Political Experimentation in the Age of Global Revolutions

This essay reviews six recent books that explore how revolutionary upheavals pushed imperial and republican projects alike to experiment with novel political ideas and mechanisms. These initiatives came in response to calls for representation and equality throughout the Age of Revolution. In doing so, these books reveal the failures and successes of these projects in responding to these demands. The authors of these works show that republican and imperial processes of state-building and legitimacy-building did not have a predetermined outcome—quite the opposite. To constitute themselves as valid political alternatives, revolutionary, imperial, and republican projects had to adapt to different actors’ expectations, contingencies, and growing geopolitical tensions. By exposing those adaptation processes, the six books under review demonstrate that the Age of Revolution was a period of intense political experimentation across the ideological spectrum.