of Griffin’s The Age of Atlantic Revolution, I think the analytical and hermeneutic weight he gives to the concept of connection is excessive; more specifically, to political, social, economic, and cultural connections. In this regard, the author is firmly supported by Atlantic and Global historiographies, which have been highly influential during the last decades, and which have elevated the notion of “connection” into a postulate that, as such, is not questioned in any meaningful way. In this regard and before closing this introductory section, it should be very clear that this essay does not pretend to deny that “connection” or “connections” were very important during the Age of Revolutions. This is evident in many instances and in several domains. My point here is to nuance the nature, intensity, frequency, ubiquity, and implications of the connections which are all too often assumed and accepted by many historians that belong to one or both of the historiographies just mentioned.

It is also worth mentioning that, in the introduction of his book, Griffin himself notes that two other historiographic trends currently in vogue, what the French call histoire croisée and histoire connectée, may have overused notions like “entanglement” and “connection” (p. 7). However, this cognizance, which the author himself makes explicit, does not prevent him from pushing both notions to their limits in the first two chapters of the book to which we now turn our attention.

II. The Age of Atlantic Revolution in a hyper-connected world 

Griffin’s central thesis in The Age of Atlantic Revolution is most clearly reflected in the second part of the book’s subtitle: The Fall and Rise of a Connected World. I could not discern to which fall and to which rise the author is referring. Regarding the level of connection, I have already mentioned my doubts regarding the intensity of the connection that contemporary historiography on the Age of Revolutions tends to assume when studying the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The slowness of communication during almost the whole Age (both naval and, even more so, on land), the very small number of people who could travel or did in fact travel, the dangers and vagaries of transatlantic shipping, the language barriers that hindered what could be considered a profound communication, and finally, the fact that technical advancements from the Roman era until the introduction of the intercity railway in 1830 affected the speed of communication far less than what is often assumed (on land, but also maritime) are some of the aspects that, I think, should lead to some caution before proposing an intense, permanent, and ubiquitous connection throughout the Atlantic world, as Griffin assumes from the very first page of his book.

It is worth repeating that I am not questioning the existence of these connections, but rather their magnitude and the repercussions that are very often attributed to the connectivity in question. Nor do I dispute the intense communication in certain areas of the Atlantic world, primarily, the Caribbean. What I question in this section is the alleged hyper-communication that supposedly characterized every single corner of the Atlantic world (and even adjacent areas) and, as already mentioned, the purported varied and very profound implications assumed by many proponents of Global history, Atlantic history, entangled history, and, of course, connected history.

It is useful to begin this critical analysis by noting that, for Griffin, the Atlantic Revolutions are essentially a single revolution. The title of his book is in the singular. In his words, there was a “revolutionary wave” that swept through the Western world between 1775 and 1825: “The age of revolution transformed all. After the New Yorkers tore down the statue, the spirit of liberty, almost like a current of electricity, would course across America. It would then travel to France, throughout the Continent and the Caribbean, back to the British Isles, and eventually find its way to Latin America and Africa.”[14]

As for the magnitude of this electric current, Griffin has no doubts: “Across the Atlantic, from the 1760s to the 1820s, nothing and nobody would be untouched.” (p. 5, my italics). Regarding the level of interconnection, the author is equally assertive: “What happened in one place, then, informed what would occur elsewhere. Pulling the thread in a seemingly isolated corner of a network could have dramatic implications for people and places an ocean away” (p. 8). In fact, the Atlantic is a unit that only makes sense as such: “The whole only makes sense when we pull together what are usually seen as discrete dynamics with those occurring far away, and when we observe how they relate to one another” (p. 9). In the world Griffin presents in the introduction of his book, everything, absolutely everything, is connected, and strongly so. Not only that, but the intelligibility of the whole Age of Revolutions depends entirely on that level of interconnection. For him, this level is so deep, continuous, and omnipresent that I decided to use the term “hyper-connection” in the title of this section.

For Griffin, a figure as exceptional in the nature and amount of his Atlantic involuntary and voluntary displacements, movements, and travels as Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797), whom we will revisit at the end of this essay, “demonstrates the way Atlantic ties now bound people and connected far-flung regions” (p. 22, my italics).[15] A few pages ahead, in line with something expressed in the introduction of his book, the author acknowledges that the term “entanglement” is an “all too trendy” concept (p. 25). Yet, the first two chapters of his book (titled “A Tangled World” and “Disentangling the Atlantic”) are filled with the noun “entanglement” and its variants.[16] These two chapters contain assertions that might be considered historiographic exaggerations of varying degrees, such as the following: discussions about Atlantic print culture (with Benjamin Franklin as the “epitome”) that seem to imply that the entire Atlantic world understood the English language in the third quarter of the eighteenth century (p. 31); the Atlantic traveler moving seamlessly between different parts of the Atlantic world (“shape-shifter” in Griffin’s words) as if it was “the norm” in the second half of the eighteenth century (p. 36); the suggestion of a medium-term causal link between the independence of the Thirteen Colonies and the Latin American independence movements that seems to me unprovable (p. 81); and finally, a statement that implies, as far as I can see, a historical logic and a historical inevitability that cannot pass unnoticed by any cautious historian: “The Atlantic world was so imbricated that it was folly to believe that one crisis over sovereignty that had turned into a revolution would remain isolated. The logic of the system would not allow it” (p. 81, my italics)

Leaving aside the use of the term “folly” in this context, one might ask, what “logic” and what “system” are we talking about here unless we have uncritically accepted all the author’s working hypotheses stated in his introduction. History is less logical, less systematic, and less predictable than what Griffin suggests here and in several other passages of his book. For example, according to the author, French revolutionaries saw eventualities “much as Americans had twenty years earlier,” and then he adds: “They [the French revolutionaries] created patterns of events to make sense of any new event, and soon such patterning took on inexorable shape. They interpreted any new eventuality through the lens of the pattern, and soon all became almost trapped in a logic of events.” (p. 98). Concerning the level of entanglement assumed by the author in the whole Atlantic world, I think some nuances are in order. To give a single example that may be useful to transmit this historiographic prudence, I mention a couple of historic processes that not only took place in the same continent, but also in the same geographical region, North America: between the beginning of the war of independence of the Thirteen Colonies and the achievement of independence of the Viceroyalty of New Spain (Mexico), the Spanish-American region that was in practical terms its border to the south, nearly half a century passed by. In my view, if connection and connections were as intense and direct as the author affirms throughout his book, this chronologic distance between two neighboring territories should lead us to the kind of historiographic wariness I have recommended more than once in this essay.

In Chapter 3, Griffin delves into the French Revolution, not without first suggesting that Thomas Jefferson “personifies” the Age of Revolution (p. 82). In this regard, one might wonder: why not Georges Danton, Toussaint Louverture or Simón Bolívar?[17] The author’s answer is that Jefferson “epitomizes” the scale of the connections that, according to him, defined the world and era in which the primary drafter of the United States Declaration of Independence lived. For Griffin, giving meaning to the Age of Revolution essentially revolves around “making connections” (p. 83). At the beginning of his analysis of the French Revolution, he suggests that precisely because of the deep connectivity of the time, the French Revolution, like that of the Thirteen Colonies, had its origins in the existing entanglements. This may hold some truth, but once again, the American experience appears as the origin, the model, and the example to follow. Griffin puts it this way: “America seemed to set off a chain reaction in the 1780s and encouraged men and women to imagine what ‘revolution’ meant. As Thomas Paine had said in 1776, in an almost prophetic way, ‘the cause of America is the cause of mankind’”. (p. 86)

For Griffin, there are no provisos or precautions when it comes to connectivity. For example, what does it mean that in the 1780s, “South America was bound to North America by all sorts of ties” (p. 90). At this point, the author seems to realize he may be exaggerating, for he notes that establishing connections is a complex issue and adds that revolutions do “not start solely with ideas” but, instead, stem “from deep-seated grievances, structural imbalances and injustices, politicization, and government action or inaction” (p. 91). In my view, this is a crucial statement in historiographic terms.[18]

Regarding the place and entity Griffin sometimes gives to ideas in his book, it seems to me that his approaches in this regard are more aligned with the old history of ideas than with the intellectual history of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In other words, sometimes his arguments tend to follow approaches similar to those employed by authors like Isaiah Berlin, who started publishing at the end of the 1930s, regarding the enormous transformative power of ideas vis-à-vis political movements and political practices. For Berlin, “philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor’s study could destroy a civilization”. Another example from Berlin’s work is his contention that the doctrines of the French conservative thinker Louis de Bonald (1754-1840) “duly inspired nationalism, imperialism, and finally, in their most violent and pathological form, Fascist and totalitarian doctrines in the twentieth century”.[19] Assertions of this kind may be viewed as instances of an intellectual temerity that is difficult to find in contemporary intellectual history, which pays much more attention to contexts when explaining a certain idea, a certain author or a certain political movement. In this regard, the names of Reinhart Koselleck and Quentin Skinner —the two most prominent representatives of conceptual history and the history of political languages, respectively— come to mind.[20] In any case, I think that several passages of The Age of Atlantic Revolution tend to share a very common tendency or belief among thinkers, academics, and intellectuals, from past and present: to exaggerate the weight and influence of ideas, authors, and books on historical events.

