The Atlantic Revolutions as One Story

In the 1950s and 1960s the American historian R. R. Palmer and the French historian Jacques Godechot argued that the upheavals between roughly 1760 and 1800 formed a single 'age of democratic revolution' across the Atlantic world. Their view linked America, France, the Netherlands, Ireland, Geneva and other places through shared ideas about popular sovereignty and resistance to privileged elites.

Later historians broadened the frame to include Haiti and Spanish America and pushed the period into the 1820s, calling it the 'Age of Revolutions'. The Atlantic approach highlights connections: printed declarations, traveling soldiers such as Lafayette, and wars between empires that spread crises across oceans. Critics warn that a shared label can hide real differences, for instance between a revolution of slaveholders in America and a revolution of the enslaved in Haiti, so comparison must examine contrasts as well as links.