Chapter 12 - Planet of the People II: Feminists, Abolitionists, and los liberales

Summary

Chapter 12 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet continues the book’s exploration of cities’ role as creators and creations of the age of revolution. The revolution in Paris gave a boost to feminist movements in many Atlantic cities, movements for the emancipation of Jews that opened the gates of Europe’s ghettos, and the movement to abolish slavery. It visits colonial cities and plantations in French Saint-Domingue to follow the most radical revolution of the era – the uprising of enslaved people that resulted in the independence of a black republic of Haiti. After Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in Paris, using his armies to spread populist dictatorships to other European capitals and re-impose slavery in the Americas, he gave new impetus to abolitionism in Britain and the United States while destabilizing the centuries-old webs of imperial power that radiated from Madrid and Lisbon to Mexico City, Lima, and Rio de Janeiro. French revolutionary ideas inspired leaders based in the numerous spaces across Iberian America identified as “liberal” cities to cut those ties and found new nation states.