I think that the particularities of each historical process are essential (among them, notably: “grievances,” “imbalances,” “structural injustices,” “politicization,” and “government action or inaction”) if we are to avoid overlooking important aspects of each revolutionary movement in favor of the broad generalizations that Atlantic and Global historians are so fond of. Any attentive reader would note that the author first establishes a very close connection between the independence of the United States and the French Revolution, but as he delves into the latter, he acknowledges that with time, “the French would lose interest in America” or asserts, as soon as he begins to study the French case, that comparisons between the British and French revolutions “break down, at least in part” (p. 96).[21]

Later, when discussing the Haitian Revolution, Griffin argues this revolutionary movement influenced the Caribbean, Spanish-America, and “eventually, those who led slave uprisings in the United States” (pp. 128-129). Regarding this topic, it is worth remembering that while it is true that several slave rebellions took place across the Americas during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, slavery remained intact for many decades after the Haitian Revolution concluded (1804) in the three regions mentioned by the author. In fact, the slave trade grew exponentially in the southern United States, Cuba, and Brazil. Not even in neighboring Jamaica did anything took place that remotely resembles what happened in Saint-Domingue. As Paul Friedland has noted, recent historiography has overemphasized the influence of the Haitian Revolution, even within the Caribbean.[22] However, Griffin goes even further in this regard, claiming that the accounts of Saint-Domingue “elicited the same range of responses as events in France had” (p. 129). This is another assertion that could be nuanced, especially when one considers the scale of the French Revolution’s reverberations across the Atlantic world. The distance between the impact of these two revolutions in the Western world and regarding the responses they elicited is, as far as I can see, substantial.

A similar observation can be made about Griffin’s claim that the Irish Rebellion of 1798, which was a complete failure in terms of its objectives, could be “paralleled” to what occurred in Saint-Domingue (p. 129). This is questionable, if only because the Haitian Revolution was, in a “civilizational” sense, the most significant of the Atlantic Revolutions, for it succeeded, albeit within a limited geographic space, in abolishing slavery, one of humanity’s most long-standing scourges. The Irish rebellion, which Griffin refers to in his book as a “revolution”, is considered by him a very important political movement, comparable in several respects to the American, French, Haitian, and Spanish-American revolutions. One could argue that, even with a scarce familiarity with this rebellion, Griffin’s emphasis may seem somewhat misplaced. In fact, the author himself ultimately considers that the Irish case “proved another telling casualty of the Atlantic revolutionary moment” (p. 159) and acknowledges that “Ireland remained an underdeveloped hinterland of Britain and the Atlantic” (p. 200).

It should be added that the main political outcome of that rebellion was the loss of the Irish parliament, which was moved to Westminster —no small matter.[23] That said, it is important to clarify that a given historical process does not have to be politically successful to be historically “significant”. The historiographic issue lies elsewhere: in attempting to grant a level of historical relevance to a process that, at the time it took place, lacked the magnitude and, in the immediate future, the consequences suggested. Historians, by themselves, cannot bestow this magnitude and these consequences.

Several passages in The Age of Atlantic Revolution would catch the attention of any reader familiar with this period of Western history. One example, involving a historical figure of the stature of Napoleon I, cannot be overlooked. Griffin asserts that, like the Constitution of the United States of 1783, Bonaparte also instituted “a new constitution of a sort,” in reference to the Napoleonic Civil Code. The comparison seems out of place, but even more so are the assertions that follow: Napoleon I faced “the same sorts of crisis” that George Washington and Jefferson did; Napoleon’s political genius is the same as that of the Founding Fathers; and, additionally, Napoleon I and Jefferson were successful “by using almost exactly the same means.” In closing this subject, Griffin contends that Napoleon I combined the ideas of people, nation, and state into a successful arrangement after a period of “uncertain sovereignty,” and then he adds, “Americans like Jefferson had done exactly the same thing.” (p. 193)

For those readers relatively well-acquainted with Bonaparte’s political ascent and with the European context of the era, statements like these are problematic, to say the least, as the differences between the French emperor’s political, social, economic, and diplomatic context and the one faced by the landowning elite which led the independence movement of the Thirteen Colonies are plenty and are significant. In this regard, David Hackett Fischer’s remark on historical analogies comes to mind: “Any intelligent use of analogy must begin with a sense of its limits.”[24] If this holds true for any historical analogy, caution should be even greater regarding the series of historical equivalences that Griffin practically establishes between the Founding Fathers and Bonaparte, for they faced markedly different situations, social structures, political contexts, and international frameworks.[25]

Regarding Spanish-America (or “Latin America,” as Griffin refers to it throughout the book), he includes it among the areas that were “relatively untouched” by the French Revolution (leaving the reader wondering: where did the profound Atlantic connection go?) (p. 110). He immediately adds: “Ideas alone could not ignite revolution here.” (p. 110). Ideas, by themselves, cannot ignite a revolution in Spanish-America or anywhere else. A bit ahead, Griffin argues Spanish-America can be considered “an exception that proved the rule of the complex connections between the universal, the local, the tangles of the Atlantic, and the role of the state” (p. 140). Setting aside the fact that exceptions do not prove any rule, it is noteworthy that even when a region does not respond to the author’s central hypothesis, according to him, it ends up confirming it after all.[26]

Later in the book, Griffin describes Latin America independence movements as a revolutionary process that can be considered an ideal case study for appreciating “nonendings” (p. 201). This claim seems to have its origin in the fact that social violence persisted in the region after independence was achieved (see p. 203). This is true in general terms, but that does not mean that the different Latin American independence processes did not have an end or a conclusion, like in the case of all the other Atlantic Revolutions. Each of the several processes that constitute the Spanish-American revolutionary era had a clear endpoint, occurring in the second and, mostly, the third decade of the nineteenth century.

Beyond the interpretive difference just noted, doubts about the author’s level of understanding of Spanish-American independence movements stem from several passages and, notably, from his discussion of what happened in New Spain —the most important American territory of the Spanish empire in several respects. I will address a few of his claims about this viceroyalty minutely, responding to some of the assertions he makes in pages 205 and 206: social violence did arise in 1810, the Creole elites did not try to co-opt peasant movements, Mexico did not become independent in 1814 but in 1821, centrifugal forces did not prevail over centripetal ones when Mexico achieved independence in that final year and, finally, not all of Central America separated from Mexico in 1821. In fact, initially, nearly all of it joined the Mexican Empire.[27]

Regarding Spanish-America, it is worth mentioning that, unlike Griffin, some present-day specialists in the Age of Revolutions consider or suggest the Spanish-American revolutions of the first decades of the nineteenth century do not belong to it. This constitutes a historiographic perspective that is surprising, to say the least, in this third decade of the twenty-first century.[28] Griffin refers in his book to “those who cut out Latin America” from the age in question (p. 271), but he includes the Spanish-American revolutionary movements in it. An inclusion that is the clearest and most explicit way of making them an integral part of the Atlantic Revolutions and of the Age of Revolution in general.

In note 23, I made reference to the peculiar and interesting seventh chapter of Griffin’s book, which is dedicated to memorials built in various countries in America, Europe, and Africa to commemorate different revolutionary movements within the Age of Revolutions. The previous chapter, Chapter 6, addresses an issue that is perplexing (at least to me): for Griffin, the Age of Revolution is not over yet. This discussion leads him to statements like the following: “Perhaps the age of revolution did not end at all,” or “perhaps Haiti’s revolution continues as well.” (p. 276). These are assertions that may sound appealing to some, but, from my perspective, lack historiographic content. In this regard, it is no coincidence that I have never read in any book or heard in any academic debate that the world of the twenty-first century remains immersed in the Age of Revolutions.[29]

The final pages of The Age of Atlantic Revolution move between political correctness and historiographic naivety. The author returns to Olaudah Equiano, a significant figure in the Age of Revolutions for what his life reveals about slavery. However, despite the notable international reach of Equiano’s 1789 autobiography, Griffin’s decision to give him such a prominent place in his book and in the Age of Revolution seems somewhat exaggerated.[30] It is unclear how Equiano’s autobiography can be equated with Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels or Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (as Griffin asserts in p. 15); nor is it clear what he means by claiming that the Atlantic “now belongs to him [Equiano]” or by writing that “most scholars think we need Equiano” (pp. 269-270, my italics). Of what majority are we talking about here? Of scholars from what country? Is the verb “need” an appropriate one in this context? Finally, to almost conclude a book on the Age of Revolutions by asserting that it is challenging “to find a plinth that can belong to him [Equiano]” embodies the type of statements —well-meant, affected, and politically correct— that professional historians would do well to avoid.

Griffin concludes his book by asserting something he had already mentioned on more than one occasion in his book: the “Age of Revolution” is still with us —an assertion that simply does not hold. Some questions naturally arise in this respect: Where are the current revolutions? Where are the revolutionaries of the twenty-first century? Where is the “revolutionary wave” that the author posits at the beginning of his book? According to Griffin, the age in question survived the era of industrialization, two world wars, and the Cold War. That is, if I understand correctly, we are still living under its aegis. The book’s next-to-last two sentences is a wager without much historiographic sense. The very last one is a logical continuation of the idea of an unfinished revolution and, simultaneously, a forceful accentuation of the hyper-connectivity that runs through The Age of Atlantic Revolution: “It is a good bet the Age will survive our day, too. It still ties us together.” (p. 283, my italics)

As for the revolutionary links that supposedly still unite “us” today, I wonder who is included in the pronoun the author employs. In this twilight of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, no matter where readers turn their gaze around the world, in many important political and social aspects, differences and particularities weigh as heavily as those connections and entanglements that, according to the author of The Age of Atlantic Revolution, supposedly defined each and every one of the revolutionary movements that took place during the age in question and that, also according to him, continue to define the world nearly two and a half centuries after the inhabitants of New York City decided to bring down the statue of King George III.

III. The Age of Revolutions explained through generations and mobilizations

The subtitle of The Age of Revolutions by Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is And the Generations Who Made It.  We will come back shortly to this central issue of two distinct revolutionary generations and the place they occupy in this book. Meanwhile, it is important to mention that it also revolves around the lives of seven individuals who experienced the Age of Revolutions in various parts of the Atlantic world; four of them were men, and three were women. Five are relatively unknown figures, whom the author, in a certain way, brings out from historiographic obscurity. In his words, the social diversity of these seven lives makes them “good entry points” to different areas of the revolutionary world of that era, a world “inhabited by people of different races, ethnicities, sexes, and homelands” (p. 12).

