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Political Experimentation in the Age of Global Revolutions

Review products

Cristina Soriano. Tides of Revolution: Information, Insurgencies, and the Crisis of Colonial Rule in Venezuela (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018), 336 pp. ISBN: 9780826359865, $95.00.
Vanessa Mongey. Rogue Revolutionaries: The Fight for Legitimacy in the Greater Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 288 pp. ISBN: 9780812252552, 45.00.
Marcela Ternavasio. Los juegos de la política: Las independencias hispanoamericanas frente a la contrarrevolución (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores, 2021), 219 pp. ISBN: 8413402956, $ 20.00.

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 September 2023

Nicolás Alejandro González Quintero Open the ORCID record for Nicolás Alejandro González Quintero [Opens in a new window]
Nicolás Alejandro González Quintero*
Affiliation:
University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
*
Email: nagonzalezq@usp.br
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Abstract

This essay reviews six recent books that explore how revolutionary upheavals pushed imperial and republican projects alike to experiment with novel political ideas and mechanisms. These initiatives came in response to calls for representation and equality throughout the Age of Revolution. In doing so, these books reveal the failures and successes of these projects in responding to these demands. The authors of these works show that republican and imperial processes of state-building and legitimacy-building did not have a predetermined outcome—quite the opposite. To constitute themselves as valid political alternatives, revolutionary, imperial, and republican projects had to adapt to different actors’ expectations, contingencies, and growing geopolitical tensions. By exposing those adaptation processes, the six books under review demonstrate that the Age of Revolution was a period of intense political experimentation across the ideological spectrum.

Keywords

Age of Revolutionpolitical experimentationempirerepublicanismrevolutionary movements
Type
Review Article
Information
Itinerario , Volume 47 , Special Issue 3: Regimes of Bondage: The Encounter between Early Modern European and Asian Slaveries , December 2023 , pp. 377 - 389
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Research Institute for History, Leiden University

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References

1 Armitage, David and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, “Introduction: The Age of Revolutions, c. 1760–1840: Global Causation, Connection, and Comparison,” in The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840, ed. Armitage, David and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), xiiiCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Adelman, Jeremy, “An Age of Imperial Revolutions,” American Historical Review 113:2 (1 April 2008), 319–40, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.113.2.319CrossRefGoogle Scholar.