The fate of empires and the making of nations in the age of revolutions were central to the field of “Atlantic history” from the very start of its own formation as a field of scholarshi p seeking to transcend idiographic, nationally bound narratives about the rise of the “West.” When R. R. Palmer composed his classic two-volume The Age of Democratic Revolution about the forty-year epic culminating in Napoleon’s defeat, he argued that these upheavals were essentially democratic, which he defined as signifying “a new feeling or kind of equality, or at least a discomfort with older forms of social stratification and formal rank.” Palmer sought to transcend entrenched, exceptionalist national narratives. Now that the Cold War is over, Palmer has been recovered for a post-nationalist, post-socialist turn in history. His vision—transnational, Atlantic, or worldwide in scale—offered a historic framing for the temper of the times, which saw the spread of liberal democracy as the dominant tidal process. Its triumph emboldened Atlantic history after 1989. Nowadays, the underlying tenets of the liberal imaginaire and universalizing scale are both under assault.

Yet, Palmer’s efforts to plot a narrative that escaped the fastened gri p of national destinies, to evoke the age of revolutions as more than just the expression of the unique insight of patriotic “founders” or philosophes, relied on unquestioned assumptions about nationhood: that it was the sequel to empire once the force of democracy erupted onto the stage. Nationhood was the evolved form, the only form, in which democracy could realize itself because nations were the peerless bounded units in which comembers could acknowledge the equal rights of others, which lay at the theoretical core of democracy, liberalism, and the kind of civic nationalism that Palmer and others extolled. [ 28] The assumptions about nationhood had their corollary in the assumptions made about the anciens régimes they replaced: just as the nascent democratic nations were imagined as born with the traits that would drive them into maturity, the old regimes were aristocratic monarchies in irreversible decline, their moral foundations yielding to intellectual and social changes they could not stop.

Sixty years later, our perspective on Atlantic empires looks very different. It would be hard to imagine how one would narrate their stories without placing colonialism, slave labor, and the explosive struggles for emancipation at the center; none of these got swept away by the arrival of new forms of political representation. By the same token, the work on early nationalism has revealed just how “constructed”— uneven, incomplete, and labored— the transition was. The very turn to Atlantic history that Palmer sought to motivate has exposed some older presumptions about imperial arrangements that thrived off legalized systems of privilege and legitimated regimes of inequality.For the most part, however, American, French, and even Iberian revolutions have been narrated as the products of autonomous impulses unfolding within their borders, as basic rigidities of sprawling and overextended regimes that gave way to government-toppling insurrections, most especially in the inaugural upheaval of 1776, whose historiography stamped so much of how we have come to understand empires, revolutions, and nationhood. One result has been to treat Latin American concepts and struggles as pale replicas, derivatives, or unworkable ri p-offs of the original, eliminating the possibility of local intellectual histories with their own dynamics and autonomy. We are confronted with a dilemma. Going “Atlantic” or global aimed to transcend internal logics and exceptionalist narratives; but scaling up this way has often erased the significance of the particularities of place that frame and make sense of the stories of dissolution or integration, or has reduced them, as Elías Palti notes in his introduction, to deviations from a prescribed norm, a “rational pattern” as he puts it. How to frame an entangled history of revolutions that admits local meanings and does not simply pathologize those that do not measure up to the ideal? How to connect histories of empires and nations once they are not bound by basic internal logics?

One way is to question whether there was some uniform switch in the meaning of sovereignty that fueled the long transition from anciens régimes to modern ones. There are two basic strains to conventional narratives. One comes from international relations theory, which sees the meaning of sovereignty more or less stabilizing around 1648, associated with the later idealized notion of a “Westphalian System.” In this storyline, rulers accepted the premise that their dominions reached the limits of their borders—and there they stopped, absolutely. The territorial lines separating states got fixed so that rulers could focus on consolidating capacities within each regime. Only with the rise of twentieth-century norms of liberal internationalism would this pacted system give way, albeit with fits and starts. The limits to this approach are now many, and have been catalogued: the recognition of persistent interdependence of states, the incompleteness of their dominions, the durability of multilayered, composite structures within them, and even the interlacing of global exchanges of ideas and networks that made boundaries much more porous and absolute than the traditional interpretation of the Westphalian tradition permitted.The second, often correlated, view comes from a constitutional tradition that charted kings ceding power, authority, and responsibility from themselves to subjects, and in so doing transforming them into citizens, a journey that began with a ruler as sovereign and ended with the triumph of “popular sovereignty.” This, too, has come under fire over the decades, not least because the notion of who the people were— or are—remains contested and unfinished.

