The French Revolution in Global Perspective

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.

Suzanne Desan is Vilas-Shinners Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France, also from Cornell, and The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France. Lynn Hunt is the Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of several books, including Measuring Time, Making History and Inventing Human Rights. William Max Nelson is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Toronto and the author of a book manuscript and essays that focus on eighteenth-century intellectual history in France and the Atlantic world.

The eleven contributions are clustered under the traditional headings of the origins, internal dynamics and consequences of the Revolution. Their analyses are far from traditional, however, consistently teasing out transnational connections and contrasts, and it is unusual to have a collection of such uniformly high quality which has such tightly linked concerns. The chapters are all closely documented, and the notes will be a treasure-trove for researchers as much as the text will engage students and teachers alike.

John Shovlin, New York University, author of The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution:

The French Revolution in Global Perspective is a timely, compelling, and lively book. This work will be of great interest to experts in the field, and the lively and lucid way in which it is written makes it suitable for adoption in courses on the French Revolution at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and for courses on European history, world history, and the history of globalization. I suspect that many in our field have been waiting for the appearance of a volume like this, which connects global themes to the dynamics of the French Revolution in a coherent and compelling way.