What were the three major revolutions in the Atlantic world during the 18th century?

A new look at a contentious period in the history of the Atlantic world

Within just a half century, the American, French, Haitian, and Spanish American revolutions transformed the Atlantic world. This book is the first to analyze these events through a comparative lens, revealing several central themes in the field of Atlantic history. From the murky position of the European empire between the Old and New Worlds to slavery and diaspora, Wim Klooster offers insights into the forces behind the many conflicts in the Atlantic world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Digging deeply into the structural causes and oppressive environments in which these revolutions occurred, Klooster debunks the popular myth that the “people” rebelled against a small ruling elite, arguing instead that the revolutions were civil wars in which all classes fought on both sides. The book reveals the extent to which mechanisms of popular mobilization were visible in the revolutions. For example, although Blacks and Indians often played an important role in the success of the revolutions, they were never compensated once new regimes rose to power. Nor was democracy a goal or product of these revolutions, which usually spawned authoritarian polities.

The new edition covers the latest historiographical trends in the study of the Atlantic world, including new research regarding the role of privateers. Drawing on fresh research – such as primary documents and extant secondary literature – Klooster ultimately concludes that the Enlightenment was the ideological inspiration for the Age of Revolutions, although not its cause.

Check out our Atlantic Revolutions Reading List – two lists of top texts to read on the American Revolution compiled by Julia Gaffield and Wim Klooster. 

Roberto Breña wrote a critical bibliography of Spanish language literature on the Latin American revolutions in Atlantic perspective. Check it out here. 

*** The goal of this bibliography is to link revolts and revolutionary movements in Europe, Africa, and the Americans. Be sure to consult our lists on Latin American, Haitian, American, and French Revolutions.***

Adderley, Rosanne. New Negroes from Africa: Slave Trade Abolition and Free African Settlement in the Nineteenth-Century Caribbean. Indiana University Press, 2006.

Andrews, Stuart. The Rediscovery of America: Transatlantic Crosscurrents in an Age of Revolution. St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

Alpaugh, Micah. Friends of Freedom: The Rise of Social Movements in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Armitage, David and Sanja Subrahmanyam, eds. The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1769-1840. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

—, David, Alison Bashford, and Sujit Sivasundaram, eds. Oceanic Histories. Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Applewhite, Harriet B. and Darline G. Levy, eds. Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution. The University of Michigan Press, 1990.

Auslander, Leora. Cultural Revolutions: Everyday Life and Politics in Britain, North America, and France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.

Baker, Keith Michael and Dan Edelstein. Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions. Stanford University Press, 2015.

Ballone, Angela. The 1624 Tumult of Mexico in Perspective (c. 1620-1650): Authority and Conflict Resolution in the Iberian Atlantic. Brill, 2017.

Barcia, Manuel. 

—. West African Warfare in Bahia and Cuba: Soldier Slaves in the Atlantic World, 1807-1844. Oxford University Press, 2014.

Bennett, Herman L. African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.

Benson, Devyn Spence. Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution. University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

Borucki, Alex. From Shipmates to Soldiers: Emerging Black Identities in the Rio de la Plata. University of New Mexico Press, 2015.

Brinton, Crane. The Anatomy of Revolution. Vintage Books, 1965.

Brown, Gordon. Toussaint’s Clause: The Founding Fathers and the Haitian Revolution. University Press of Mississippi, 2005.

Brown, Jonathan C. Cuba’s Revolutionary World. Harvard University Press, 2017.

Brown, Vincent. Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War. Harvard University Press, 2020.

Browne, Randy M. Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.

Burnard, Trevor. Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650-1820. University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Burnard, Trevor and John Garrigus. The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Burroughs, Robert and Richard Huzzey, eds. The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade: British Policies, Practices and Representations of Naval Coercion. Manchester University Press, 2015.

Chopra, Ruma. Almost Home: Maroons between Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone. Yale University Press, 2018.

Clark, J.C.D. Thomas Paine: Britain, America, and France in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution. Oxford University Press, 2018.

Cormack, William S. Patriots, Royalists, and Terrorists in the West Indies: The French Revolution in Martinique and Guadeloupe, 1789-1802. University of Toronto Press, 2019.

Cosner, Charlotte A. The Golden Leaf: How Tobacco Shaped Cuba and the Atlantic World. Vanderbilt University Press, 2015.

Couti, Jacqueline. Dangerous Creole Liaisons: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses from 1806-1897. Liverpool University Press, 2016.

Crabtree, Sarah. Holy Nation: The Transatlantic Quaker Ministry in an Age of Revolution. University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Crawford, Matthew James. The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016.

Cromwell, Jesse. The Smugglers’ World: Illicit Trade and Atlantic Communities in Eighteenth-Century Venezuela. University of North Carolina Press, 2018.