What is important to note is that these two conceptions of sovereignty-in-transition are central to the narrative about the making of the modern world and the conditions of what is regarded as modern, and they witness their triumphal and failed switches in the age of revolutions, from about the 1770s to 1820. Recent work on the age of revolutions has revealed the need to step back and reconstruct a global history of the era that treats the revolutions as connected and encompassing without presuming that they are driven by a single, teleological purpose.

This reconstruction needs to begin with a new understanding of what kinds of anciens régimes were at stake to be transformed and the recognition that these struggles unfolded in particular institutional settings—colonies as parts of empires, which assembled the components of eighteenth-century notions of sovereignty. What distinguished empires was not their absolute definitions of sovereignty, but as Lauren Benton has shown in her study of legal pluralism across a variety of colonial contexts, their amalgamation of a variety of institutional practices and their incomplete territorial contours. The relationship between empire and territory thus shifted when the notion of sovereignty got reset from one that rests on self-evident princi ples of rulershi p, especially as regimes sprawled overseas, into a view of sovereignty that constituted an unstable and shifting assortment of understandings and practices. Conceptions of sovereignty might be seen not as explanations of how old orders fell and new orders emerged, but as the consequences of struggles to sort out rival ideas and meanings. If the traditional Westphalian narrative rested on the triumph of a European design and a basic contest that unfolded at the centers of power and radiated outward to be borrowed, adapted, and imitated in the national, territorial form, attention to interactions within and between imperial regimes, including at their fringes, makes the emergent design a contingent effect of a wider struggle for power, one that made room for local struggles in peri pheries that would shape the histories of the cores.

The shifting identification of empire with territoriality laid the context for the ways in which the meaning of sovereignty itself changed in the run up to—and as a cause of—revolution. Empires did not begin with ambitions of territorial indelibility. Only with time did sovereignty become associated with territory. What is important is that empires spread European notions of sovereignty to distant shores with less concern for legal homogeneity up to the definable boundaries of empire than the Westphalian narrative admitted. They were rather more polyglot and vague—exemplified by the prominence of grey zones that shaded the incomplete and contingent reach of empires, grey zones that would eventually evolve into borderlands. What is more, this greying of the anciens régimes applied not just to the outer reaches of empires that entangled them with rivals, but to their local countrysides and blurry, and contested, frontiers. One of the effects of the escalating imperial rivalries was to drive monarchs and merchants to become more and more territorially minded over the course of the eighteenth century. More rivalry led to more landgrabbing.

The accent on territoriality intensified the disequilibrium and the outward expansion of European states; empires did not enter crises because they could not adapt; it was not so much the refusal to change as change itself that yielded to the tensions of empire that eventually shattered the fiscal bulwarks of rivals. By the middle of the eighteenth century, rulers and ministers wrangled over how to adapt their ways and embark on increasingly ambitious plans to modify the institutions, private and public, that held their emporia together. Though each regime set about to modify their imperial pacts, it is important to stress that they did so in response to the ways in which empires coiled together into a single, internally competitive and increasingly disequilibrated regime. Here the Iberian cases played an important function. First, because they were the sites for latecomers—Dutch, English, and French—to interlope, prey, and grab, they were the first to experiment with topto- bottom modifications of the relationshi ps among the Iberianimperial parts. Variously described as the Bourbon (for Spain) or Pombaline (for Portugal) reforms, they had multi ple means to pursue a broad objective: to reconstitute the empires so that private rents and public revenues flowed more effectively to support and defend the contours of imperial states, contours that were being defined more and more as territorially bounded by the treaty systems they signed. As Fradera and Elliott have shown, these experiments often served as models for their rivals; they challenge the common story of sclerotic, hopelessly backward-looking examples. [ 28] Indeed, reform recombined important aspects of empires, and gave them enough stamina to suggest that predictions of their inevitable falls, and certainly their impossible adjustment, were at the very least premature. If Abbé Raynal and Adam Smith singled out the Spanish empire in particular as an example of a polity addicted to silver, it reflected their yearning for their own governments to shed their own bullionist predilections. Accordingly, the efforts by Parliament to revamp the status of monopoly trading companies and transform the fiscal instruments of empire to connect the “parts” more directly in the service of the “whole” shot through the French and English drives to out-muscle the other. The very term mercantilism emerged as a label for envisioning policies of imperial sovereignty that rejected old, monopolistic and specie-thirsty concepts of rule.

Remaking empires challenged older imperial pacts. Reform provoked a ri ptide of opposition, less to the princi ples and more to the practices of new imperial sovereignty, both in the metropoles and (more ominously) in the colonies. From the 1760s, British colonists and their commercial patrons in Britain bridled at the flurry of commercial and fiscal demands. But these protests were hardly unique. Pombal ran into resistance in Lisbon, which got fierce when his patron, the king, José I, died in 1777, leaving the minister exposed to his many detractors. In Madrid, bread riots brought an end to experiments in free grain trade. In the Americas there was even more unrest. The Tupac Amaru revolt in the Central Andes, Comunero uprisings further north, seditious activity across New Spain, and the aborted Tiradentes movement in Brazil all exemplified the various ways in which colonial peoples saw the reforms as being effective enough to disturb tacit and not-so-tacit colonial pacts among peri pheral rulers and between them and subaltern agents.

