Historians
have long characterized the economic and political changes that swept across
the globe and irrevocably transformed the world between the 1770s and the 1840s
as the "Age of Revolutions." This era features prominently in world history
textbook assigned to undergraduates across the United States and high school
students in an ever-growing number of states. World history textbooks tend to
focus on the story of political revolutions through an Atlantic World
narrative, which moves from the "thirteen British colonies" in North America to
France, to Haiti, to Latin America; although historians have also recently attempted
to set the subject into a global framework, their work has not yet changed the way
most of us teach our world history surveys.1
The articles in our forum do not systematically
place themselves into either an Atlantic world or a global context. Instead, by
aiming their analysis on indigenous peoples, these articles offer some new perspectives
to world historians, teachers, and students on how to complicate our
understanding and thinking about the Age of Revolutions in world history. Indeed,
an era so often associated with empire breaking was, of course, simultaneously
one of empire making. As the late C.A. Bayly observed
decades ago, European imperial expansion during the Age of Revolutions engendered
the "creation of 'indigenous peoples' as a series of comparable categories
across the globe."2 More
recently, inspired by Daniel K. Richter, who famously faced east to write
Native-centered histories of European expansion in North America, Michael A.
McDonnell and Kate Fullagar have called upon
historians of the Atlantic, the Pacific, and beyond to "face empire" so as to
explore the myriad ways that "indigenous peoples changed the nature and purpose
of European empires at this critical juncture."3 As the pieces below underscore, indigenous peoples at home and abroad, free and
enslaved, sovereign and colonized, played complex and multifaceted roles in
this period of history that defy easy characterization. By focusing our
analysis on indigenous peoples that historians of the Age of Revolutions often
neglect in their research and teaching, the contributors to this forum
complicate our understanding of this period. |
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Notes
1 For a recent comparative synthesis of the history of the
revolutionary Atlantic, see Wim Klooster, Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A
Comparative History (New York: New York University Press, 2009); on efforts
to globalize the history of the Age of Revolutions, see C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the
Modern World, 1780–1914 (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2004) and
David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., The Age of Revolutions in Global Context,
c.1760–1840 (New York: Palgrave, 2010).
2 C.A. Bayly, "British and
Indigenous Peoples," in M.J. Daunton and R. Halpern,
eds., Empire and Others: British
Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1850 (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1999) 21.
3 Daniel K. Richter, Facing
East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2001); Michael A. McDonnell and Kate Fullagar, "Facing Empire: Indigenous experiences of
European empire in comparative Perspective, 1760–1820," in The Routledge History of Western Empires, eds. Robert Aldrich and
Kirsten McKenzie (New York: Routledge, 2014), 59–71, 60, 61. |
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