This chapter addresses the three earliest constitutional lineages, in the USA, France and Poland. It shows how these constitutional forms were shaped by imperialism and how the intensification of military policies in the eighteenth century defined the patterns of citizenship that they developed. It also shows how, diversely, each constitutions established a polity with militarized features, so that the different between national and imperial rule was often slight. To explain this, it addresses Napoleonic constitutionalism in Fance and the tiered citizenship regimes that characterized the American Republic in the nineteenth century.

In 1830, a group of forty officers and men from the recently deposed Federalist government of the province of Mendoza, in the Argentine Confederation, were massacred by their erstwhile Indigenous allies. The Federalists had sought asylum with Creole Loyalists to the Spanish Crown – exiled from southern Chile – who had facilitated the Federalist alliance with Indigenous groups. The massacre occurred at Chacay, in the south of present-day Mendoza, in what was then an Indigenous frontier zone. Though a relatively unimportant battle, it nonetheless highlights certain key dynamics of the complex political situation of post-independence South America. As the wars of independence spilled over into civil wars in Chile and the Río de la Plata, fluctuating alliances of émigrés and Indigenous groups continued to pose a cross-border threat to the newly independent political authorities. This chapter argues that exile played an important role in the process of border formation and the establishment of republican sovereignty in the region.

This chapter covers: the beginning of reforms: first of constitutional and then of economic reform; laissez faire continues to be the popular ideology for economists; growing contrast between laissez faire and socialist ideologies; laissez faire continues to stress the pursuit of efficiency and growth over that of equity; socialism stresses the promotion of equality; many forms of socialism are developed; Darwinian views of laissez faire continue to prevail in the United States and in the United Kingdom; laissez faire continues to ignore equity; the income distribution becomes more uneven; economics becomes progressively more “scientific” with the increasing use of mathematics; and the concept of equilibrium continues to prevail and its impact on policies remains strong until 1930.

Revolutions sprang from a variety of causes rather than simply from Enlightenment. Iberia and Ibero-America absorbed whatever Enlightened ideas or practices responded to political, economic and social necessities. The Spanish and Portuguese governments sought thereby to tighten imperial control. Individual reformers, often independently of government, regarded the new ideas as instruments of amelioration. International conflicts and revolutionary movements in the United States and France, as well as internal tensions, introduced new factors and pressures. These accompanied the strains on both the Spanish and Portuguese governments during the war years between 1793 and 1808. The Portuguese government escaped the political collapse and crisis of legitimacy which befell Spain and its empire, and managed to reconstitute itself in Brazil. The Enlightenment had contributed greatly to the critique of Royal absolutism in both empires and of metropolitan dominance. A range of influential Enlightened figures emerged in each of the component territories of both monarchies. The roots of Iberian Liberalism may be traced to their ideas and actions. A counter-critique attacked Enlightened ideas along with Liberal constitutional forms. The ensuing polemic and its political manifestation, especially after 1814-15, blamed revolutionary activity on the influence of the Enlightenment.

The introduction establishes a framework for the volume as a whole. It explains why questions of temporality are at the heart of political thinking, and points to the several ways in which many (but not all) political thinkers have invoked history. It asks what historians of political thought can learn from the wider ‘temporal turn’ in historical studies inspired by Reinhart Koselleck, while also arguing that the understanding of political thought in terms of plural ‘languages’ of politics, advocated by John Pocock and Quentin Skinner, already offers powerful resources for addressing the issues associated with time and history. Six such linguistic contexts for thinking about politics in time and history are identified – the legal, the sacred, the contingent, the social, the revolutionary and the global – and the individual chapters of the volume are then introduced in relation to these contexts. Particular attention is given to recent developments in global intellectual history. Approaching political thought in these contexts will show that the roles of time and history have amounted to much more than the cliché that ‘a week is a long time in politics’.