Adaptation made the empires internally heterogeneous, while in some senses making them more externally similar. The challenge was balancing the diversity within empire with the fiscal hunger and need to direct funds to metropolitan governments locked in intractable conflicts with rivals.[ 28] While the American Revolution and the spasm of insurrection down the Andean spine were wake-up calls, these threats did not diminish the affiliation of sovereignty with the defense of empire. If anything, they were opportunities to reconstitute relations between the parts of empires. While the Seven Years’ War, for instance, issued its blows, it also presented opportunities. P. J. Marshall suggests that, for the British, “territorial empire had survived and was q uickly to resume its growth” in part because the pacts that rulers learned to make with colonial mediators were so effective at striking a compromise between the illusion of unequivocal imperial authority and an admixture of systems of sovereignty at the local and regional levels. In the same manner, global war did more to recast empires in Iberian domains than to sunder them. Once the 1790s sucked Spain and Portugal into the maelstrom (a point to which I will soon return), both regimes faced spikes in defense costs, but adapted in ways that reintegrated the parts of empires around a new matrix of slavery, silver, and decentered sovereignty. In the 1790s, we see Iberian authorities recalibrating colonial pacts in the same ways that the East India Company authorities renegotiated the alliances between the firm and its local mediating allies. At the same time, governors in the West and East Indies had to be mindful of local resistances, lest insurrection spread.

There are three consequences to going beyond the Westphalian narrative and seeing Europe’s empires as entangled with each other and thus simultaneously redrafting and reimagining the relationships between imperial parts as a way to cope with the inescapable reality of wider competition. First, it was not the discovery of new princi ples of sovereignty that compelled revolutionaries in the fringes and at home to challenge old princi ples of rule and to break with them; rather, it was the effort to reform empires to cope with rivals that unsettled the princi ples of imperial integration. Second, empires—not even the Iberian cases, so often rolled out as examples of the natural course of imperial decline—were hardly doomed to overstretch or ossification, waiting for a more “modern” concept of sovereignty to come along and wi pe the slate of the old order clean. This framework suggests that the transition at the heart of the age of revolution cannot be explained as one that saw a more modern, maturing, conception of sovereignty bursting to rid itself of an old imperial mold. This has implications for how we write about entanglements and the place of Iberian and Latin American stories of statehood in them. The breakdowns did not occur as prophesied (by Gibbon, and other figures of the Enlightenment), as first afflicting what were seen as the most backward of empires, the Iberians’, which could not accommodate new princi ples of enlightened freedom. The age of revolution did not smash up the old order in a way that sent each imperial part spinning off into its own orbit, as if the empires broke up to allow separable nation states to fill the vacated spaces of the anciens régimes with new concepts of, as Benedict Anderson famously said, “horizontal comradeshi p.” On the contrary: the inter-imperial, global regime not only spanned both Indies, it locked the rivals in an intractable struggle. With the outbreak of the French Revolution and the advent of total war, the cycle of conflict between empires ramped up, twisting imperial histories onto a new track from which it would become increasingly difficult to deviate. So interlocking were the rivalries that rampedup competition could brook no bystanders. Indeed, initially Madrid and Lisbon sought to stay out of what seemed to be the continuation of an essentially Anglo-French contest. That was futile. For starters, there were advocates of pro-English and pro-French sides deep within the courts of both governments. They feuded bitterly over their allegiances to Paris or London, a match which grew increasingly bitter as the revolutionary wars gave way to Napoleon’s continental and Atlantic-wide ambitions.

If the inter-imperial regimes locked belligerents into an inescapable spiral, wartime adaptations had important effects on the internal balancing of empire and the relationship between and among its parts. Imperial dependency on the fringes gave local brokers an important role in maintaining the delicate equi poise within an empire that was being ravaged by disequilibrium between them. Increasingly, the primary sites in the governance of colonial affairs were the merchant guilds and munici pal councils. Viceroys and high courts still weighed in, but there was a notable devolution of power to the delegated authorities of colonial ruling blocs and their assemblies of local potentates. While much has been made of figures such as Mexico’s Servando Teresa de Mier or the Venezuelan adventurer Francisco de Miranda as apostles of independence, what dominated colonial deliberations was loyalty to monarchy and empire, exemplified by the concerned voices of José Ignacio de Pombo and José da Silva Lisboa.