The usefulness and interest of a biographical approach in a book about the Age of Revolutions partially derives from the fact that all the individuals chosen by the author participated in one way or another in the political life of their respective societies. The author’s decision is a sound and attractive one, for it enriches the portrait of the quintessential revolutionary era in the history of the Western world with biographies that give a personal and vivid flavor that otherwise would be absent. Of course, as with any other historiographic decision, this one also carries with it some disadvantages. In any case, the archival work required to achieve the biographical portrayals that occupy an important place in the book is one of the most attractive aspects of The Age of Revolutions. The final result, in this regard, is a polychromatic picture that shows the diversity of paths, situations, and circumstances that characterize different “actors and actresses” who played different and varied roles in the Atlantic stage during the six decades that go from 1770 to 1830.

In this case, however, the historiographic “problem” lies elsewhere: in the broad premises that underpin the entire book, which end up overshadowing, in a certain way, the seven biographical trajectories just mentioned. Despite the intrinsic interest these individual lives undoubtedly have and how appealing it is for readers to learn about them and their vicissitudes, these life paths end up aligning with the author’s central hypotheses and, in several ways, end up becoming subordinate to his general view of the Age of Revolutions. In my view, this general perspective seems reductive and even misleading regarding some fundamental aspects of the era in question. These limitations partially emerge due to Perl-Rosenthal’s lack of historiographic caution regarding the sweeping hypotheses or generalizations that supposedly explain the entire Age of Revolutions during the sixty years that span between 1765 and 1825. I turn my attention to the two hypotheses that, according to the author, play such a role.

The central premise of The Age of Revolutions, as hinted at in the subtitle, is the succession of two generations of revolutionaries. These generations, purportedly quite distinct from one another, are the primary factors that, when considered together, explain, for the author, what occurred during the entire Age of Revolutions in political terms. According to him, the first generation defines the period 1765-1800, and the second, the phase 1800-1825. The first generation was, according to him, unable to mobilize the masses, while the second, was able to carry out that mobilization. The first generation of revolutionaries “largely failed” in their efforts to recruit significant segments of the population, while the second one “succeeded” in the same endeavor (p. 3). The Age of Revolutions is basically built upon this generational framework of “failure” and “success” regarding social mobilization. A framework that seems to me to contain and sometimes hide several problematic historiographic issues.

If the Age of Revolutions spans from 1765 to 1825, it seems unlikely that Perl-Rosenthal’s generational-mobilizational framework can truly work as an explanatory axis of the whole Age, since three of the four “major” Atlantic Revolutions took place before 1800 (with the Haitian Revolution taking place from 1791 to 1804). As mentioned in note 5, the other three are the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Spanish-American revolutions or Spanish-American revolutionary cycle. If we want to understand the complexity of the Age in question, Perl-Rosenthal’s central hypotheses are much less convincing than what he suggests in his introduction.

“The first wave of revolutions…succeeded in disrupting the social, economic, and political structures of the eighteenth-century Atlantic empires.” (p. 7). In other words, the first revolutionary generation, which supposedly “largely failed”, did succeed in disturbing some of the fundamental structures of Atlantic societies. This can be considered revolutionary and therefore hardly a “failure” (at least not in a book focused on the Age of Revolutions). However, the author appears to see no contradiction whatsoever with his central premises. It is worth emphasizing what seems to be a crucial point regarding this book, hinted at earlier: the Atlantic revolutionary movement that many historians consider the most politically significant —the French Revolution— occurred between 1789 and 1799, that is, before 1800. It is also worth noting that this revolution mobilized the masses as much as any other Atlantic revolution; maybe even more, at least in an “international” sense, if we take into account the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary movements that took place both in France and in several neighboring countries during that decade. Similarly, the French Revolution set the stage for alliances between or among diverse classes, with varying and often fluctuating character. This last point is more than relevant regarding The Age of Revolutions because, for Perl-Rosenthal, the alliance between the elites and the masses defined the second generation of revolutionaries, the generation he deems “successful,” precisely because this alliance did in fact, according to him, materialize.

The author states in the introduction of his book that between 1800 and 1825, “many of the revolutionary movements in the Atlantic world took an illiberal turn” (p. 10). If liberalism —along with republicanism and often in alignment with it— can be considered the most revolutionary ideology of the Age of Revolutions, insofar as it frontally opposed the ancien régime, and if, supposedly, the second revolutionary generation was the one that succeeded, an attentive reader might begin to feel a bit lost. Was there such a construct as a “liberal liberalism” before 1800 that then became “illiberal liberalism” after that year?[31] The reader’s confusion can only increase when Perl-Rosenthal asserts that, in Saint-Domingue, United States, and Spanish-America during the same quarter-century (1800-1825), “political movements strengthened the equality of majorities at the expense of minorities” (p. 10).

Any reader who is familiar with the political history of the United States during those years, with the Haitian constitutions of 1801 and 1805, as well as with the political practices that prevailed in Haiti until 1825, or who has a reasonable knowledge of the Spanish-American independence movements (along with the main political and social guidelines that its most important political and military leaders followed between 1810 and 1830), cannot help being skeptical regarding the preceding claims and wonder: What kind of “equality of the majorities”  is the author talking about here? What “minorities” is he referring to? In what sense could it be asserted that these minorities lost out to majorities between 1800 and 1825, in Saint-Domingue, in the United States, and in Spanish-America? In the three cases considered by Perl-Rosenthal, the  minorities were of a notably different nature in each one of the three societies involved. In any case, considering each one of them in their respective post-independence period, it seems to me that minorities kept a very clear grip on political, social, and economic power.

Let us now turn to what the author considers the three key insights of the generational-mobilizational history of the Atlantic Revolutions that he develops in his book. The first is that “we should not expect radical political change to happen quickly” (p. 13). Nothing to add here, if only because it can be considered a historiographic truism. The second insight of the author is that scholars should rethink the special place Western historiography in general has granted to the American and French revolutions in the history of modern politics, at the expense of the Haitian and Spanish-American revolutions.[32] The author’s third and final insight, which can be considered an extension of the previous one, is that his book offers a “non-exceptionalist” history of the Age of Revolution. By this term, he means the independence of the Thirteen Colonies and the French Revolution were not exceptional. Not only in the traditional and positive sense of the expression, that is, “the idea that a certain revolution was uniquely important or singularly transformative”, but neither regarding the “negative exceptionalist views of the American Revolution”, which have been numerous in the last decades, mainly due to the imbrication of the patriot movement with slavery and racism.[33]

Statements that are difficult to interpret appear frequently in The Age of Revolutions. For example, in the opening pages, Perl-Rosenthal claims that in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, “the lower sorts gained an unexpected measure of dominance” (p. 25). He asserts this after stating that working-class people took over public spaces that had previously been off-limits to them. While this may have happened on certain streets of Boston and Paris, it did not occur in the vast majority of the societies of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. To begin with, the term “working-class,” when applied to this century without any qualifications, seems out of place except in England, but this is not the only reason for my skepticism in this regard.[34] Perl-Rosenthal’s claim is even more striking because, in chapter 7 of his book, he asserts what appears to me as practically the opposite: “Eighteenth-century Atlantic societies in general were characterized by a widening gulf between the well-off and the working-class.” (p. 161). According to him, from July to September 1789 (i.e., at the very start of the French Revolution), these two groups already constituted “the two main wings” of that revolution (p. 168). When discussing the Dutch revolution of 1780, the working class has transformed into a “non-elite” (p. 174), leaving readers, who were already somewhat puzzled regarding this important issue, likely even more confused regarding the nature and entity of “the elites”, “the masses”, “the working class”, and the “non-elite”.[35]

It is worth pausing on Perl-Rosenthal’s dichotomy “elites versus masses,” especially when referring to Spanish-America. I tend to agree with David Bushnell and Neill Macaulay when they make the following claim about nineteenth-century Spanish-America: “There is very little basis for reducing nineteenth-century Latin American history to a simple struggle between the elites and the masses.”[36] As these authors state, one must be cautious with any generalization about the class interests of both categories because, depending on the time, place, and context, the “masses” were made up of different social groups with varying interests and, therefore, distinct political goals. The authors express similar reservations about the “elites”. In fact, they are even more skeptical: “The concept of an elite as a simple pressure group, with dominant interests —self-sufficient and capable of self-perpetuation, conspiratorial, and engaged in a permanent class struggle against the masses— is worse than useless.”[37] On this point, Bushnell and Macaulay conclude that in nineteenth-century Latin America, sociopolitical conflicts did not occur between elites and masses, “but between interest groups whose members came from all the social classes”.[38] Perhaps “all the social classes” may be an exaggeration by Bushnell and Macaulay, but the issue here is to highlight the considerable limitations of all-encompassing social dichotomies if we want to understandthe political, social, and economic conflicts that characterized the Age of Revolutions, not only in Spanish-America, but also in North America and in the rest of the Western world.

At the end of the first chapter of his book, Perl-Rosenthal asserts that visions of change had spread across Europe and America since 1760 and that although the corresponding ideas were marginal or unrealized, “their power and appeal were already unmistakable” (p. 34) “Unmistakable”? For whom? This seems to be an exaggerated and unverifiable claim, unless one makes Atlantic-wide extrapolations based on a handful of documents from a couple of archives. Added to this is an intent that also seems to me debatable from a historiographic standpoint: “The revolution that began in the 1760s set their sights on breaking the Atlantic’s world stagnant political and social order.” (p. 34). As far as I know, no revolution began in the Western world in the 1760s; furthermore, no revolution sets goals for itself. Only “revolutionaries” can set these goals, which are almost always vague and indeterminate in the early stages of any revolution —a significant point that is all too often overlooked. Finally, to assume and convey to readers of The Age of Revolutions that the Atlantic world of the 1760s was politically and socially stagnant (right in the middle of the Seven Year’s War) is just one more example, among several others that can be found in this book, of “retrospective history”.

