The Age of Atlantic Revolution: The Fall and Rise of a Connected World by Patrick Griffin (review)

Reviewed by: The Age of Atlantic Revolution: The Fall and Rise of a Connected World by Patrick Griffin Bryan A. Banks The Age of Atlantic Revolution: The Fall and Rise of a Connected World. By Patrick Griffin. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2023. 384 pages. Cloth, ebook. The first volume of R. R. Palmer's The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America was published in 1959 and for the most part went underappreciated until the twenty-first century, when historians savaged it for its notable omissions and heavy weight placed on democratic ideology.1 Where was the Haitian Revolution? Where was the transatlantic slave trade? What about the roles of women and Indigenous peoples? Could the revolutionary era be defined by different types of democracy and republicanism? The porous nature of Palmer's book made it a straw man for some. One significant issue Palmer's work failed to address was how exactly these democratic ideals came to be transmitted across land masses and oceans. Palmer's contemporary Jacques Godechot had begun to compile some of the work necessary to trace revolutionary reverberations in Les révolutions (1770–1799), which appeared a few years later.2 Much has changed in the decades since, and now historians regularly analyze communication networks and the movements of peoples, both voluntary and involuntary.3 This literature suggests that the history of the revolutionary Atlantic is found at the nexus of networks and the ideas that moved across them. Patrick Griffin's The Age of Atlantic Revolution is an attempt to do just that. Readers will find a "synopsis" rather than a "conventional history" (8) of the revolutionary Atlantic networks and ideas. In unpacking his choice of descriptor, Griffin states that he means "synopsis" as a "scholar of the New Testament would use it" (8). What is contained in these pages is not a "blow-by-blow" (8) retelling of the revolutionary age, which would be impossible. Rather it offers a macro picture with vignettes and anecdotes that suggest what a more encyclopedic account could offer. The framing End Page 446 matters. Griffin's book provides a replacement to Palmer's work (that is, an accessible, teachable analysis of the revolutionary era) while also acknowledging the impossibility of covering everything. One of the subjects Griffin does not cover is the revolutionary era as a global phenomenon; for this, readers should explore works such as David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam's edited collection The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840 (2010) or Sujit Sivasundaram's more recent Waves across the South (2020).4 Although Griffin takes readers on brief sojourns from the Atlantic world to the Indian Ocean, just as merchants, slaves, and sailors crossed the Atlantic and rounded the Cape of Good Hope, the vast majority of the text remains within the geographic expression of the Atlantic. This should not be perceived as a criticism, for this book encompasses Europe, North America, the Caribbean, South America, and Africa—a vast region that Griffin argues should be set apart from other salt waterways precisely for how "dense and tangled" (17) its networks became. Griffin frequently uses a fabric metaphor to explain those networks as well as the disruptive effects of revolution. He shows that political, business, and communication connections extended across the Atlantic, holding colonial commerce together, yet the collapse of those ties can be traced to frays in the weave. When revolutions tore an edge, the strands of the fabric weakened, and eventually the colonial tapestry loosened and fell apart. He traces that fall across several chapters. The first chapter establishes the nature of the Atlantic in the eighteenth century, and chapter 2 addresses imperial reforms that provided fodder for revolutionary resentment and challenges to sovereignty. Next Griffin explores how French Enlightenment ideals inspired revolutionary currents around the Atlantic. Chapters 4 and 5 discuss how revolution broke out in the British North American colonies, metropolitan France, colonial Saint Domingue, and across Latin America. Ending each of these revolutions required revolutionaries to "singe the fray" (181) to shape their national fabrics into new nations and empires, as described in the next two chapters...