Ideas of Revolution in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions

Abstract

This article examines the concepts of revolution that political actors employed during the age of Atlantic revolutions (c.1760–1830) and how they used these concepts to analyze, compare, and connect the era's political events. The article begins by briefly recapitulating the evolving meanings of revolution in the seventeenth century and the early eighteenth. The capacious concept of a “revolution of government” that developed in the eighteenth century remained in regular use into the 1820s as a key conceptual tool to imaginatively connect otherwise disparate political movements/phenomena. Revolutionaries also created two new concepts, “total” and “limited” revolution, that were crucial to drawing political distinctions, especially between the American and French revolutions. These three concepts of revolution, I argue, all gave late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century actors an unusual degree of flexibility—which did not exist before or after the period—in describing the temporal and causal dynamics of revolutionary change.