A Review of The Age of Atlantic Revolution: The Fall and Rise of a Connected World

In the last two decades, fueled by commemorations of bicentennials and a soon-to-come semi-quincentennial, Atlantic History has experienced a golden age of studies focusing on the revolutionary era. Patrick Griffin’s latest book, The Age of Atlantic Revolution: The Fall and Rise of a Connected World, is a welcome contribution to the field.  

Although it does not present original research or deep case studies, Griffin’s work offers an expansive and meticulously crafted synopsis of the period. It focuses on how Atlantic empires grappled with interconnected changes that shook the world during the 18th and 19th centuries. Building on the tradition of synthesis monographs like R. R. Palmer’s The Age of Democratic Revolutions,  Jacques Godechot’s Les Révolutions, Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Revolutions, and more recently, Wim Klooster’s Revolutions in the Atlantic World,  Griffin offers a well-crafted and substantiated monograph on the Age of Atlantic Revolution, emphasizing the centrality of networks in the demise of Atlantic empires and the rise of nation-states and reformed empires.   

The Age of Atlantic Revolution: The Fall and Rise of a Connected World by Patrick Griffin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2023. 376 pages).

The Age of Atlantic Revolution stands out by not attempting an all-encompassing synthesis of the revolutionary processes in the Atlantic. Instead, it offers a “synopsis” centered on the connections that bound and unbound Atlantic imperial polities during the period (8). Griffin examines the political dynamics that made the Age of Atlantic Revolutions distinct from the Age of Global Revolutions. He proposes a periodization (c. 1750 to c. 1850). He defines the Atlantic Revolution as an interconnected process that spanned the Atlantic shores, emphasizing the significance of warfare, imperial reforms, revolution, and the emergence of new polities and identities. Griffin offers new terminology to refer to the critical events of the Age of Atlantic Revolution, such as renaming the “Seven Years War” as the “The War for the Atlantic” and placing its beginnings in the Americas, not Europe (44). By centering exploitation, freedom, slavery, and commercial entanglement among imperial territories as axles of the Atlantic World historical process, The Age of Atlantic Revolution argues that the imperial edges were as significant as the European centers of power in shaping historical processes.  

Griffin argues that processes unfolding in Anglo-North America, the Spanish and Portuguese Americas, and Atlantic Africa were pivotal in the prosperity and collapse of Atlantic Empires. Unlike previous monographs that offered syntheses about the Atlantic revolutions, Griffin’s work tries to include diverse peoples, territories, and dynamics in its account. 

Griffin develops his “synopsis” in seven chapters, plus an introduction, prologue, and epilogue. In the first chapter, the author examines the many linkages connecting Atlantic empires, their multi-ethnic populations, and the economic and social processes that entangled and generated tensions in the Atlantic. A result of these tensions was the emergence of The War for the Atlantic, fought across all Atlantic shores and adjacencies. In Griffin’s account, networks of trade, agency of local elites and plebians, enslaved and Indigenous groups, and processes that unfolded in the interior of the Americas and Africa were central in shaping how European empires managed their survival and demise. 

He then examines the common threads of imperial reform in Atlantic polities, emphasizing that after the War for the Atlantic, all empires—regardless of being winners or losers—engaged in reform. These reforms were simultaneously similar but also differed significantly. The resistance and negotiation around reforms defined the timing, level of imperial repression and the levels of violence in the way reforms unfolded. Colonial resistance, negotiation, and participation in reforms alongside the state’s political will to implement reforms were determinants of their success or failure (54-55). Chapter Two stands out for its detailed and convincing analysis of the role of imperial reforms in Iberian American territories and West Africa. 

In the next chapter, “The French Connection,” the author compares French and British imperial reforms and political processes during the American and French revolutions. Griffin successfully denies claims of the exceptionalism of the French and British empires and focuses on how changing connections across empires affected their political communities. According to Griffin, the Age of the Atlantic Revolution changed how these connections played out. Thus, the circulation of ideas, goods, and people crossing imperial borders ushered in a new era of hope in revolution and the emergence of new identities. In this chapter, Saint Domingue—what is now modern-day Haiti—plays a significant role. 