Regarding the last point, it would be useful to look at the origins of any of the four “major” Atlantic Revolutions to know that the “revolutionaries” of the first hour did not have political objectives clear in their heads. In fact, the author himself writes the following on the American Revolution: “As late as the beginning of 1776, deep disagreements persisted in the patriot party about the fundamental question of whether to break from Britain.” (p. 58). This fact is not exceptional at all, for something similar can be said about some of the most important leaders during the first months and even years of the French, the Haitian, and the Spanish-American revolutions.

The debatable arguments found in The Age of Revolution do not only relate to revolutions in general, but also to specific revolutions. For example, in several passages, the author practically equates the Andean rebellion of Tupac Amaru of 1780-81 with the events that took place in the Thirteen Colonies from 1776 to 1783. Considering their nature, their respective endings, and their consequences, it is clear to me that differences outweigh similarities. In any case, comparisons like this one can be made, of course, but with a series of precautions and warnings that, in this case, the author limits to a brief paragraph in which he recognizes important differences between both processes (p. 81). However, he immediately asserts that the two of them faced “the same fundamental problem”, one that is in perfect correspondence with one of his main hypotheses: “The steep challenge of building cohesive and broadly based political movements in societies in which profound inequality structured and shaped the inhabitants’ worldviews.” (p. 81)

Not many pages ahead, Perl-Rosenthal claims that the imperial crisis experienced by the Viceroyalty of Peru was “every bit as wide and deep as the upheaval that had taken place in Britain’s North America a decade earlier” (p. 102).[39] Regarding their very contrasting outcomes, the author recognizes that they were different, but, once again, he immediately adds that their different paths “owed something to luck” (p. 104).  In this regard, it seems to me that every historical event owes something to luck. In any case, the crushing defeat of Amaru’s rebellion, contrary to what Perl-Rosenthal writes, was not “a temporary victory for the empire” (p. 80), unless the protagonists of the rebellion and of the protagonists who quenched it were prescient regarding what would happen about forty years afterwards in the Viceroyalty of Peru.

Without downplaying the magnitude of what happened in the Peruvian Andes in 1780 and 1781, statements like the previous one contribute to one of the negative effects of the amazing rise in the study of Atlantic Revolutions and the Age of Revolutions in the English-speaking academia since the late twentieth century: turning the diverse revolutionary movements that constitute the Age of Revolutions into “a night where all cats are gray” (an expression I already referred to in note 25). In historiographic terms, this means that the distinctive features of each historical process are overlooked or ignored to focus solely on their similarities, affinities, and/or purported continuities.[40] Ignoring, by the way, a cautionary note made by Bernard Bailyn in which he draws attention to a certain watchfulness that all practitioners of Atlantic history should bear in mind and apply, for, in his words, in this historiographic field there is a frequent risk of “exaggerating similarities and parallels unrealistically”.[41]

Regarding Perl-Rosenthal’s comparison between the Peruvian and American cases, a few questions arise. On what basis can it be claimed that the fundamental political problem faced by the “patriots” in both places was moving beyond social divisions? What about fiscal issues? What about loyalty to the English crown in the case of the Thirteen Colonies? What about the divisions among indigenous groups in the case of the Viceroyalty of Peru? What about military matters in both cases? The historical, political, social, and economic realities were so different between the Thirteen Colonies and the Viceroyalty of Peru in the eighth and ninth decades of the eighteenth century that trying to equate what happened in both regions is a historiographic decision that must be accompanied by a series of caveats and explanatory remarks.[42]

I should insist that my point here is not that comparisons like the above, or many others Perl-Rosenthal makes in his book, cannot be made, but if they are, we must also put forward the nuances and provisos that proceed. Considered altogether, they would offer a very different perspective on the processes that are being compared and, therefore, on their purported affinity. The set of alluded forewarnings would be useful for readers in order for them to have a much more complete and complex idea about the nature of the comparison that is being made and, I think, would help them calibrate its import or entity, especially if they are not experts on the subject.

Another example of the kind of comparisons I am calling attention to is the one Perl-Rosenthal establishes between the United States and Haiti in the decade of 1810 (pp. 385-387). To limit ourselves to the aspects the author mentions, their political elites are not comparable, nor are their policies “illiberal” in the same way, nor does it make sense to deny Haiti’s overt authoritarianism in the name of “political correctness”,  nor is the comparison between the famous Missouri Compromise and the death of King Christophe very persuasive. It seems that, once again (as in the comparison between the Thirteen Colonies and the Viceroyalty of Peru), the author was swayed by the fact that the historical events in question took place around the same time; in the latter case, in the exact same year (1820). In this regard, the magnetism exerted by the chronologic proximity of events on some Atlantic and Global historians is surprising, if only for one reason: the chronologic proximity between certain historical events does not necessarily imply any kind of causality.

The most problematic historiographic issue in The Age of Revolutions is that the various revolutions that took place between 1775 and 1825 are viewed not only through a generational lens of considerable rigidity, but also through another lens: an apparently unescapable dichotomy and confrontation that pretend to explain all the Atlantic Revolutions: “the elites” on one side and “the masses” on the other. Added to this aspect is a notion of “mobilization” that lends itself to diverse interpretations and adjustments. According to Perl-Rosenthal, all revolutionary movements before 1800 failed because the elites were not able to mobilize the masses. The problem lies, first, in the fact that no revolution is possible without mass mobilization. Furthermore, suggesting that what happened after 1800 is entirely different because, supposedly, from that year onward, “the elites” succeeded in mobilizing “the masses,” “working classes,” or “non-elites” and putting them on their side is an argument that seems not only naïve from a historiographic perspective, but also inaccurate, as the independence movements or revolutions in Spanish-America clearly show.

In most cases, the leaders of these movements did not have a social imaginary entirely different from that of the previous generation. In fact, to a good extent they could not, since before 1800 there had been no revolutions in Spanish-America. Of course some of them had contact with other Atlantic revolutions, but the truth is that when they approached the masses once the emancipation movements started in the region, it was almost always to mobilize them for their own benefit and to achieve their immediate political and military goals. That supposed “new generation of revolutionaries” that Perl-Rosenthal refers to in a very complimentary way throughout his book and which supposedly emerged, almost out of nowhere, around 1800, simply did not exist in Spanish-America. At least not in the way he describes and suggests in his book. According to him, this new generation viewed the social world “in profoundly new ways” and, moreover, he claims, opened “promising avenues for mass political mobilization” (p. 223). Without simplifying an ideology, a set of ideas, and a political tradition known for its protean nature, I believe that very important aspects of the history of Spanish-American liberalism and of early nineteenth-century Spanish-American liberals largely refute several of the author’s main arguments and contentions in this part of The Age of Revolutions.[43]

It is not true, as Perl-Rosenthal claims, that the Spanish-American generation that came of age in the 1790s broke away from the “patterns of caste” that had defined the social order in Spanish-America (p. 277). In fact, one could argue that, at the end of the independence movements, what the Creole leaders did was to replace the peninsular elite —certainly—, but retaining political power, social prestige, and the deep social inequalities that henceforth underpinned that power. They also managed, in broad if unstable terms, to impose control over other social groups or, failing that, over the fragile institutional frameworks that emerged with independence in each country. Asserting, as the author does, that in the early nineteenth century, “practices of social mobility and ideas of social flexibility had penetrated even the most conservative regions of Spanish-America” (p. 289) seems a very debatable statement. Even more debatable are some of the consequences that a lay reader would very probably infer from some of the author’s assertions in this regard. If anything, once again, a statement like the one just quoted should come with a series of admonitions, nuances, and complementary remarks to avoid conveying what appear to me as distorted notions regarding such an important topic.

An important comment or clarification is in order here: of course, the masses participated in the construction and legitimation of power in Latin America during the independence period and throughout the nineteenth century. It could not have been any other way. However, as Hilda Sabato points out in her book Republics of the New World, the egalitarian norms that prevailed in theoretical-legal terms across the region did not materialize in egalitarian institutions or egalitarian practices.[44]

It is also necessary to temper the author’s statement that the “entire generation” of Spanish-Americans that came of age around the decade of 1790 exhibited “a strong conviction, indeed, a certainty, that changes of status were possible and even inevitable” (p. 294). A “certainty”? On what grounds can such an assertion be made? Moreover, can we truly claim that social changes were possible “and even inevitable” in Spanish-America in the early decades of the nineteenth century? If there had indeed been a situation like the one Perl-Rosenthal describes in this part of his book, it would be hard to explain the nature of the political and social arrangements that emerged in the new countries of Spanish-America at the end of the independence period. These arrangements benefited primarily the Creole elites and secured their political, social, and ethnic supremacy for hundreds of years. This last statement is no exaggeration, for this legacy can be perceived by any attentive observer of both daily life and political life as they unfold today in many Latin American societies.[45]

Let me mention one more example of the way in which Perl-Rosenthal perceives the nature and the pace of historic change. In chapter 17, he acknowledges that even in the United States, the Republican Party, which he fully identifies with the “second generation” (the successfully revolutionary one from the author’s perspective), while it did expand its social base, “remained firmly connected to the gentry” (p. 388). The author immediately adds: “A succession of Virginia aristocrats remained at the head of the party throughout this period.” (p. 388). Mutatis mutandis, similar situations happened in every one of the Atlantic Revolutions. In any case, the ultimate reason supporting my stance in this essay on this topic comes from the author himself when, at the beginning of his book and as previously mentioned, he introduces his first insight: “We should not expect radical political change to happen quickly.”

