An Age of Imperial Revolutions

Abstract

WHEN THE VENEZUELAN CREOLE FRANCISCO DE MIRANDA led an expeditionary force to the shores of his native land to liberate it from Spanish rule in the summer of 1806, he brought with him a new weapon for making revolutions: a printing press. He hoped that his band of white, black, and mulatto patriots would start a revolt to free a continent with an alliance of swords and ideas. After dawdling for ten days, Miranda learned that royal troops (also white, black, and mulatto) were marching from Caracas. He withdrew before the two multiracial forces could clash. Consider Miranda's reasons for retreat: The nation he sought to free from its chains was not, in his opinion, a nation at all. While Venezuelans yearned for "Civil Liberty," they did not know how to grasp and protect it. They needed a liberation that would tutor them in the ways of liberty and fraternity, to create a nation of virtuous citizens out of a colony of subjects. This was why Miranda treated the printing press, a portable factory of words about liberty and sovereignty, as part of the arsenal of change: he wanted to create public opinion where there was none. But faced with the prospect of a violent clash and a scourge of "opposition and internal divisions," of a war waged mainly with swords, he preferred to pull out and bide his time. 1 Miranda's dilemma-whether or not to move forward knowing how revolutions worked in imperial settings when their protagonists did not presume that their cause was self-evidently bound to triumph-evokes questions about the embedded politics of what we might now call, with a wince, "regime change." As empires gave way to successor systems in their colonies, those regimes began to call themselves nations not in order to cause imperial crises, but as the result of such crises. The study of imperial crises and the study of the origins of nationalism in colonial societies should inform each other more than they do. Bringing these two separate fields of scholarship together, and questioning the tacit and not-so-tacit beliefs upon which they rest, can help us reframe the complex passages from empires to successor states, free I want to extend my thanks to

Negotiating Sovereignty in German History—Historiographical Challenges

“…37 The contingent and contested construction of sovereignty in overseas colonies paved the way for violent conquest not just in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, but also in land empires and borderlands on the Eurasian and North American continents. 38 The concept changed in the nineteenth century under the double influence of colonialism and nationalism, which made territoriality its defining feature and established the sovereign nation-state as a specifically European norm. 39 Unequal treaties between China and colonial powers, for instance, reshaped the Chinese state and treaty ports' ability to control everything from trade to laying telegraph lines, issues that historians of China have long discussed through the lens of sovereignty.…”

Within and Beyond the “Fourth Generation” of Revolutionary Theory

“…An intersocietal approach to revolutions starts from a simple premise: Events that take place in one location are both affected by and affect events elsewhere. A number of transnational histories point to the ways revolutionary events contain an international dimension that supersedes the nation-state frame (e.g., Adelman 2008; Hunt 2010; Stone 2002). To take one example, the onset of the French Revolution cannot be understood without attention to the expansionist policies of the French state during the 17th and 18th centuries—between 1650 and 1780, France was at war in two out of every three years.…”

Revolutions and the international

“…At the same time, although some of the descriptive components of an intersocietal approach can be found in transnational histories of revolution (e.g. Stone 2002;Armitage, 2007;Adelman 2008;Hunt 2010), the analytical dimensions of an intersocietal approach have not, as yet, been systematically interrogated. This paper has provided a first--cut at such an 15 A partial exception is the Marxist debate on uneven and combined development.…”