Cathy Matson

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Cathy Matson | The Atlantic Economy in an Era of Revolutions: An Introduction | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.3 | The History Cooperative

The Atlantic Economy in an Era of Revolutions: An Introduction

THE five articles in this special issue were presented originally at the annual conference of the Program in Early American Economy and Society in November 2003.¹ Readers of the William and Mary Quarterly who have been following the outpouring of work in Atlantic world studies will readily acknowledge the rapidly transforming view of the Western Hemisphere. Through a wide-angle lens, scores of new monographs and articles have surveyed the sweep of a centuries-long era of multi-imperial exploration, settlement, and colonial development on no fewer than four continents. This work reexamines old sources and questions in light of new methodologies and realigns the crosscurrents of goods and peoples in the Atlantic world to show new patterns of activities and new ways to conceptualize the unfolding drama of Western Hemispheric development. Themes running from the sixteenth through early eighteenth centuries have received comparatively more attention than those from the period after 1760. Nevertheless, significant new work has already appeared that extends the scope of Atlantic world studies into this revolutionary era, one in which peoples within and across empires rose up in rebellions and wars of independence that resulted in great, though not total, makeovers of their societies. And much more is on the way.	1
One of the hallmarks of this new work is to move well beyond the decades-long focus on what R. R. Palmer called the age of democratic revolutions, an interpretation that privileged the profound influence of ideas about individual freedom and representative politics on the era's upheavals throughout the Western Hemisphere. The fundamental principles Palmer explored in comparative fashion have been critiqued, refined, and, in some cases, preserved since his work appeared. But to some analysts, Palmer's influential writings contained a fatal flaw of conflating the transatlantic language of freedom and representation with various internal independence movements, parts of which undoubtedly spoke in the language and for the purposes Palmer identified, yet even larger parts of which framed distinctive grievances and local communities of dissent that propelled revolutions forward. Even granting the significance of liberal or republican ideas tested in the crucibles of the American and French Revolutions, such ideas often seem inadequate to explain the range of distinctive motivations and local mobilizations that transformed Continental and island societies in this long era of upheaval. Scholarship, for example, insists that the era's most profound revolution (in Saint Domingue) and its reverberations throughout the Western Hemisphere were far more complicated.²	2
Though the articles in this special issue are not directly concerned with the intellectual principles and revolutionary mobilizations marking this tumultuous era, their focus on the commercial backgrounds and consequences of Atlantic world revolutions and wars presses forward scholarly discussion about how a variety of experiences played into revolutionary outcomes. The American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, as well as the Napoleonic Wars and Latin American independence movements, contained overlapping economic trajectories at various island and mainland settlements of the French, British, and Spanish Empires. Few would now deny that the development of revolutionary and postrevolutionary North America's domestic economy contributed to, and unfolded in accord with, the economic conditions of Spanish, French, and British West Indies possessions during the entire era. In turn the economic opportunities and failures of every region in the Western Hemisphere became interdependent, shaped by Continental European wars, the vagaries of the weather, internal agricultural markets, consumer demand, personal commercial networks, and government policies.	. . .

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