This chapter argues that an adequate assessment of revolutions (and the role of law in revolutions) is often stymied by historical exclusions and theoretical myopia. Historical exclusions centralise certain experiences and present sanitized and one-sided narratives of the revolutionary experiences they centralise, especially with respect to violence, slavery, and colonialism. On the basis of such ideological uses of history, theoretical accounts paper over these social and political realities in order to legitimate particular revolutionary constitutions and to elevate them to the status of a paradigm or ideal type. This paradigm serves as the yardstick by which other experiences are assessed. The main feature of this paradigm is that it postulates a distinction between political and social revolutions. It presents the American Revolution of 1776 as an exemplar for the political revolution that concerns itself with the establishment of government under law. In contrast, the French Revolution of 1789 is presented as an exemplar for the social revolution that also seeks to tackle social injustice. The deficiency of this paradigm construction is not merely methodological, but also substantive and normative. It reduces the plurality of the revolutionary phenomena, it ignores the revolution’s dialectical nature, and it presents a certain type of revolutionary constitutions as ones that legitimate the polity.

Examining the transition from slavery to free labor through the lens of the overseer-state, this chapter clarifies the ascent of labor regulation to a key preoccupation of colonial rule, reveals plantation colonies as sites of experimentation in interventionist governance, and illuminates the evolving relationship between colony and metropole (and different colonies to one another). The analytical framework of the overseer-state also demonstrates how the changing character of colonial labor management entangled British and Continental European modes of imperialism, complicating our historical understanding of the role played by liberal ideology in British imperial governance and political discourse. The overseer-state, concretely and conceptually, bridged the histories of the British Empire and the French, Spanish, and Dutch Empires, revealing how the development of labor control mechanisms in Britain’s plantation colonies remained a European enterprise rather than merely a British one.

The Cambridge History of the Papacy is organized to provide readers with a critical–historical survey of the structural development of the papacy as an institution and as an actor in Church history, and in world history. It is hard to imagine a sphere of human activity over the past two millennia that has not been influenced by, and influenced in turn by, papal action – be it in the domains of religious belief and practice; social, cultural, and political thought; art, science, medicine, ethics, diplomacy, and international relations. Four questions – each addressed throughout the three volumes of the present work – have framed that vision across vast chronological and geographical expanses: the pope’s centrality within the Catholic Church, the primacy of papal power as an instrument of governance, the papacy’s cultural influence in society and culture, and the implications of secularity for its place in the lives of believers and non-believers alike. Each question – and the search for answers – converges around the fundamental question of papal authority: its original claims; the ebbs and flows of its effective reach; and the numerous ways in which claims, and expressions of papal authority and supremacy, have been contested within the Catholic tradition, and from without.

The Cambridge History of the Papacy is organized to provide readers with a critical–historical survey of the structural development of the papacy as an institution and as an actor in Church history, and in world history. It is hard to imagine a sphere of human activity over the past two millennia that has not been influenced by, and influenced in turn by, papal action – be it in the domains of religious belief and practice; social, cultural, and political thought; art, science, medicine, ethics, diplomacy, and international relations. Four questions – each addressed throughout the three volumes of the present work – have framed that vision across vast chronological and geographical expanses: the pope’s centrality within the Catholic Church, the primacy of papal power as an instrument of governance, the papacy’s cultural influence in society and culture, and the implications of secularity for its place in the lives of believers and non-believers alike. Each question – and the search for answers – converges around the fundamental question of papal authority: its original claims; the ebbs and flows of its effective reach; and the numerous ways in which claims, and expressions of papal authority and supremacy, have been contested within the Catholic tradition, and from without.

In the late Roman empire, the papacy’s endorsement of marriage as a divine institution was already explicita. From the mid-fifth century, fundamental importance was attached to the signification by marriage of Christ’s union of the Church, a value shaping the social practice of marriage, underpinning the creation in Roman Catholicism of a marriage system unique in the history of literate societies, one which banned both polygamy and divorce. More flexible laws limited marriage within the “forbidden degrees” of relationship. The aim was to foster social cohesion. These rules could be changed, or dispensed with, in individual cases. Marriage was made by consent, and only from the Council of Trent was the presence of a priest required. Christianity in general and papal law in particular slowly transformed the relationship between slavery and marriage.