There is also a logical problem: the causal account for change owes a great deal to the presence (or absence) of necessary conditions, inferring that the outcome of modern nation-states depended on the identification of actors or agents whose ideas or interests were associated with systems that did not yet exist—”national,” “modern,” or “capitalist.” Indeed, there has been a long tradition of arguing that states that “failed” (starting with an image of Haiti, as Michel- Rolph Trouillot has so trenchantly reminded us) could be reduced to the weakness of national and modern identities that made their revolutions so manq ué, and thus condemned them to remain enthralled to feudal, neocolonial ways.[ 28] The inevitability that coats the past leaves little to the passage that connected a world governed by empires with a later cycle of national state-formation. Not surprisingly, failure or success of precursor-empires and successor-nations were determined long before the transformation of sovereignty set in. No wonder the formula is so appealing. If the steps between the imperial demise of empire and the emergence of something new were not plotted out in advance for actors to follow, how can we explain the breakdowns and localized experiments in alternative models of sovereignty? If the age of revolution was not simply a light switch that flipped on the Westphalian arrangement of self-determining nation states, we can see actors groping for an arrangement that would stabilize, not dismantle, old regimes, and in their experiments lay the conditions for new, constitutional, successors. Colonial and metropolitan ruling classes more often discussed the management of the crisis within a framework of “loyalty,” which yielded to changes in sovereignty as processes with beginnings that led nowhere and endings that surprised even the most prescient of actors, and eventually led actors to the “exit” option—in the sense that motivated Albert Hirschman to argue in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty that people cope with crises in a variety of ways, with an “inborn tendency toward instability” of even the most perfect of mixes.

The tendency to disequilibrium was not a brewing tempest within each empire; rather turmoil was embedded within an increasingly combustible interstate system, riven by warfare in the 1790s, and escalating to an epic confrontation and Atlantic-wide war after 1805. Indeed, the growing weakness of state structures did not provoke secessionist movements when it would have been easiest to “exit.” Just as the reconstitution of empires was a response to competitive pressures of the eighteenth century, the final breakup of Iberian empires was the effect of even more heightened rivalry. What was new by 1800 was a struggle for transregional hegemony that shot through the empires’ alignments and legitimacy. The result was not the disruptive or shocking intervention of a Eurocentric concept of constitutionalism and sovereignty, imported and emulated at the fringes and doomed to fail because they lacked the right local “pre-conditions” to flourish, but a renegotiation of the pacts between colonial outposts and capitals as well as of those within the coalitions of forces in the peri pheries. To the physiocratic letrados in Cartagena and Buenos Aires, all that was required was for authorities to turn ad hoc adjustments into a new model. In this way, ridding the empires of the agents of “corruption” would even revitalize them and make them more durable. New perspectives on property, in fact, bore no automatic association with a new outlook on sovereignty.

The possibility of an evolution toward a new pact between the component parts and actors in the Iberian empires, was not infinitely elastic for it was still subject to the external dynamics of interstate conflict. Yet, actors on all sides tried to rethink incumbent regimes before giving up on them; renewed warfare was the last thing anyone wanted. In the end, the Spanish monarchy was toppled by Napoleon’s sleight of hand, when the French invasion of 1807 turned into a lasting occupation of the Peninsula and the house arrest of the Spanish Bourbon monarchy. In short order, the Spanish empire was missing its keystone, prompting an upsurge of anxiety over how to govern an empire without a king. In Portugal, the French invasion simply displaced the emblem of sovereignty instead of decapitating it, as the monarchy took refuge in a new imperial capital, the erstwhile colonial outpost of Rio de Janeiro. “Americanizing” the monarchy spared it the immediate question of what bound the colonies to ancien régime sovereignty.

Striking at the cores of each empire, French armies forced local ruling cliques in each empire to improvise means for survival. These experiments rested on admixtures of new and old practices and ideas. To the urban guilds and munici pal councils were added new practices of public representation in the form of elected assemblies and a freer press to restore loyalty to shaken systems. In the end, they did more to shake up old pacts and ruling coalitions than to stabilize new ones. The first main drive to stabilize imperial order was the transformation in communications. To resacralize monarchy and rebuild confidence in its ministers, governments in both empires lifted restrictions on the press (in Mexico, Lima, Buenos Aires, and elsewhere) or allowed a press to begin to take root in the first place (in Brazil, Caracas, Chile, and elsewhere). In Brazil, the role of the press was different, as the court brought the first printing press to the colony with an eye to using it as a means to promote closer ties between colonial subjects and the Braganza court. Either way, governments now had to cope with the birth of public opinion; this meant that contending with dissent (with either inquisitorial zeal or indifference) was likely to produce much more than the mere consent of the governed.