“Age of Revolutions” or “World Crisis”? Global Causation, Connection, and Comparison, c. 1760–1840

—a conference organized by David Armitage, Harvard University, and Peter Reill, University of California, Los Angeles

Co-sponsored by UCLA’s Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies and
SCAS (Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study), Uppsala University

European and American historians have long seen the decades around 1800 as an “Age of Revolutions”: American, French, Caribbean, Latin American, and European. Global historians have more recently seen this same period as an era of “World Crisis” or globally “Convergent Revolutions,” from the Americas to East Asia. In the words of one leading proponent of this new characterization, “The crisis of the old order had Asian, African, and American, as well as European origins. Its consequences were also global.” This conference brings together scholars of Europe, the United States, Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East and Asia (South, East and South-East) to tackle the question: Was Europe the catalyst of the global crisis of this era, or was it simply one site among many in which political reform, state formation, and imperial expansion explosively interacted with each other across the globe?

Program

Opening Remarks
David Armitage, Harvard University

Session 1
Chair: Marie-Christine Skuncke, Uppsala University and SCAS-Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala

Gary B. Nash, University of California, Los Angeles
“Sparks from the Altar of ’76: International Repercussions and Reconsiderations of the American Revolution”

Lynn Hunt, University of California, Los Angeles
“The French Revolution in Global Context”

Maya Jasanoff, Harvard University
“Revolutionary Exiles: The American Loyalist and French Émigré Diasporas”

Session 2
Chair: Leos Müller, Uppsala University

Jeremy Adelman, Princeton University
“The Age of Imperial Revolutions”

David Geggus, University of Florida
“The Caribbean in the Age of Revolution”

Session 3
Chair: Sanjay Subrahmanyam, University of California, Los Angeles

Joseph C. Miller, University of Virginia
“The Historical Dynamics of the ‘Age of Revolutions’ in Africa”

Juan Cole, University of Michigan
“Hybridity and Difference in the French Republic of Egypt”

Robert Travers, Cornell University
“Imperial Repercussions: South Asia and the World, c. 1760–1840”

Session 4
Chair: Max Edling, Uppsala University

Peter Carey, Trinity College, Oxford University
“’Times that try men’s souls’: Revolutionary Europe and the Destruction of Java’s Old Order, 1808–1830″

Kenneth Pomeranz, University of California, Irvine
“Their Own Path to Crisis? State-Building, Social Change, and the Limits of Qing Expansion, ca. 1785–1825”