The French Revolution in Global Perspective illuminates the dense connections among the cultural, social, and economic aspects of the French Revolution, revealing how new political forms—at once democratic and imperial, anticolonial and centralizing—were generated in and through continual transnational exchanges and dialogues.

Situating the French Revolution in the context of early modern globalization for the first time, this book offers a new approach to understanding its international origins and worldwide effects. A distinguished group of contributors shows that the political culture of the Revolution emerged out of a long history of global commerce, imperial competition, and the movement of people and ideas in places as far flung as India, Egypt, Guiana, and the Caribbean.

This international approach helps to explain how the Revolution fused immense idealism with territorial ambition and combined the drive for human rights with various forms of exclusion. The essays examine topics including the role of smuggling and free trade in the origins of the French Revolution, the entwined nature of feminism and abolitionism, and the influence of the French revolutionary wars on the shape of American empire.

Suzanne Desan's profile page

Lynn Hunt's profile page

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Suzanne Desan is Vilas-Shinners Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin?Madison. She is the author of Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France, also from Cornell, and The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France. Lynn Hunt is the Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of several books, including Measuring Time, Making History and Inventing Human Rights. William Max Nelson is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Toronto and the author of a book manuscript and essays that focus on eighteenth-century intellectual history in France and the Atlantic world.

The eleven contributions are clustered under the traditional headings of the origins, internal dynamics and consequences of the Revolution. Their analyses are far from traditional, however, consistently teasing out transnational connections and contrasts, and it is unusual to have a collection of such uniformly high quality which has such tightly linked concerns. The chapters are all closely documented, and the notes will be a treasure-trove for researchers as much as the text will engage students and teachers alike.

H-France Review