The Cambridge History of the Papacy is organized to provide readers with a critical–historical survey of the structural development of the papacy as an institution and as an actor in Church history, and in world history. It is hard to imagine a sphere of human activity over the past two millennia that has not been influenced by, and influenced in turn by, papal action – be it in the domains of religious belief and practice; social, cultural, and political thought; art, science, medicine, ethics, diplomacy, and international relations. Four questions – each addressed throughout the three volumes of the present work – have framed that vision across vast chronological and geographical expanses: the pope’s centrality within the Catholic Church, the primacy of papal power as an instrument of governance, the papacy’s cultural influence in society and culture, and the implications of secularity for its place in the lives of believers and non-believers alike. Each question – and the search for answers – converges around the fundamental question of papal authority: its original claims; the ebbs and flows of its effective reach; and the numerous ways in which claims, and expressions of papal authority and supremacy, have been contested within the Catholic tradition, and from without.

Chapter 4 follows different groups of conspirators, with differing agendas, who began to find one another and come together. One group was composed of soldiers who felt that they had been passed over for promotions due to racism. Another small group that was disgruntled by a combination of low wages and racism came together in the shop of a master tailor. And a third group was composed of white professionals who were driven by republican ideas they gleaned from studying the French Revolution. For these groups to come together, there needed to be a delicate balance of maintaining secrecy while also growing the plot and preparing to reveal it publicly. This chapter demonstrates that it was the bonds of relation, and a conviction that they could take care of one another and administer society better than the state, that kept people committed to the plan as they worked through this dangerous moment of expanding the conspiracy. Seen from this perspective, their struggle constituted a definition of the political in which care, concern, rest, and the belief that the people were the seat of sovereignty were foundational to being radicalized.

Perhaps the key area where global history has affected European history has been the study of the trade in commodities and its impact on European consumer behaviour. Yet there remains a divide between study of the production and distribution of goods from coffee and sugar to porcelain and muslins and study of how these goods became desirable, then embedded in European consumption and everyday life. Historians have investigated the profound impact of Asian manufactured goods on the material cultures of Europe, but they know less about their conditions of production and trade in China, India, and Japan. Global history, now combined as it is with the recent rise of the history of capitalism, also challenges European historians of consumer culture and industrialization to connect the European reception of wider world goods and raw materials to the Americas and to slavery. This is a key new direction in historical research. At a time now of historians uncovering Europe’s slavery past, and enquiring further into coerced and low-wage labour systems, we continue to write histories of slavery and slave plantations separately from those of Europe’s consumer cultures of sugar, coffee, and cotton.

Chapter 3 unpacks the “sickly season,” or the summer of 1860, characterized by the threat of mosquito-related diseases in the Lowcountry. It argues that South Carolinians’ insistence upon traveling to their usual vacation haunts, often ending their trips in New York City, reveals a still-uncertain political future. During this “season” (roughly late May to late October), South Carolinians felt time slow down, and talk of electoral politics faded to the background. South Carolina women continued to express political thoughts, however, revealing rivalries with Virginians that coexisted with desires to form social, and therefore economic and political, relations at Virginia’s healing and resort springs. The annoyance with Virginia reflects a tension between the two states of who is the true inheritor of the American Revolutionary spirit, and this chapter uses the Mount Vernon Ladies Association to explore shifting perceptions of a federalist and yet southern president. It also describes the increasing anxieties surrounding slave rebellion on the eve of secession, and to what extent enslaved women increased their day-to-day resistance as rumors of disunion spread.

