This chapter recasts America’s revolutionary origins as an imperial crisis brought on by changes in the Atlantic. It surveys Atlantic-wide developments over the course of the eighteenth century to suggest that the issues British Americans grappled with in the 1760s were not exceptional. The watery space was transformed by the movement of peoples, goods, and ideas for all. Slavery and the slave trade were the catalysts to systemic change. With these changes, the Atlantic became an entangled space. War heightened the stakes for domination of the oceanic system. Imperial reform was the result. All creoles throughout the Atlantic world experienced similar tensions over relations with their respective metropoles, and consolidation of the Atlantic created similar conflicts within all Atlantic societies. The chapter then explores how and why the British case diverged from the Atlantic-wide model and how a crisis over systemic consolidation became a civil war that fractured an empire. What we know as the American Revolution represented the fallout from these tangled dynamics.

This chapter revisits the classic issue of the origins of Latin American independence and questions a set of prevailing historiographic assumptions. From a review of political conspiracies and mobilizations in eighteenth-century Latin America, it argues that Spanish and Portuguese colonial sovereignty faced significant challenges well before the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 1807; that the role of popular sectors was crucial to revolutionary and counterrevolutionary politics in the eighteenth century; and that the conflicts in Iberian American territory were linked to wider political dynamics in the Atlantic world. Without adopting a determinist argument that Bourbon reform or American identity explains Latin American independence in the nineteenth century, the chapter disputes the idea that a stable and legitimate “old regime” only unraveled after 1808. It also suggests that significant patterns of political contestation in the late colonial period found new expression in the novel context of the early nineteenth century.

Known as enemies of all nations, pirates emerged out of a contest for New World resources and land amidst an increasingly lawless early modern Atlantic World. While Spanish treasure fleets faced attacks from brazen British privateers, such as Henry Morgan, piracy became commonplace by the start of the eighteenth century. Although some engaged in slaving and certainly embraced violence, many pirates established outlaw communities based on democratic ideals that would come to characterize the Enlightenment. By the Age of Revolution, instability and intermittent warfare allowed sea bandits such as the Laffite brothers to flourish once again during the War of American Independence and the Napoleonic Wars, especially in coastal enclaves like Louisiana and Texas and on smaller Caribbean islands such as Guadeloupe. The wars of independence in Spanish America likewise saw an upsurge in smuggling and privateering. As new nations began to curtail the licensing of these privateers, their numbers and significance waned by the 1830s.

France was at the centre of a transnational process of nineteenth-century European state formation. Since states have often reformed themselves as a result of interaction with one another, the book begins by taking a wide angle on the development of the French case, situating it within the context of state formation in Europe and the Americas. Not only were the French influenced by the progress of rival states, they also shaped the way in which other European and American states were formed. Under Napoleon, for instance, the French exported their tax system across Europe, shaping the subsequent development of taxation in large parts of Germany, Italy and the Low Countries. Also discussed here is the historiography of the French state, and its emphasis on the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period of 1789–1815 as the formative years of the nineteenth-century French state. This book, by contrast, demonstrates the importance of the post-Napoleonic period in state formation, and the opening chapter outlines this argument.

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.

Chapter 11 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet explores cities’ role as creators and creations of the political revolutions of the late-eighteenth-century Atlantic world. It argues that traditions of urban “freedoms” going back to the revival of European cities, imperial conflict throughout the world between regimes based in London and Paris, restive settler colonial cities in the Americas, and the Atlantic economy’s reliance on enslavement made the Atlantic into the world’s first “cauldron” of modern revolution. It traces the close connections between the American Revolution that started in Boston and the French one in Paris, while investigating the ways revolutionaries used the spaces of a cities designed for colonial or authoritarian control to overthrow otherwise all-powerful-seeming regimes, replacing them with structures designed for democracy or People Power.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, as Cuba was gearing up to become one of the world’s largest sugar producer for the world markets, planters and colonial officials in Havana were rolling back many historic protections for smallholders, enslaved people, and free people of African descent, prudential measures that the Crown had historically encouraged as a means of “keeping the peace.” Yet, in Santiago, in the island’s east, many such measures remained in place, and the new coercive policies received a locally specific interpretation inside first-instance district courts. The demographic weight of the free population of African descent and its importance to the economy meant that officials could not rely on coercion alone to control them. Historically, it had been through custom that Santiago’s Afro-descendants had managed their relations with state authorities and with local enslavers and landholders. In an Age of Revolutions, at a time of profound shifts across the Caribbean, they maintained their ground as well as access to custom-based legal protections, even while their Havana counterparts saw theirs besieged on an unprecedented scale.