In the same key, it is very difficult, at least for me, to understand the following statement (which appears at the beginning of chapter 18): “In Spanish America, as had happened elsewhere in the revolutionary world, the second generation began to take command in 1800.” (p. 405). In 1800? In which Spanish-American territories? Who represented this “takeover” when, in that year, there were no major insurrections in the Spanish-American empire? More importantly, what could “taking command” mean in a context where Spanish authorities were well established in the commanding positions of almost all the American territories that were part of the Spanish empire in America? In this respect, it may be important to add that the reactions in the Spanish-American territories once they began to suffer the political and economic implications of Bonaparte’s rise to power were very different from one territory to the other. Think, for example, in the profound and disruptive consequences of the appropriation of Church wealth (consolidación de vales reales) in the Viceroyalty of New Spain during the first decade of the nineteenth century and, almost at the same time, the way in which the two British invasions of the Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata were lived by the inhabitants of Buenos Aires and, maybe even more importantly, the political and social consequences of those invasions. However, authorities in New Spain maintained control until the beginning of the crisis hispánica in 1808, even until 1810. That makes the case of Buenos Aires, during the British invasions of 1806 and 1807, the only one that experienced a situation like the one Perl-Rosenthal suggests existed in the whole of Spanish-America starting in 1800, a year in which, I insist, no major social upheavals took place in the region.

Chapter 18 is devoted entirely to Spanish-American constitutionalism during the Age of Revolutions. However, there is almost nothing in it about the “explosion” of constitutional activity that took place in Spanish-America during the independence period, especially between 1811 and 1815.[46] In those five years only, more than thirty constitutional documents were drafted in the region —an unparalleled feat in the Age of Revolutions (and indeed in Western history). What the author does mention in this chapter is the enormous influence of Thomas Paine, of American constitutionalism, and of some of the French revolutionary constitutions on Spanish-American constitutionalism. This, despite the fact that in areas like the electoral census, constitutional review, and emergency powers, Spanish-American lawyers and jurists were original in several aspects within Western constitutional thinking. One cannot claim, on the one hand, being critical of the American and French exceptionalism of the Age of Revolutions in order to give due recognition to the Haitian and Spanish-American revolutions, while at the same time continue to echo certain historiography, particularly in the English language, on important matters regarding constitutional history and constitutional thought.

In the last chapter of his book, the author’s assertion that Spanish-America “was not the anomaly, but the epitome of the second revolutionary wave” (p. 428) also seems to me highly unpersuasive.[47] As has been shown, that “second revolutionary wave”, supposedly successful, does not hold up, strictly speaking, anywhere; but what would be essential, to fulfill the author’s interpretive intentions, would be for it to hold up in the only one of the four “major” Atlantic Revolutions that took place between 1800 and 1825 —that is, in the Spanish-American independence processes. Yet, Perl-Rosenthal’s argument does not stand in Spanish-America.

Consider prominent political, military, and ideological leaders such as Miranda, Bolívar, San Martín, Monteagudo, Nariño, Henríquez, Bello, and Mier, among others. None of them expressed social concerns like those that Perl-Rosenthal presents in his book as having played an essential role in their thought or their texts. Not only that, they did not attempt to approach the masses and look after their interests or social condition in any meaningful way, except —as noted— for the ultimate purpose of obtaining immediate benefits. Furthermore, their political ideas clearly contained socially conservative elements; in other words, they were hardly revolutionary in social terms.[48] In fact, it can be argued that conservatism played an increasing role in their political thought and practice; as it is evident in the cases of Bolívar, Nariño, Monteagudo, and Mier.

It cannot be asserted (especially, in a categoric way) that the leaders of the Spanish-American independence movements “were nothing if not members of the second revolutionary generation.” (p. 440). Even more debatable, if possible, is the claim that their political vision, according to the author, was aimed not only at political change but also at the profound transformation of society. In his own words, their political vision “was deeply interwoven with ideas of transformation and reconstruction of the social world” (p. 440). What exactly are we referring to when we say that these independence leaders advocated a profound reconstruction of Spanish-American societies? On what texts from these leaders does Perl-Rosenthal base such statements? Even prior to these questions: who are the “South American patriot-generals” (p. 440) he has in mind?

The author’s conclusion on this matter seems hardly credible to anyone who has studied Spanish-American emancipation movements with some detail. Once again, Perl-Rosenthal is emphatic in his assertions: “Of all the revolutions that rumbled through the Atlantic empire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, none was more fully the handiwork of the second generation than the independence movements in South America.” (p. 445). If only for chronologic reasons, this could not be otherwise regarding the other three major Atlantic revolutions. In any case, according to the author, the independence processes in South America were carried out by a successful, transformative, and truly revolutionary generation, especially due to its purported mobilizing capacity and concern for the people or the masses. The author’s claim that South American independence leaders of the second generation represented the acceptance of “status mobility and ease with social mixing” (p. 446) is impossible for me to trace, at least in the texts of those Spanish-American political leaders that I have read. As Bolívar’s writings make very clear —as well as the writings of any of the other seven prominent figures of the independence movements mentioned above— this was not the case in Spanish-America during the first decades of the nineteenth century.[49]

In the conclusion of his book, Perl-Rosenthal states that it is very important for historians to reckon that the entire revolutionary era was marked by “pervasive illiberalism”. For him, this historiographic recognition “is both necessary and useful” (p. 450). This claim can only be made if one speaks from the perspective of twenty-first-century liberalism, but it becomes unintelligible if we situate ourselves in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, that is, in the historical context of the period under study in the closing chapters of The Age of Atlantic Revolutions.

The liberalismo hispánico, like all the other historic expressions of liberalism in the Age of Revolutions, was socially conservative or, in other words, anti-democratic. This fact does not make it illiberal; it simply makes it another historic avatar of the liberal ideology during the Atlantic revolutionary era and, more broadly speaking, during the Age of Revolutions.[50] In any case, as expressed in the previous section, whatever critique is made regarding the nature of liberalism during the Age of Revolutions, it cannot be denied that it played a profoundly revolutionary role vis-à-vis the Old Regime.

Whenever we analyze and discuss political-intellectual history, we must pay close attention to nuances and to the historic context in intellectual, linguistic, and social terms. Otherwise, we are risking to merely repeat formulas, present ideas and ideologies in suspiciously clear-cut terms, decontextualize the ideas, thinkers or politicians under study (sometimes under one or another of the many avatars of “political correctness”) and, in sum, simplify the enormous complexity of that history —especially in revolutionary times, like those under review here.

The supposed generational shift between two cohorts of persons and the mechanical link that the author establishes between their mobilizing incapacity or capacity, which is the dual hypothesis The Age of Revolution aims to uphold, suffers from the interpretive weaknesses I have tried to show and, if my approach to this issue is correct, almost nullifies it as the central explanatory framework to understand the Age of Revolutions. The proposition appears naïve to me from a historiographic perspective because it pretends to ascribe an enormous hermeneutic power to a category as volatile in many respects as “generation” and combines it with another equally unstable category, “mobilization”. This seems to me to be a loose double foundation. The historiographic problem is not only that it sustains Perl-Rosenthal’s entire historiographic proposal in The Age of Revolutions, but also that it is exacerbated by the mechanical application of both categories.

As suggested on more than one occasion, the Age of Revolutions does not lend itself to pinpoint chronologic divides nor to zero-sum social characterizations. Social values and political principles did not change radically from one generation to another, nor was the extent and nature of mobilizations radically different between generations. As if all members of a certain generation across the Atlantic world responded in the exact same way in political, social, and even personal terms simply because they passed from youth to maturity between one given year and another specific year.

My main disagreement with Perl-Rosenthal has to do with the way in which, very often, he ignores or puts in parenthesis the political, social, and economic characteristics of the societies and processes that he compares throughout his book. History in general and revolutionary times in particular are more complex, less predictable, and less amenable to sweeping hypothesis than what the readers of The Age of Revolutions will very probably assume after reading the book.

IV. By way of conclusion

If I have been so prolific with quotations from the two books reviewed in this essay, it is because I wanted to present as textually as possible certain hypotheses, assumptions, and assertions that reflect a particular way of approaching the Age of Revolutions. Altogether, from my perspective, these elements tend to diminish and simplify the enormous complexity of the Age of Revolutions. Now, there is no book on this age —nor could there be one— that does not exhibit certain limitations or gaps. The topic is so vast, and touches so many spheres and facets of Western history over at least half a century, that the suggested insufficiencies or lacunae are virtually inevitable.

The Atlantic Revolutions increase their number further if we do not treat the Spanish-American independence movements as a single process, as I think we should. The reason is relatively simple. In Spanish-America, without much difficulty and without forcing historical events, it is possible to identify at least seven processes with distinct characteristics, differentiated timelines, and very peculiar internal logics. In fact, some historians might identify up to nine different processes, for it is possible to identify more than one within two of the administrative units in which the Spanish Empire was divided at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is important to add that this does not imply ignoring that there were fundamental elements that were common to the whole region (language and religion to begin with). These elements emerged from a basic historical fact that had immense consequences: all the American territories were part of a single empire for almost 300 years.