Chapter 6 focuses on the men who were caught in the act of trying to start the intended rebellion. They were all free people of African descent, yet some among them also invited enslaved people to join the rebellion. Thus, relations between enslaved and free people are at the center of this chapter. The ways in which these people talked about freedom and bondage with one another presents a picture in which it is impossible to say that the conspiracy was definitively anti- or pro-slavery. There were some men who took abolition of slavery quite seriously, and there were others who had no interest in the matter whatsoever. Those who fit the latter group were connected to a shadowy group of elite white men who had been planning their own rebellion. Evidence of these white men’s participation in a conspiracy showed up frequently during a significant number of different men’s interrogations. The High Court chose to ignore or dismiss all such claims, clearing the way for them to transform the collective insurgencies of 1798 into a so-called Pardo conspiracy, free from confusion, free from uneven relations, and unconnected to the aims of elite white men.

The chapter returns to what has been called the “central paradox of American history,” the ostensible contradiction between this nation’s declared liberal ideals (“all men” being promised the inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”) and its sanctioning of slavery, the supreme denial of liberty. It focuses on how antebellum debates (literary, political, and theological) over the moral and political legitimacy of slavery were ultimately debates over “personhood” in order to make clear that the conceptual category of the “person” (the center of liberal thought) needs to be understood as a historically contingent – rather than absolute – identity. Noting how deeply modern accounts of slavery remain indebted to the liberal presumption that slavery is wrong precisely to the extent that those enslaved possess a fixed, transhistorical personhood (a personhood that racism, ideology, or self-interest too often obscures), the chapter seeks to leave behind arguments over the conflict between slavery and liberalism and ultimately asks whether it is possible to imagine a liberatory politics that does not require the “person” to be at its center.

Chapter 2 is situated in the context of Portugal’s internal conflicts with its colonies. In 1787, a group of so-called Brahmin priests who attributed racism to their lack of clerical promotions planned a revolt against Portuguese authority in Goa. In the Kingdom of Kongo, a rebellion in 1788 by the smaller Kingdom of Musulu spread into Portuguese slave-trading territories in Angola, initiating a war between Portugal and Musulu. Finally, a conspiracy in 1789 to end Portuguese rule in Minas Gerais, Brazil included slaveholders with outstanding debts who were in jeopardy of losing their property, including the people they enslaved. Two things stand out from placing these events together. First, we see more acutely how slavery and the slave trade not only supported the entirety of the Portuguese empire but also constituted its very framework. Second, and relatedly, the 1798 conspiracy in Bahia may have been more explicitly about race and slavery than these other three episodes. But it is, in fact, race and slavery that tied them together, a claim which orients the reader towards thinking about the Tailors’ conspiracy as part of an empire-wide phenomenon in the remaining chapters.

This chapter explores the oscillations of political power and the “revolutions” – both violent and subtle – that appeared on the US stage throughout the nineteenth century. While many dramatists sought to avoid political debate, all too aware of the potential consequences (from boycotts to riots), timely issues of the day, including the abolition of slavery, the eradication of Indigenous populations, temperance, and women’s suffrage, inevitably made their way onto the stage. Some playwrights struck out boldly, naming issues of substance misuse and miscegenation in dramas such as The Drunkard or The Octoroon. Others infused politics into their depictions of everyday life, including Ossawattomie Brown (which retells John Brown’s history as a romantic family plot) and the labor melodrama Bertha, the Sewing Machine Girl. These homely narratives reminded viewers of how inescapable these issues had become. But whether starkly challenging or subtly questioning, nineteenth-century US theater never escaped the pressing political issues of the day.

From the Enlightenment, liberal political economic thought, and the history of science, to the nation-building, ideas of citizenship, and border-setting that have defined European political and geographical space, and to racial capitalism and imperialism’s foundational role in shaping modern European economies, politics, law, and modernity, race has been central to modern Europe’s history, including its most painful episodes, and to the “global turn” in writing European history. Antiracism associated with internationalism, anticolonialism, and decolonization has also profoundly shaped European history and its writing – especially the “global turn.” Yet, considerations of economic, intellectual, political, religious, and other aspects of European history continue to neglect race and racial thought. This chapter examines the literature produced by the global turn on the role of race and racism in European history and reflects on its persistent marginalization in narratives of European history.