Chapter Four explores the significance of violence and fear derived from the reforms in shaping Atlantic societies. According to Griffin, violence and terror were not exclusive to the French, Haitian or Anglo-American revolutions, but “once we transnationalize things, terror would seem inextricably bound up in the revolutionary process” (141). The author points out that violence in Latin American revolutionary movements was less prevalent than in North Atlantic regions because colonists had developed “more sophisticated and hybrid” forms of coercive labor and an increased “ability for creoles to control and manage the labor force” (140). Such a conclusion may sound less convincing to Latin Americanists, considering the long history of riots and rebellions that spanned Iberian America in the second half of the eighteenth century (Comunero Rebellion, Guarani War, Tupac Amaru, the Katarista movement, to cite just a few). 

The following chapter deals with the “Web of War” and its effect on imperial polities and colonial territories. Griffin argues that the Age of Atlantic Revolutions was also the “Age of Atlantic Aggression.” As reforms and revolutions took shape in Europe and the Americas, empires and states began a new age of expansionism and conquest. In Europe, France sought to exploit occupied territories in the Napoleonic wars. In contrast, in the New World, Spanish, Luso-Brazilian, and Anglo-America experienced a new tide of expansion over frontiers. According to the author, war made imperial linkages more unstable, with Napoleon’s invasion of Spain triggering the greatest crisis of legitimacy of any Atlantic Empire. The exception was Brazil, where warfare and the Napoleonic invasion of Portugal led to the transfer of the Portuguese throne to Brazil, offering more stability for the colony, which was economically and politically larger than the mother country.  

Subsequently, the author engages the “vexed task of ending revolution” (181). This chapter delves into the profound transformations of identity, political participation, sovereignty, and state structure. To end revolution and usher in a new era, new instruments for mobilizing and crafting legitimacy were necessary: constitutionalism and federalism were crucial creations of the period. As the end of revolutions marked the beginning of new sovereignties, it evolved from the “age of revolution” to an “age of revolutions” with more regionalized agendas and dynamics (183). The early 19th century marked the attempts at defining republican or reformed legitimate governments, demarcating the nation-state territories, and defining the rules of inclusion and citizenship. By the end of the period, a new Atlantic was emerging, marked by republics and reformed empires. While there were many similarities among regions from a comparative perspective, regional and national processes gained traction against the old sea of interconnected linkages. 

The book’s last chapter, “Reknitting the Fabric,” offers an overview of how different republics and reformed empires started memorializing the foundational moments and values and creating their pantheons of founding heroes—even though the agents involved in these processes often had conflicting views about what the nation should become. Attaching the “nation” to the “state” was a significant operation that created new legitimacy for governments and new ways of mobilizing populations. As a result, even though the Atlantic Revolution ended with the end of colonial rule in the Americas, the many revolutions continued into the next decades, with essential developments regarding citizenship, territory, freedom, coercion, and sovereignty into the 1850s. 

The Age of Atlantic Revolutions offers a provocative synopsis of the revolutions in the Atlantic World. While previous monographs attempting to synthesize the Atlantic developments in the revolutionary era were excessively Eurocentric or focused on the North Atlantic dynamics, Griffin tries to offer a more inclusive perspective. The author must be commended for the expansiveness of examples and arguments. By centering violence, exploitation, slavery, freedom, revolution, and hope as axles of the historical process, Griffin offers a convincing explanation to understand the similarities, differences, interconnections and contradictions of the Age of Atlantic Revolution. Nevertheless, Spanish America, and especially Brazil and Africa, do not appear as central as British, French, and Irish territories, even though the book argues that political peripheries played a critical role in shaping imperial reforms, the course of revolutions, and the emergence of new polities in the Atlantic World.  As a synopsis, many events and processes of the revolutionary Atlantic were left out of the book. Specifically, one could criticize the still present centrality of northwestern European empires as the sole origin of Enlightenment ideas and the source of modern political ideas. However, much has been brought into the narrative and analysis of the revolutionary era, including the role of political peripheries in the American West, West Africa and Iberian America, with an emphasis that no author has given in an extensive narrative of the era of Atlantic revolutions. This book will generate lively academic debates among Atlanticists, Latin Americanists, Early-Americanists, Europeanists, and Africanists interested in empire and revolution. It will serve as an excellent monograph to spearhead debates in graduate seminars and an excellent introduction to the period for undergraduates. The Age of Atlantic Revolution is a refreshing monograph that does not try to offer a general synthesis; instead, it builds on the vast Atlantic historiography of the past decades on different regions of the Atlantic to provide a fresh perspective to a traditional theme.  

Fabrício Prado is an associate professor of history. He teaches courses on Colonial Latin America and the Atlantic World; he is the author of Edge of Empire: Atlantic Networks and Revolution in Bourbon Rio de la Plata (the University of California Press, 2015), among other publications.