My main historiographic difference with the authors of the two books discussed in this essay are their central hypotheses. In Griffin’s case, he assumes a level of interconnectedness throughout the Atlantic world, starting in the seventh decade of the eighteenth century, that becomes a kind of deus ex machina throughout his book and that, from his perspective, makes every single aspect of the Atlantic Revolutions intelligible. A substantial degree of communication and interconnectedness in the Atlantic world is undeniable; however, it does not suffice to explain each and every step in a historical and historiographic journey that is highly diverse, not only in chronological and geographical terms, but also in its political, social, economic, military, diplomatic, and cultural dimensions. In Perl-Rosenthal’s case, the central hypothesis is two-fold: on one hand, the concept of generations, and, on the other, the concept of mobilization. Or perhaps, more accurately, a single hypothesis with two facets: a generation as non-mobilizing until 1800, and a subsequent generation as mobilizing. I presented several arguments and historic facts that tried to demonstrate that this main hypothesis is clearly insufficient to understand and explain the Age of Revolutions in a compelling way.

It is understandable that historians, at the beginning of their books, propose broad, ambitious, and comprehensive hypotheses for fear of falling into what we might call here the mere “narration of events”. We have been told in countless ways that historians must look for and adopt theoretical foundations, general propositions, or all-encompassing hypotheses in order to give coherence to the whole. This is unquestionable at a certain level, but it can entail serious historiographic distortions when taken too far. I am not the only one to perceive this issue in this way. For example, Lester D. Langley writes the following in the introduction to a very good book on the revolutionary era in the Americas: “An inquiry uninformed by theory, I concede, may contribute little more than a narrative account. A study oblivious to the nuances of the particular and to the parallel complexities that an awareness of place can inspire, however, can be sadly lacking in explanatory power.”[51]

Langley is not the only historian who has studied the Age of Revolutions adopting a perspective that is close to the one I am trying to convey here. In the preface of his notable book, The Four Horsemen, Richard Stites writes: “This book, a narrative history of the revolutions in Spain, Naples, Greece, and Russia and their relationships, has no overarching thesis or theory to bind it together; the analysis changes from one topic to another.” (italics are mine)[52] A few lines ahead, Stites adds (he is referring to the four revolutions studied in his book): “They shared some common ground, though acute differences disallow any kind of universal applicability, especially of the kind that bleeds into speculative history with alleged predictive power.” (again, italics are mine)[53]

The two authors reviewed in this essay would have done well to consider some of the advantages of Langley’s and Stite’s methodologic approach to some of the political movements that constitute the Age of Revolutions, if only to temper the exegetic ambitions of their central hypotheses. If this hypothetical proposal of mine had been heeded by Griffin and Perl-Rosenthal, their books would not have forced historical events the way they do on several occasions. This occurs largely because, very often, highly varied and distinct events are made to fit into frameworks that are so comprehensive that, from my perspective, they serve more as straitjackets of the diverse political, social, and economic events under examination, than as frameworks that illuminate, in principle, not only each one of the processes under study, but the Age of Revolutions in general.

I conclude this double-review with a linguistic issue that I consider of the utmost importance, especially taking into account that a good part of the best scholarship that has been written on the Spanish-American revolutions is not in the language of Shakespeare, but in that of Cervantes.[54] In this regard, we might start by concentrating our attention in the “historiographic revolution” that the study of the revoluciones hispánicas experienced in the early 1990s —this  expression includes the Spanish liberal revolutions of 1810-1814 and 1820-1823, along with the Spanish-American independence movements— as well as the current dynamism in the study of the independence processes of Spanish-America in the Spanish-speaking academia.[55] In the first section, I referred to this linguistic issue as “the (absolute) hegemony of the English language”. All the shortcomings that stem from this almost total dominance in contemporary academia explain why the so-called “Global” history is, in my view, an academic enterprise that is bound to fail or, at least, to fall short of its goals. Mainly because it assumes that an intellectual endeavor that purportedly is global in scope, can be successfully carried out in a single language (English), by scholars educated at a handful of English-speaking universities, with secondary sources in a single language (English), and, when studying non-Anglophone regions, without primary sources. This last aspect applies every time the language corresponding to the region of the world under study is not mastered by the historian in turn.

To quantify my point, let us consider the two books reviewed in this essay. In The Age of Atlantic Revolution, I could find eight bibliographic sources in Spanish out of around 1,200 total. In Perl-Rosenthal’s book, I counted 30 secondary references in Spanish. The Age of Revolutions, according to my estimate, has around 1,000 references. If my numbers are correct, there are fewer than 40 secondary references in Spanish out of a total of, approximately, 2,200 (that is, less than 2%).

One question naturally arises: where are the dozens of high-quality authors, books, and articles written in Spanish on the revoluciones hispánicas in general and on the Spanish-American revolutions in particular since, say, 1990? The main motive for this question is very simple: of the four “major” Atlantic Revolutions, one of them (in fact, at least, seven different revolutions) took place in Spanish, with protagonists and many secondary actors who predominantly spoke Spanish (in many regions the population was primarily indigenous), and with primary sources in one language: Spanish.

If the above is true, then another question logically follows. Can a book on the Atlantic Revolutions or the Age of Revolutions be written today without a considerable number of references in the Spanish language? The answer should be clear by now. The fact that, at this historiographic stage (the third decade of the twenty-first century), the English-speaking academic world pretends that it is possible to write such a book, says a great deal about the academic arrogance of that world, as well as about its intellectual provincialism.

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Roberto Breña studied politics, philosophy, and political theory in Mexico and Canada before obtaining a PhD in the history of political thought from the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, Spain. He is professor and researcher at the Center for International Studies of El Colegio de México in Mexico City, where he teaches courses on the history of ideas, historical analysis, political theory, and the Atlantic Revolutions. His main academic interests are the history of liberalism, liberalism in the mundo hispánico, the Atlantic Revolutions, intellectual history, and the Age of Revolutions. He is the author or editor of several books on first Spanish liberalism and the Spanish-American independence movements. He has been visiting professor in the United States, Canada, Spain, France, and Italy. Among his publications of the last years, three of them may be of interest to the readers of the Age of Revolutions electronic site: “Tensions and Challenges of Intellectual History in Contemporary Latin America,” Contributions to the History of Concepts, vol. 16, issue 1, 2021; “Revoluciones hispánicas and Atlantic History: a Spanish-language interpretation and bibliography,” Age of Revolutions (an Open-Access, Peer-Reviewed Journal), May 2021: https://ageofrevolutions.com/2021/05/10/revoluciones-hispanicas-and-atlantic-history-a-spanish-language-historiographical-interpretation-and-bibliography/ and “Revoluciones hispánicas e historia atlántica en español (Ensayo crítico-bibliográfico sobre un menosprecio lingüístico injustificable)”, Wirapuru (Revista latinoamericana de historia de las ideas), year 4, n. 7, 2023 (I): http://www.wirapuru.cl/images/pdf/2023/7/brena.pdf

Email: rbrena@colmex.mx 

Title image: Abrazo de Acatempan. Óleo sobre tela de 1870, Román Sagredo, Museo Nacional de Historia, INAH, México.

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* This text is the translation of an article that I originally wrote in Spanish: “La Era de las Revoluciones bajo la lupa: Análisis crítico de dos libros recientes de la historiografía estadounidense,” which appeared in the Mexican academic review Foro Internacional, vol. LXIV (4), n. 258, October-December 2024, pp. 965-1014. It is published here with the authorization of the original editor. I should mention that I made several changes, additions, and clarifications, as well as a couple of corrections, to the Spanish version. I also benefited from several of the comments and criticisms of a reviewer designated by Age of Revolutions. Finally, I included new references that could be of interest for an English-speaking audience.

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[1] Of course, there are many differences between American and English academia in the field of history, but I think that, in general terms, my critique holds for both. As always, there are exceptions to the alluded tendencies, for the historiography on the Age of Revolutions in English is very rich and very diverse. To mention just one example, the well-known British historian Brian Hamnett distances himself completely from the way in which Atlantic history pretends to study (and limit) the Spanish, Spanish-American, Portuguese, and Brazilian experiences during the age in question. In fact, in the last page of his introduction to his book The End of Iberian Rule on the American Continent, 1770-1830, Hamnett states that the Atlantic model “may well have outlived its original usefulness” (New York, Columbia University Press, 2017, p. 11). In this regard, it should not be forgotten that the Spanish-American colonies had even more shores that looked upon the Pacific Ocean than upon the Atlantic.

[2] The book by Palmer was published in two volumes, with different subtitles, in 1959 and 1964, by Princeton University Press.

[3] I provide three examples: The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 by Eric Hobsbawm, New York, Vintage Books, 1962; L’âge des révolutions européennes (1780-1848) by Louis Bergeron, François Furet, and Reinhart Koselleck, Paris, Bordas, 1973, and La era de las grandes revoluciones en Europa y América (1763-1848) by Juan Luis Simal, Madrid, Editorial Síntesis, 2020.

[4] A very recent book that goes against this tendency is Revolutionary Spring (Fighting for a New World 1848-1849) by Christopher Clark, London, Allen Lane, 2023.

[5] Regarding the number of Atlantic Revolutions, considering its most complete treatment up to date, the three-volume edition by Wim Klooster for Cambridge University Press, we are dealing with twenty different processes (counting the Spanish-American revolutions as a single one). The Age of Atlantic Revolutions, Wim Klooster (ed.), Cambridge, CUP, 2023 (3 vols.). It is worth mentioning that volume III is devoted entirely to the Iberian empires. Klooster is the author of Revolutions in the Atlantic World (A Comparative History), New York, New York University Press, 2009 (new edition, 2018). This book studies the four “major” Atlantic Revolutions: that of the Thirteen Colonies, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and the Spanish-American revolutions.

[6] It is impossible for me to delve into this issue in an essay that is, already, very long. Interested readers who can read Spanish may find interesting an article that is about to appear in Italy: “El liberalismo en América y Europa en la Era de las revoluciones: límites de la conectividad global y hegemonía historiográfica en lengua inglesa”, in Il vento del Sud: Intrecci e prospettive del Trienio Liberal (vol. 1), Vittorio Scotti Douglas (ed.), Soveria Mannelli, Rubbettino Editore, 2024.