David, David Brion.  The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823.  Cornell University Press, 1976.

Delle, James A. and Elizabeth C. Clay, eds. Archaeology of Domestic Landscapes of the Enslaved in the Caribbean. University of Florida Press, 2019.

Dubois, Laurent.  A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804.  University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Ducharme, Michel. The Idea of Liberty in Canada during the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, 1776-1838. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014. 

Duffy, Michael.  Soldiers, Sugar and Seapower: The British Expeditions to the West Indies and the War against Revolutionary France. Oxford, 1987.

Duke, Eric D. Building a Nation: Caribbean Federation in the Black Diaspora. University Press of Florida, 2018.

Dunn, Susan.  Sister Revolutions: French Lightning, American Light. Faber & Faber, Inc., 1999.

Echeverri, Marcela. Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution: Reform, Revolution, and Royalism in the Northern Andes, 1780-1825. Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Epstein, James. Scandal of Colonial Rule: Power and Subversion in the British Atlantic during the Age of Revolution. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Falola, Toyin and Matt Childs, eds., The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World. Indiana University Press, 2005.

Fanning, Sara. Caribbean Crossing: African Americans and the Haitian Emigration Movement. New York University Press, 2015.

Ferrer, Ada.  “Talk About Haiti: The Archive and the Atlantic’s Haitian Revolution.”  In Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Americas, ed. Doris Lorraine Garraway.  University of Virginia Press, 2008.

Ferreira, Roquinaldo. Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World: Angola and Brazil during the Era of the Slave Trade. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Finucane, Adrian. The Temptations of Trade: Britain, Spain, and the Struggle for Empire. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Fischer, Sibylle. Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution.  Duke University Press, 2004.

Fitz, Caitlin. Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions. W.W. Norton, 2016. 

Force, Pierre. Wealth and Disaster: Atlantic Migrations from a Pyrenean Town in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.

Fougère, Eric. Les Îles maladies: Léproseries et lazarets de Nouvelle-Calédonie, Guyane et Guadeloupe. Garnier, 2018.

Fradera, Josep M. The Imperial Nation: Citizens and Subjects in the British, French, Spanish, and American Empires. Princeton University Press, 2018.

Frykman, Niklas. The Bloody Flag: Mutiny in the Age of Atlantic Revolution. University of California Press, 2020.

Gerbner, Katharine. Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.

Gharala, Norah L.A. Taxing Blackness: Free Afromexican Tribute in Bourbon New Spain. University of Alabama Press, 2019. 

Godechot, Jacques León. France and the Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, 1770-1799. Rowen, Herbert H., trans. The Free Press, 1965.

Gómez, Pablo F. The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic. University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

Geggus, David P.  “The British Government and the Saint Dominique Slave Revolt, 1791-1793.” The English Historical Review XCVI (1981): 285-305.

Geggus, David P.  The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World.  University of South Carolina Press, 2001.

Greene, Jack P., Franklin W. Knight, Virginia Guedea, & Jaime E. Rodríguez O. “AHR Forum: Revolutions in the Americas,” American Historical Review 105 (February 2000): 92-152.

Grenouilleau, Olivier. Fortunes de mer, sirènes colonials: Économie maritime, colonies et développement: la France, vers 1660-1914. CNRS Éditions, 2019.

van Groesen, Michiel. Amsterdam’s Atlantic: Print Culture and the Making of Dutch Brazil. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Hague, Stephen. The Gentleman’s House in the British Atlantic World, 1680-1780. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links. University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Hawthorne, Walter. From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity, and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1830 (African Studies). Cambridge University Press, 2010. 

Heinsen, Johan. Mutiny in the Danish Atlantic World: Convicts, Sailors and a Dissonant Empire. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

Herzog, Tamar. Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas. Harvard University Press, 2015.

Hickey, Donald R. “America’s Response to the Slave Revolt in Haiti, 1791-1806.” Journal of the Early Republic 2 (Winter 1982): 368-73.

Hogarth, Rana A. Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840. University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

Holcomb, Julie L. Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy. Cornell University Press, 2016.

Horne, Gerald. Negro Comrades of the Crown: African Americans and the British Empire Fight the U.S. before Emancipation. NYU Press, 2012.

Hunt, Alfred N. Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean.  Louisiana State University Press, 1988.

Iannini, Christopher. “‘The Itinerant Man’: Crèvecoeur’s Caribbean, Raynal’s Revolution, and the Fate of Atlantic Cosmopolitanism.”  William & Mary Quarterly 61, no. 2 (2004): 201-34.

Innes, Joanna, and Mark Philp. Re-Imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain, Ireland, 1750-1850. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Jackson, Mauriece, and Jacqueline Bacon, eds. African Americans and the Haitian Revolution: Selected Essays and Historical Documents. Routledge, 2009.