The objective of this chapter is to draw the route map followed both by constitutions and the representation of the electoral base in Spanish and Portuguese America from the Napoleonic occupation of the Peninsula (1807/1808) until the creation of new sovereign states at the end of the wars of independence (ca. 1824). The argument that articulates the discussion here and the dialogue between the Hispanic and Lusitanian world is that the constitutional and representative question assumed, jointly and with many variants, a constructivist dimension regarding the dilemma of sovereignty. In the context of the crisis of the Iberian monarchies, representation of the territories played a central role in constitutional experiments and electoral regulations. Faced with the fact, or danger, of dismemberment of preexisting political bodies, the adoption of a constructivist stance was manifest as much in the leaders who attempted to restore and safeguard the unity of the bi-oceanic monarchies as in those who sought to legitimize the emergence of new communities aspiring to be sovereign.

Chapter Three tackles the historical enigma of the disappearance of sortition from politics following the French and American revolutions. First, it highlights the “great divergence” between China and the West on this issue, the former using sortition (jointly with imperial examinations) until the beginning of the twentieth century. Next, it unearths the causes of the two-century partial eclipse of random selection in Western politics, at the same time as the technique was employed for the appointment of trial juries. In fact, the random selection of juries was linked to the idea that jurors were interchangeable sources of common sense. On the contrary, the Swiss debate that was waged during the revolutionary period at the turn of the eighteenth century shows that the new rationalist ideas that emerged with the advent of modernity and the Enlightenment viewed the use of chance as a blind and irrational vestige of the past. At that time, the notion of the representative sample, which is familiar to contemporary readers, had not yet been developed. Consequently, even those who defended a descriptive form of representation, where representatives sociologically resemble the people they represent, could not lay claim to sortition when defending their ideal.

The Conclusion summarizes the book's contribution and details the implications of The Arab Spring Abroad for future studies of transnational activism, diaspora mobilization, and immigrant politics.

The Introduction presents an overview of why diaspora mobilization matters, why the existing literature has not satisfactorily explained its causes and dynamics, and previews the author's key arguments. This chapter justifies the book's comparative framework and details the data collection strategies used to investigate the Arab Spring abroad.

Between 1750 and 1800, writers of African descent drew on oral and written traditions to create literature that expressed their desires for freedom, equality, and a future for themselves and their children. Moved and shaped by transitional events ranging from the forced migration of millions of Africans to enslavement in the Americas to revolutions that shook and transformed the British colonies, Saint-Domingue, and France, they developed cultural productions that articulated their longings, supported their communities, and impacted the rapidly shifting sociopolitical environments in which they lived. Like Phillis Wheatley, who publicly declared her impatience of oppression in a letter to Rev. Samson Occum on the eve of the American Revolution, they were compelled to resist enslavement, choose their own racial affiliations, and assert their agency by writing themselves into the metanarratives that marginalized or omitted them.

Democracy in America focuses mainly on the history of the United State and the prospects for Anglo-American democracy. However, it is important to remember that Tocqueville’s celebrated thoughts on the unique qualities of American democracy did not go unnoticed by Spanish American thinkers in the nineteenth century. Like Tocqueville’s France, Latin American nations struggled with similar questions of how to secure the institutional and cultural prerequisites for self-government. As José Antonio Aguilar Rivera reveals in this chapter, there is an important tradition of reading and applying the lessons of Democracy in America in the “other America.” Latin American countries sought to emulate the United States’ success with constitutionalism and representative government, and leading political thinkers turned to Tocqueville for guidance. Despite widespread interest in Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and Chile, however, these applications of Democracy in America diverged widely from one national context to another. Aguilar Rivera shows how interpreters drew on different arguments, often selectively ignoring others, depending on the unique circumstances and political debates of each country.

The Introduction presents an overview of why diaspora mobilization matters, why the existing literature has not satisfactorily explained its causes and dynamics, and previews the author's key arguments. This chapter justifies the book's comparative framework and details the data collection strategies used to investigate the Arab Spring abroad.