Janet Polasky explicitly connects her book Revolutions without Borders to R. R. Palmer's landmark The Age of Democratic Revolution (1959–64), and the comparison is apt. Polasky updates Palmer's study by drawing on the vast amount of research that has occurred since its publication and by bringing additional lenses of gender analysis and racial concerns to bear, especially in recounting how revolutions played out in Africa and Saint-Domingue (Haiti). Further, Polasky writes as a self-conscious Atlanticist, demonstrating how the field has matured in recent years. The result is an important work that aids all scholars who work on the Atlantic world of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Polasky is most interested in the way the ideals of revolutionary change crossed borders. In narrating these developments, she moves along two axes. The first is chronological. Polasky, despite the challenge of narrating overlapping events, traces successive waves of revolution around the Atlantic. Thus, in her first chapter she focuses on the American Revolution before tracking revolutions in Geneva, the Netherlands, and Belgium. Further waves of revolution in France and Poland follow. Polasky weaves into her narrative developments in the Caribbean, especially the revolution on Saint-Domingue, and on the African coast. She also considers domestic revolutions, as men and women ponder and enact the implications of revolutionary change for their loves and marriages.
The second axis of organization is archival, sorting according to the type of sources that best inform and describe given topics. Chapters trace, in turn, the impact of pamphlets, political journals, newspapers and their connection to political clubs, oral culture and rumors, family correspondence, and novels that wrestled with domestic themes. In this self-conscious way, Polasky helps us think about the many ways sources can be deployed, as well as the practical need for multiple types of sources for anyone attempting to tell an Atlantic story. Polasky also demonstrates the requirement of wide reading in secondary sources, as mastery over so many regions may be too much to ask of any individual.
In drawing on this range of sources, Polasky assembles a compelling cast of characters who crossed political borders, transmitted political ideas, and contemplated what they meant on national and personal levels. By grounding her account in the experience of identifiable people, Polasky makes clear the trends of revolutionary exchange are personal as well as structural. As Polasky recreates their experiences, she helps readers appreciate them as well.
Scholars of Britain will find that Polasky has touched on several significant British concerns from the period, beyond merely setting the late-eighteenth-century stage on which the British Empire acted. Polasky identifies British reformers who sympathized with the Atlantic revolutionary ferment and attempted to convince and rally their countrymen. She also pays attention to the abolitionists in Britain, their support of freed slaves and writers such as Olaudah Equiano, their founding of the Sierra Leone colony, and the way that colony developed in ways unforeseen by its backers. Finally, she ties in the Irish revolt of 1798. Noticeably missing in significant ways, though, are leaders of the British government at the time, especially William Pitt the Younger and Edmund Burke, men who were not always so enamored with the desire for liberty and revolution that Polasky narrates.
These absences raise three important issues for thinking about the revolutionary Atlantic of the late eighteenth century. First, for all of the talk of “revolution,” this reviewer was not convinced that the term formed an adequate umbrella for all the events that occurred. In fact, the content of what reformers and revolutionaries desired varied greatly across the Atlantic, as did their methods. Some pamphleteers blanched at the thought of French revolutionary armies forcing other nations toward freedom. Clearly many reformers at the time could advocate some reforms without being in favor of “revolution” in general. The French Revolution, after all, rejected many of its earlier supporters. Similarly, in the American context, many supporters of that Revolution could still be horrified at the French Revolution's Terror, at the French invasion of other European states, or at the bloodshed in Saint-Domingue. Further, the treatment of the domestic revolutions Polasky believes were aborning did not necessarily integrate into the other upheavals of the period. Second, in her sympathetic interest in revolution and revolutionaries, Polasky cannot easily account for their failures. The book ends as a tragedy, as these revolutionaries do not achieve all or even much of what they set out to accomplish. Instead, they (and the reader) are forced to witness the triumph of nationalism over cosmopolitanism. However, the causes of these failures are not accounted for. If the Atlantic World was so caught up in revolutionary fervor, what stopped it? Polasky might have wrestled at greater length with the failures of revolution in this period. Finally, the book does not take on the Latin American revolutions of the early nineteenth century. Although subsequent to the period Polasky recounts, they might have been fruitfully integrated into the story.
In her acknowledgments, Polasky notes that this volume caps forty years of her thinking about the era of eighteenth-century revolutions. That research shows both in the text of the volume and in its supporting scholarly apparatus. The book demonstrates important scholarship that should be attended to by scholars of both Atlantic history and British history. It certainly should be assigned in graduate seminars, thereby to challenge the next generation of scholars with both impressive research and the way it opens up additional, transatlantic paths to follow.