Jasanoff, Maya. “Revolutionary Exiles: The American Loyalist and French Émigré Diasporas.” In The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760-1840, eds. David Armitage and Sanja Subrahmanyam. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Pp. 37-58.

Johnson, Rashauna. Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions. Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Johnson, Ronald Angelo. Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance. The University of Georgia Press, 2014.

Johnson, Sherry. Climate and Catastrophe in Cuba and the Atlantic World in the Age of Revolution. University of North Carolina University Press, 2011.

Jones, Colin and Dror Wahrman, eds. The Age of Cultural Revolutions: Britain and France, 1750-1820.  University of California Press, 2002.

Klooster, Wim. Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History. NYU Press, 2009.

—. The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World. Cornell University Press, 2016.

—, and Gert Oostindie. Realm between Empires: The Second Dutch Atlantic, 1680-1815. Cornell University Press, 2018.

Kramer, Lloyd.  Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolutions. University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Kvande, Marta.  Everyday Revolutions: Eighteenth-Century Women Transforming Public and Private.  Rosemont, 2008.

Landers, Jane. Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions. Harvard University Press, 2010.

Langley, Lester D. The Americas in the Age of Revolution,1750-1850. Yale University Press, 1996.

Legnani, Nicole D. The Business of Conquest: Empire, Love, and Law in the Atlantic World. Notre Dame Press, 2020.

Lepore, Jill. “A World of Paine.” In Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of a Nation, ed. Alfred Young & Ray Raphael. Knopf, 2011.

Lindsay, Lisa. Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth-Century Odyssey from America to Africa. University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

Liss, Peggy K. Atlantic Empires: The Network of Trade and Revolution, 1713–1826.  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.

Livesay, Daniel. Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833. University of North Carolina Press, 2018.

Lovejoy, Paul E. Jihad in West Africa During the Age of Revolution. Ohio University Press, 2016.

Marques, Leonardo. The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776-1867. Yale University Press, 2016.

Mattes, Armin. Citizens of a Common Intellectual Homeland: The Transatlantic Origins of American Democracy and Nationhood. University of Virginia Press, 2015.

McDonald, Kevin P. Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves: Colonial America and the Indo-Atlantic World. University of California Press, 2015.

Metcalf, Alida C. Mapping the Atlantic World, Circa 1500. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020.

McKee, Sally. The Exile’s Song: Edmond Dédé and the Unfinished Revolutions of the Atlantic World. Yale University Press, 2017.

Miller, Marla R. The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution. University of Massachusetts Press, 2006.

Moore Lisa L., Joanna Brooks, and Caroline Wigginton. Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions. Oxford University Press, 2012.

Morgan, Gwenda and Peter Rushton. The British and French in the Atlantic 1650-1800: Comparisons and Contrasts. Routledge, 2019.

Morrison, Karen Y. Cuba’s Racial Crucible: The Sexual Economy of Social Identities, 1750-2000. Indiana University Press, 2015.

Muller, Dalia Antonia. Cuban Émigrés and Independence in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf World. University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

Murphy, Tessa. The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.

Oliver, Bette W. Jacques-Pierre Brissot in America and France, 1788-1793: In Search of Better Worlds. Lexington Books, 2016.

O’Shaughnessy, Andrew Jackson.  An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.

Palmer, Jennifer L. Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic. University of Pennsylvania, 2016.

Palmer, R. R. The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800. Princeton University Press, 1959.

—. “The World Revolution of the West: 1763-1801.” Political Science Quarterly 69 (March 1954): 1-14.

Parrish, David. Jacobitism and Anti-Jacobitism in the British Atlantic World, 1688-1727. Royal Historical Society, 2017.

Perl-Rosenthal, Nathan. Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution. Harvard University Press, 2015.

Petley, Christer. White Fury: A Jamaican Slaveholder and the Age of Revolution. Oxford University Press, 2018.

Picó, Fernando. One Frenchman, Four Revolutions: General Ferrand and the Peoples of the Caribbean.  Marcus Wiener Publishers, 2011.

Pluymers, Keith. No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.

Polasky, Janet. Revolutionaries Without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World. Yale University Press, 2015.

Pullin, Naomi. Female Friends and the Making of Transatlantic Quakerism, 1650-1750. Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Quintanilla, Mark S. An Irishman’s Life on the Caribbean Island of St. Vincent, 1787-90: The Letter Book of Attorney General Michael Keane. Four Courts Press, 2019. 

Quintero Saravia, Gonzalo M. Bernardo de Gálvez: Spanish Hero of the American Revolution. University of North Carolina Press, 2018.

Racine, Karen. Francisco de Miranda: A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution. Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.

Rapport, Mike. The Unruly City: Paris, London, and New York in the Age of Revolutions. Basic Books, 2017.

Rappyleye, Charles. Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution. Simon & Schuster, 2006.