[7] In relation with this issue, throughout the essay I will mention several books and articles in Spanish that have contributed to the study of the Spanish-American revolutions during the last three decades and that illuminate some of the historiographic issues that I will put forward. However, for the simple fact of being written in Spanish, they have not received the attention that many of them deserve. The fact that, very often, important texts of the historiography in Spanish are not read by “experts” on the Atlantic Revolutions and the Age of Revolutions (and, evidently, are not included in the bibliographies of their books and articles) should serve as food for thought for all those academics, from all over the world, interested in a serious and profound study of both historic processes.

[8] On some of the tensions that arise when framing these last revolutions within the Atlantic approach, I wrote a brief text in Spanish: “Debatiendo la Era de la revolución: las independencias hispanoamericanas en el contexto de las revoluciones atlánticas”, in Liberalismo e independencia en la Era de las revoluciones, México, El Colegio de México, 2021 (pp. 79-92).

[9] On this topic, see the final chapter of a well-known overview of the Spanish-American revolutions: Independence in Latin America (Contrasts and Comparisons) by Richard Graham, Austin, University of Texas Press, 2013 (pp. 139-152); the revealing title of the chapter in question is “What Changed?”.

[10] On this topic, regarding the Spanish-American independence movements, see “Conclusion: Was There an Age of Revolution in Spanish America?” by Eric Van Young, in State and Society in Spanish America during the Age of Revolution, Víctor M. Uribe-Uran (ed.), Wilmington, SR Books, 2001 (pp. 219-246).

[11] A few years ago, a contemporary expert on modern Spanish history, Christopher Storrs, wrote the following lines in a brief note titled “Eighteenth Century Spain”: “Historians have tended to see eighteenth century Spain as going through a long-term decline, one which had begun in the seventeenth century and which would culminate in the loss of Spanish America in the early nineteenth century.” https://www.gale.com/intl/essays/christopher-storrs-eighteenth-century-spain This perception has a long historiographic trajectory. See, for example, the last chapter (“Epitaph of an Empire”) of J.H. Elliot’s book Imperial Spain 1469-1716, London, Penguin Books, 1990, pp. 361-386 (the first edition dates back to 1963).

[12] On this topic, see Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and its Empire, 1759-1808 by Gabriel B. Paquette, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

[13] On this topic, see La independencia de Brasil y la experiencia hispanoamericana (1808-1822) by João-Paulo Pimenta, Santiago, DIBAM/CIDBA, 2017.

[14] The Age of Atlantic Revolution, p. 5.

[15] Italics are mine; my point here is that Equiano’s life, by itself, cannot demonstrate practically anything.

[16] To give an idea in quantitative terms, in only two pages (67-68), the author uses the word “entanglement(s)” six times.

[17] On several occasions, Griffin gives excessive weight to the revolution of the Thirteen Colonies and its purported Atlantic influence. For example, on page 141, the author claims that the “Mexican liberals” of the independence era (I have no idea which New Spain politicians or thinkers Griffin has in mind) were inspired by the Americans in their perception that revolution could lead to social anarchy. Further, on page 224, he states that many lessons can be drawn from the way in which the revolutionaries of the Thirteen Colonies understood the process in which they were immersed. What is curious, in this case, is that what the author writes in that same paragraph shows how profoundly different was what happened in North of America vis-à-vis the other three “major” Atlantic Revolutions. Not to mention how different was the way in which the French, Haitian, and Spanish-American revolutionaries perceived the events that were taking place before their eyes. Lastly, in the epilogue of his book, Griffin considers the American Revolution as “what appeared to be the most perfectly packaged revolution” (p. 271); a statement that, beyond the point I am trying to make, is not easy to interpret.

[18] If the author were to take seriously these elements, the enormous interpretive weight he gives to connections and entanglements throughout his book would be impossible to understand or justify in intellectual terms. Something similar can be said when, in the introduction of his book, Griffin suggests that the criticisms and doubts I expressed several years ago regarding the sequential inclinations of Atlantic history and the way in which Spanish-America is made to fit into the Atlantic model are understandable, but that he would try to respond to my doubts in his book (notes 6 and 10, pp. 286 and 287). Despite what the author expresses in the second of these notes, I did not perceive any attempt in this sense throughout The Age of Atlantic Revolution.

[19] The first quotation in “Two Concepts of Liberty”, in The Proper Study of Mankind, Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer (eds.), Chatham, Pimlico, p. 192 (in principle, Berlin is citing the German poet Heinrich Heine). The second quotation in “The Counter-Enlightenment”, in the same book, p. 268. In absolute contrast with Berlin’s perspective, I tend to think that political and social practices weigh more heavily on ideas than the other way around, but it is impossible for me to delve here into this question.

[20] On the significant differences between these two methodologic approaches, which some contemporary intellectual historians tend to conflate, see my article “Tensions and Challenges of Intellectual History in Contemporary Latin America,” Contributions to the History of Concepts, vol. 16, no. 1, Summer 2021, pp. 89-115.

[21] One detail regarding an issue studied in this part of The Age of Atlantic Revolution: it is not that the États-géneraux convened by Louis XVI in 1788 “had met in the past during moments of crisis”, as Griffin writes on page 96, it is that they had not met since 1614! This simple fact explains why the gathering of the Estates-General, by itself, was a “watershed moment”, as the author himself writes on the following page. I think a similar critique can be made to Perl-Rosenthal when he deals with this issue in p. 156 of his book, for the Estates-General had not gathered for 174 years (that is, much more than the century he mentions).

[22] “Every Island is not Haiti: The French Revolution in the Windward Islands”, in Rethinking the Age of Revolutions (France and the Birth of the Modern World), David A. Bell and Yair Mintzker (eds.), New York, OUP, 2018.

[23] Incidentally, the last chapter of Griffin’s book, entitled “Reknitting the Fabric” (pp. 220-270) is revealing as to the magnitude of the failure of the Irish “revolution.” This interesting chapter deals with various monuments that were erected in various countries in Europe, America, and Africa during the nineteenth century to celebrate the revolutionary movements that took place during the Age of Revolution and to, in a certain way, mark their termination. As might be inferred, the nature of this final chapter, with which I will not engage in this essay, is quite different from the rest of the book. Turning to the Irish rising, Thomas Bartlett explains the main reasons for its failure in “The Irish Rebellion of 1798,” in The Age of Atlantic Revolutions, Wim Klooster (ed.), pp. 421-442 (vol. II).

[24] Historian’s Fallacies (Toward a Logic of Historical Thought), New York, Harper Torchbooks, 1970, p. 258.

[25] The content of this paragraph seems to be another example of an attempt (voluntary or involuntary) of turning the Age of Revolutions into a kind of night in which all cats are gray (this is the English translation of a well-known Spanish expression: la noche en la que todos los gatos son pardos). I will return to it when reviewing Perl-Rosenthal’s book in the next section, because, from my perspective, he also falls into this homogenizing trend which not only does not illuminate the Age of Revolutions, but, in my opinion, often tends to do exactly the opposite.

[26] To have an idea of some of the most important political peculiarities of the mundo hispánico during the period, without forgetting the Atlantic context, see Crisis atlántica (Autonomía e independencia en la crisis de la monarquía hispánica) by José María Portillo, Madrid, Marcial Pons, 2006.

[27]  On the final period of Mexican Independence and the beginnings of the new nation, see Para la libertad (Los republicanos en tiempos del Imperio 1821-1823) by Alfredo Ávila, Mexico, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, UNAM, 2004, and La trigarancia (Fuerzas armadas en la consumación de la independencia, Nueva España, 1820-1821) by Rodrigo Moreno, Mexico, UMAM/Fideicomiso Teixidor, 2017. There are other topics where the reader does not know whether to attribute the author’s assertions to a certain lack of knowledge of the subject he is dealing with or to a certain political correctness. For example, on page 214, Griffin suggests that Toussaint Louverture advocated Haitian independence, which, as far as I know, was not the case. This can be verified by reading a brief personal text that Louverture wrote at the end of his life: The Memoir of General Toussaint Louverture, Philippe R. Girard (ed.), New York, OUP, 2014. On the levels of idealization that current historiography has reached regarding the figure of Louverture, see my extensive review of the book Black Spartacus (The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture) by Sudhir Hazareesingh (2020), published in the journal Historia Mexicana, vol. LXXIV, n. 295, January-March 2025; the electronic version is already available: https://historiamexicana.colmex.mx/index.php/RHM/article/view/4646/5061

[28] I mention two cases here: Julia Gaffield, ed., The Haitian Declaration of Independence (Creation, Context, and Legacy), Charlotesville, University of Virginia Press, 2016, p. vii, and Enzo Traverso, Rivoluzione (1789-1799: un’altra storia), Milan, Feltrinelli, 2021, pp. 121, 136, 334).

[29] In this regard, it is not enough to play around with lower case and capital letters in the expression “Age of Revolutions” for Griffin’s proposal about a “permanent revolution” to be the least persuasive.

[30] The title of Equiano’s autobiography is The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself.

[31] It may be important to remember that the term “liberal”, with a clear political connotation, appeared for the first time in metropolitan Spain, more concretely in the Cortes of Cádiz, at the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century. From there, it would spread all over Europe and then to the rest of the world. This is an aspect of Western political-intellectual history —not irrelevant in my view— that the historiography in English tends to ignore.

[32] It is impossible to disagree with this statement. The problem is that the author takes it too far when he writes that, regarding more autocracy and less stability, “the pattern of change over time, common to the two regions [the North Atlantic and the South Atlantic] is more striking” (p. 14). It is very difficult to agree with this assessment. Even in France, which had a rather turbulent nineteenth century in political terms, the levels of autocracy and instability are not comparable to those of Haiti or most of Latin American during that century. I have already mentioned in a previous note this attempt by many Atlantic and global historians to turn the Age of Revolutions into “a night where all the cats are gray”. I will return to it further in the main text.

