Chapter 17
Atlantic Revolutions and Their Echoes 1750–1914

MARGIN REVIEW QUESTIONS

Q. In what ways did the ideas of the Enlightenment contribute to the Atlantic revolutions?

• The Enlightenment promoted the idea that human political and social arrangements could be engineered, and improved, by human action. • New ideas of liberty, equality, free trade, religious tolerance, republicanism, human rationality, popular sovereignty, natural rights, the consent of the governed, and social contracts developed during the Enlightenment, providing the intellectual underpinnings of the Atlantic revolutions.

Q. What was revolutionary about the American Revolution, and what was not?

• The American Revolution was revolutionary in that it marked a decisive political change. • It was not revolutionary in that it sought to preserve the existing liberties of the colonies rather than to create new ones.

Q. How did the French Revolution differ from the American Revolution?

• While the American Revolution expressed the tensions of a colonial relationship with a distant imperial power, the French insurrection was driven by sharp conflicts within French society. • The French Revolution, especially during its first five years, was a much more violent, far-reaching, and radical movement than its American counterpart. • The French revolutionaries perceived themselves as starting from scratch in recreating the social order, while the Americans sought to restore or build upon earlier freedoms. • Unlike the American Revolution, the French Revolution led to efforts to create a wholly new society, symbolized by such things as a new calendar, a new administrative system, and new street names. • The French Revolution also differed from the American Revolution in the way that its influence spread. At least until the United States became a world power at the end of the nineteenth century, what inspired others was primarily the example of its revolution and its constitution. French influence, by contrast, spread primarily through conquest.

Q. What was distinctive about the Haitian Revolution, both in world history generally and in the history of Atlantic revolutions?

• Its key distinctive feature in both world history and the history of Atlantic revolutions was that it was the only completely successful slave revolt.

Q. How were the Spanish American revolutions shaped by the American, French, and Haitian revolutions that happened earlier?

• Napoleon conquered Spain and Portugal, deposing the monarchs who ruled over Latin America and forcing Latin Americans to take action. • Enlightenment ideas that had inspired earlier revolutions also inspired the revolutions in Latin America. • The violence of the French and Haitian revolutions was a lesson to Latin American elites that political change could easily get out of hand and was fraught with danger.

Q. What accounts for the end of Atlantic slavery during the nineteenth century?

• Enlightenment thinkers in eighteenth-century Europe had become increasingly critical of slavery as a violation of the natural rights of every person, and the public pronouncements of the American and French revolutions about liberty and equality likewise focused attention on this obvious breach of those principles. • Some Christians in Britain and the United States felt that slavery was incompatible with their religious beliefs. • There was a growing belief that slavery was not essential for economic progress. • The actions of slaves, including the successful slave rebellion in Haiti and unsuccessful rebellions elsewhere, hastened the end of slavery by making slavery appear politically unwise. • Abolitionist movements brought growing pressure on governments to close down the trade in slaves and then to ban slavery itself.

Q. How did the end of slavery affect the lives of the former slaves?

• In most cases, the economic lives of the former slaves did not improve dramatically. • Outside of Haiti, newly freed people did not achieve anything close to political equality. • The greatest change was that former slaves were now legally free.

Q. What accounts for the growth of nationalism as a powerful political and personal identity in the nineteenth century?

• The Atlantic revolutions declared that sovereignty lay with the people. • Increasingly, populations saw themselves as citizens of a nation, deeply bound to their fellows by ties of blood, culture, or common experience. • Other bonds weakened during the nineteenth century as science weakened the hold of religion on some, and migration to industrial cities or abroad diminished allegiance to local communities. At the same time, printing and the publishing industry standardized a variety of dialects into a smaller number of European languages, which allowed a growing reading public to think of themselves as members of a common linguistic group or nation. • Nationalism was often presented as a reawakening of older linguistic or cultural identities and certainly drew upon songs, dances, folktales, historical experiences, and collective memories of earlier cultures. • Governments throughout the Western world claimed to act on behalf of their nations and deliberately sought to instill national loyalties in their citizens through schools, public rituals, the mass media, and military service. • Nationalism took on a variety of political ideologies as groups across the political spectrum tried to channel nationalism for their own purposes.

Q. What were the achievements and limitations of nineteenth-century feminism?

• The achievements of the women’s movement include the admission of small numbers of women to universities and growing literacy rates among women overall. • In the United States, a number of states passed legislation allowing women to manage and control their own property and wages, separate from their husbands. • Divorce laws were liberalized in some places. • Professions such as medicine opened to a few women, while teaching beckoned to many more. • Nursing was professionalized in Britain and attracted thousands of women into it, and social work, soon to be another female-dominated profession, took shape in the United States. • The movement prompted an unprecedented discussion about the role of women in modern society. • As far as limitations, aside from New Zealand, women failed to secure the right to vote in the nineteenth century. • Nowhere did nineteenth-century feminism have really revolutionary consequences.