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.

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.

Contributors: Rafe Blaufarb, Florida State University; Ian Coller, La Trobe University; Denise Z. Davidson, Georgia State University; Suzanne Desan, University of Wisconsin Madison; Lynn Hunt, University of California, Los Angeles; Andrew Jainchill, Queen's University; Michael Kwass, The Johns Hopkins University; William Max Nelson, University of Toronto; Pierre Serna, Universite Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne; Miranda Spieler, University of Arizona; Charles Walton, Yale University"

A new idea of the future emerged in eighteenth-century France. With the development of modern biological, economic, and social engineering, the future transformed from being predetermined and beyond significant human intervention into something that could be dramatically affected through actions in the present. The Time of Enlightenment argues that specific mechanisms for constructing the future first arose through the development of practices and instruments aimed at countering degeneration. In their attempts to regenerate a healthy natural state, Enlightenment philosophes created the means to exceed previously recognized limits and build a future that was not merely a recuperation of the past, but fundamentally different from it. A theoretically inflected work combining intellectual history and the history of science, this book will appeal to anyone interested in European history and the history of science, as well as the history of France, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution.

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.

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.

Contributors: Rafe Blaufarb, Florida State University; Ian Coller, La Trobe University; Denise Z. Davidson, Georgia State University; Suzanne Desan, University of Wisconsin Madison; Lynn Hunt, University of California, Los Angeles; Andrew Jainchill, Queen's University; Michael Kwass, The Johns Hopkins University; William Max Nelson, University of Toronto; Pierre Serna, Universite Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne; Miranda Spieler, University of Arizona; Charles Walton, Yale University"