[33] Both quotations in page 15 of The Age of Revolutions.

[34] The use of the term is not limited to this part of the book. For example, on page 151, Perl-Rosenthal states that the French Revolution, the Revolution of the Thirteen Colonies, the Peruvian Revolution, and the Dutch Revolution were powered by several distinct political movements that can be comprised in two main wings: the elite and the “working-class”.

[35] On the Dutch revolution, see Joris Oddens’ chapter “The Modernity of the Dutch Revolution: Ideas, Action, Permeation”, in The Age of Atlantic Revolutions, Wim Klooster (ed.), pp. 349-374 (vol. II). For Oddens, the modernity or lack of modernity of the Dutch revolutions (for he includes not only the patriot revolution of 1780-1787, which Perl-Rosenthal studies in his book, but also the Batavian revolution of 1796-1801), depends very much on the field of specialization of each historian. In any case, Oddens’ text shows that the variables to be considered to understand these two revolutions are political, ideological, social, religious, military, administrative, local, regional, and international.

[36] El nacimiento de los países latinoamericanos, Nerea, Madrid, 1989, p. 63 (my translation); there is an English version of this book: The Emergence of Latin America in the Nineteenth Century, New York, OUP, 1988.

[37] Bushnell and Macaulay, El nacimiento…, p. 64 (my translation).

[38] Bushnell and Macaulay, El nacimiento…, p. 64 (my translation).

[39] Regarding the Tupac Amaru rebellion, it is true that the lack of understanding among certain classes was a very important factor to explain its failure, but many others were also very important to understand the outcome of this rising; among them: the taxing abuses suffered by indigenous groups for centuries (never receiving a favourable decision from Lima in this regard), the social trajectory and personal qualities of Tupac Amaru, the military power of the Peruvian authorities, and, lastly but importantly, the profound internal divisions among indigenous groups.

[40] A very good example of the above is the book The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760-1840, David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds.), New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. This book pretends to turn the Western Age of Revolutions into a planetary era. The effort, in my view, misses its objective; among other reasons because variegated processes (among them, uprisings, sects, upheavals, failed rebellions, occupations, and campaigns) are considered “revolutions”. In any case, as I have written elsewhere, pretending to do global history in a single language, with scholars from a handful of English-speaking universities, with references in a single language and very often without primary sources (unless they are in English) is a historiographic enterprise doomed to fail. The fact that very few historians have expressed it as bluntly as I am doing here, does not deny the intellectual fatuity of such an endeavor. Among them, the French historian Jean-Frédéric Schaub; see his book Nous avons tous la même histoire (Les défis de l’identité), Paris, Odile Jacob, 2024 (more specifically, p. 36).  I will return to this subject in the final paragraphs of this essay.

[41] Atlantic History (Concept and Contours), Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2005, p. 62.

[42] The absence of the historiographic caution I am proposing here often leads to interpretations that, based on a single hypothesis, attempt to explain diverse, extended, and complex historical processes, like the Age of Revolutions. In my view, the majority of these interpretations tend to lack persuasiveness.  

[43] As soon as the new countries emerged in Spanish-America, the masses were more repressed than mobilized by the Creole elites who seized power throughout the region. Moreover, it should be noted that if the masses were mobilized in Spanish-America between 1810 and 1825, it was as much in favor of independence as against it, since the “independence” movements were, in fact, from the very beginning, civil wars. On this topic, see Elegía criolla by Tomás Pérez Vejo, Mexico, Tusquets, 2010.

[44] The subtitle of Sabato’s book is El experimento político latinoamericano del siglo XIX, Buenos Aires, Taurus, 2021, p. 204. The original version is in English: Republics of the New World (The Revolutionary Political Experiment in 19th-Century Latin America), Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2018 (in this case, p. 181; my quotation is taken from this edition). On this topic, regarding the independence period, see “La participación popular en las revoluciones hispanoamericanas, 1808-1816. Un ensayo sobre sus rasgos y causas” by Gabriel di Meglio, Almanack, n. 5, 2013, and “Los grupos afro-descendientes y la independencia: un nuevo paradigma historiográfico” by Marixa Lasso, in L’Atlantique révolutionnaire (Une perspective ibéro-américaine), Clément Thibaud, Federica Morelli, Alejandro Gómez y Gabriel Entin (eds.), Bécherel, Les Perséides Éditions, 2013.

[45] This does not deny the fact that very important progress has been achieved in this regard during the last two decades. However, we should bear in mind that the end of the Spanish-American independence movements is 200 years away.

[46] The book that put this topic on the radar of the historiography on the Age of Revolutions was En pos de la quimera (Reflexiones sobre el experimento constitucional atlántico) by José Antonio Aguilar, Mexico, CIDE/FCE, 2000. See also Visiones y revisiones de la independencia americana (La independencia de América: la Constitución de Cádiz y las constituciones iberoamericanas), Izaskun Álvarez and Julio Sánchez (eds.), Salamanca, Universidad de Salamanca, 2007, and El laboratorio constitucional iberoamericano: 1807/1808-1830, Antonio Annino and Marcela Ternavasio (eds.), Madrid, AHILA/Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2012.

[47] Although under a different guise, this statement by Perl-Rosenthal brings back to mind Griffin’s notion that the case of Latin America is “the exception that proved the rule”, to which I referred in the previous section.

[48] On this subject, see chapters 2 to 5 of my book El imperio de las circunstancias (Las independencias hispanoamericanas y la revolución liberal española), Madrid, Marcial Pons, 2014. On this topic, it should be added that among the most prominent Spanish-American independence leaders, there were very few who were concerned with social issues and social inequalities. However, leaders like José María Morelos in New Spain (Mexico) and José Gervasio Artigas in the Banda Oriental (Uruguay) were exceptional among the main political leaders of the Spanish-American independence movements.

[49] For a first approach, as a panoramic view, see the two volumes of Pensamiento político de la Emancipación (1790-1825), José Luis Romero and Luis Alberto Romero (eds.), Caracas, Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1977. I refer to this anthology because, although it was published a long time ago (almost half a century), it is still the only one in Spanish that covers all of Spanish-America (from the point of view of political thought). In English, see chapters 9 and 10 of Rafe Blaufarb’s documentary anthology The Revolutionary Atlantic (Republican Visions, 1760-1830; A Documentary History), New York, OUP, 2018, pp. 415-505. On Bolívar, see the anthology Simón Bolívar fundamental, Germán Carrera Damas (ed.), Caracas, Monte Ávila, 1992 (2 vols.). The first of these two volumes is a collection of letters that is a gold mine regarding some important aspects of Bolívar’s most profound socio-political notions and ideas. “El Libertador” has been very much cited, but not much read (except for a couple of documents that everybody repeats). This is not a minor issue because Bolívar is, no doubt, the most perceptive analyst of what was at stake in political and social terms during the Spanish-American independence movements. In English, there is a good anthology: El Libertador (Writings of Simón Bolívar), David Bushnell (ed.), New York, OUP, 2003.

[50] I dealt in detail with this complex subject in El primer liberalismo español y los procesos de emancipación de América, 1808-1824 (Una revisión historiográfica del liberalismo hispánico), Mexico, El Colegio de México, 2006. In English, I summarize some of the main findings I have reached regarding liberalismo hispánico in “The Cortes of Cádiz and the Spanish Liberal Revolution of 1810-1814: Atlantic and Spanish American Dimensions”, in The Age of Atlantic Revolutions, Wim Klooster (ed.), pp. 102-123 (vol. III). On Latin American liberalism during the nineteenth-century, see the collaborations included in the book Liberalismo y poder (Latinoamérica en el siglo XIX), Iván Jaksić and Eduardo Posada Carbó (eds.), Santiago de Chile, FCE, 2011.

[51] The Americas in the Age of Revolution 1750-1850, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996, p. 7.

[52] The Four Horsemen: Riding to Liberty in Post-Napoleonic Europe, New York, OUP, 2014, p. xi. Italics are mine.

[53] The Four Horsemen, p. xi. Again, italics are mine.

[54] On this topic, a few years ago I published an essay in English: “Revoluciones hispánicas and Atlantic History: a Spanish-language interpretation and bibliography,” Age of Revolutions (An Open-Access, Peer-Reviewed Journal), May 2021: https://ageofrevolutions.com/2021/05/10/revoluciones-hispanicas-and-atlantic-history-a-spanish-language-historiographical-interpretation-and-bibliography/ A couple of years after, I wrote a revised and expanded version, this time in Spanish: “Revoluciones hispánicas e historia atlántica en español (Ensayo crítico-bibliográfico sobre un menosprecio lingüístico injustificable)”, Wirapuru (Revista latinoamericana de historia de las ideas), year 4, n. 7, 2023 (I): http://www.wirapuru.cl/images/pdf/2023/7/brena.pdf

[55] The main author responsible for the historiographic revolution in question was the French historian of Spanish origin François-Xavier Guerra (1942-2002). See his collection of essays titled Modernidad e independencias (Ensayos sobre las revoluciones hispánicas), Madrid, Mapfre, 1992 (this book by Guerra has been a classic for many years now), and another anthology of his: Figuras de la modernidad (Hispanoamérica siglos XIX-XX), Annick Lempérière and Georges Lomné (comps.), Bogotá, Taurus/Universidad Externado, 2012. To get an idea of the dynamism mentioned in the main text regarding the Spanish-speaking academia, I refer the interested readers to the extensive bibliographies, completely in Spanish, that are included at the end of the two articles cited in the previous note.