Conference - January 2023

How Global was the Age of Revolutions?

Online Conference - 9 and 10 January 2023 (afternoons, UK time)

The Age of Revolutions is expanding. What was once conceived primarily in terms of the relationship between events in British North America and France in the last quarter of the eighteenth century now commonly encompasses both an extended temporal span and an increasing area of the globe’s surface. Revolution in the Caribbean has become central to revised Atlantic and imperial frameworks. Latin America’s wars of independence have been understood as part of the same processes of decolonisation and imperial state-building as the American Revolution to the north. Upheaval in Europe, incorporating many less spectacular or less-successful uprisings in the last decades of the eighteenth century, extends through the Napoleonic era, culminating in the self-consciously revolutionary events of 1848. Such frameworks also extend to Africa’s Atlantic seaboard, and to the colonial hinterlands of the Indian and Pacific oceans. Revolution of some sort could be identified wherever European empires had a substantial role in shaping regional dynamics of ecology, political economy, and violence.

At this point, however, we run into problems. The metaphors of expansion that scaffold the paragraph above mirror the sense in which the re-envisaged Age of Revolutions still places western Europe at its centre, and still operates according to the imperial logics of contagion (or diffusion) and conquest. Yet, revolutionary transformations, or at least serious crises, took place during the same century-long period in sub-Saharan Africa, in different parts of the Ottoman Empire, and in China—places with which direct European interaction was comparatively weak. Should we interpret these events as evidence that a world-system centred on western Europe was in fact stronger or more extensive in this period than previously understood? Should we, instead, understand them as causally unconnected events that unfolded according to separate, regionally specific logics? Or should we try to elaborate a new framework, beyond the Atlantic and the imperial, through which to comprehend not simply an Age of Revolutions “in global context” but a genuinely global set of revolutionary dynamics?

Hosted by the Reframing the Age of Revolutions Research Network, supported by the AHRC (UK). Steering Committee:

  • Peter Hill (Northumbria University)
  • Tom Cutterham (University of Birmingham)
  • Felicia Gottmann (Northumbria University)
  • Andrew Edwards (University of St Andrews)
  • Juan Neves-Sarriegui (University of Oxford)

Programme (all times are UK time, GMT)

Day 1. 9 January 2023

Welcome and Introduction. 1.15pm-1.30pm

Panel 1. Global Histories. 1.30pm-3.00pm

Chair: Felicia Gottmann, Northumbria University

B-Grade Revolutions or No Revolutions at all? Latin America in the Age of Revolutions, Stefan Rinke, Freie Universität Berlin

They Cry Liberty: Imperial Crisis and Revolution in Atlantic Africa, Bronwen Everill, University of Cambridge 

Ecumenical Ottomans: The Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Sublime Porte in an Age of Revolution, 1770-1821, Yusuf Ziya Karabıçak, Mainz University

Break. 3.00pm-3.30pm

Panel 2. Ideas and Languages. 3.30pm-5.00pm

Chair: Tom Cutterham, University of Birmingham

Looking for the Age of Revolutions in South American borderlands, ca. 1810-1845, Andre Jockyman Roithmann, University of Oxford

Revolutions in the Greek Revolutionary Press, Sophia Pilouri, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

“Better to die than staying miserable!”: Masaniello in the Age of Revolutions, Clara Baudet, Jesus College, University of Oxford


Day 2. 10 January 2023

Panel 3. Empires and Margins. 1.15pm-2.45pm

Chair: Juan Neves-Sarriegui, University of Oxford

Inland Empire: Colonial Experience, Technology and the Making of a Maritime Nation in the Age of Revolutions, Eóin Philips, Ramón Llul University

For our freedom and yours: the Polish question, “Romantics of freedom” and international nationalism in the long nineteenth century, Paulina D. Dominik, European University Institute

New Galicia and the Provincial Deputations: Interpretations of a Global Past in the Decline of the Colonial Order, Carlos Riojas, University of Guadalajara 

Break. 2.45pm-3.15pm

Panel 4. Framings. 3.15pm-4.45pm

Chair: Andrew Edwards, University of St Andrews

Practical Histories of the Age of Revolution, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, University of Southern California

The grains of revolution: an Eurasian perspective, Alessandro Stanziani, École des hautes études en sciences sociales and Centre national de la recherche scientifique

The Taiping Rebellion as the Prime Mover of Revolutionary Changes in Late Qing China, 1850-1911, Kent Deng, London School of Economics 

Closing remarks. 4.45pm-5.00pm

 

Contact:

To find out more or join the project’s network, please contact the Project Administrator, Juan Neves-Sarriegui: juan.neves-sarriegui@northumbria.ac.uk