Reis, João José. Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia.  John Hopkins University Press, 1993.

Rey, Terry. The Priest and the Prophetess: Abbé Ouvière, Romaine Rivière, and the Revolutionary Atlantic World. Oxford University Press, 2017.

Roberts, Warren. A Place in History: Albany in the Age of Revolution, 1775-1825. Excelsior Editions/State University of New York Press, 2010.

Røge, Pernille. “Rethinking Africa in the Age of Revolution: The evolution of Jean-Baptiste-Léonard Durand’s Voyage au Sénégal.” Atlantic Studies: Special Issue: Rethinking the Age of Revolution. 13, Issue 3 (2016); 389-406.

—, Pernille. Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire: France in the Americas and Africa, c. 1750-1802. Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Rood, Daniel B. The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean. Oxford University Press, 2017.

Ross, Richard Jeffrey and Brian Philip Owensby, eds. Justice in a New World: Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America. New York University Press, 2018. 

Rugemer, Edward B. Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World. Harvard University Press, 2018. 

Sahle, Esther. Quakers in the British Atlantic World, 1660-1800. Boydell and Brewer, 2021.

Scott, Julius S. “Afro-American Sailors and the International Communication Network: The Case of Newport Bowers.”  In African Americans and the Haitian Revolution: Selected Essays and Historical Document, ed. Maurice Jackson, and Jacqueline Bacon. Routledge, 2009.

Schnakenbourg, Eric. Le monde atlantique: Un espace en mouvement. Armand Colin, 2021.

Semley, Lorelle. To Be Free and French: Citizenship in France’s Atlantic Empire. Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Seijas, Tatiana and Jake Frederick. Spanish Dollars and Sister Republics: The Money that Made Mexico and the United States. Rowman Littlefield, 2016.

Sepinwall, Alyssa. “Atlantic Amnesia: French Historians, the Haitian Revolution and the 2004-6 CAPES Exam.” Proceedings of the Western Soc. for French History 34 (2006): 300-314.

Shovlin, John. Trading With The Enemy: Britain, France, and the 18th-Century Quest for a Peaceful World Order. Yale University Press, 2021.

Slauter, Will. “The Paragraph as Information Technology: How News Traveled in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World.”  Annales HSS 67, no. 2 (2012): 253–78.

Sparks, Randy. Africans in the Old South: Mapping Exceptional Lives Across the Atlantic World. Harvard University Press, 2016.

—. Where the Negroes are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade. Harvard University Press, 2014.

Stein, Barbara H. and Stanley J. Crisis in an Atlantic Empire: Spain and New Spain, 1808-1810. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.

Stone, Erin Woodruff. Captives of Conquest: Slavery in the Early Modern Spanish Caribbean. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.

Storozynski, Alex. The Peasant Prince: Thaddeus Kosciuszko and the Age of Revolution. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press, 2009.

Sutto, Antoinette Patricia. Loyal Protestants and Dangerous Papists: Maryland and the Politics of Religion in the English Atlantic, 1630-1690. University of Virginia Press, 2015.

Sweet, James H. Domingos Alvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World. University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Thompson, Michael D. Working on the Dock of the Bay: Labor and Enterprise in an Antebellum Southern Port. University of South Carolina Press, 2015.

Thornton, John. Africa and the Africans in the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge University Press, 1998.

—. Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500-1800. Routledge, 2000.

Truxes, Thomas M., ed. Ireland, France, and the Atlantic in a Time of War: Reflections on the Bordeaux-Dublin Letters, 1757. Routledge, 2107.

Twinam, Ann. Purchasing Whiteness: Pardos, Mulattos, and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies. Stanford University Press, 2015.

Van Horn, Jennifer. The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America. University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

Vasconcellos, Colleen A. Slavery, Childhood, and Abolition in Jamaica, 1788-1838. University of Georgia Press, 2015.

Wallerstein, Immanuel, “The French Revolution as World Event” in Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms. Temple University Press, 2001, 7-22.

Wareing, John. Indentured Migration and the Servant Trade from London to America, 1618-1718. Oxford University Press, 2017.

Wheat, David. Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640. University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

White, Ashli.  Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic.  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

White, Sophie. Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana. University of North Carolina Press, 2019.

Wilson, Lee B. Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America, 1660-1783. Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Wimmler, Jutta. The Sun King’s Atlantic: Drugs, Demons and Dyestuffs in the Atlantic World, 1640-1730. Brill, 2017.

Title image: Battle of the Chesapeake

*The above list was compiled by the editors of Age of Revolutions with further assistance from Kristen Block and Zachary Stoltzfus.*

**Think we should add a specific text to the above list? Send us a message in the comment section below.**

What were the revolutions of the 18th century?

What were the 4 Atlantic Revolutions?

What do the 3 revolutions have in common?

What were the two most important political revolutions of 18th century?