THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION AND EUROPEAN EMPIRES IN THE AMERICAS
Organisation : Carine Lounissi (Université Rouen Normandie) and Olivier Caporossi (Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour).
Argumentaire :
In 2026 the United States of America will celebrate the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776), an event which had considerable repercussions in the Atlantic World in the eighteenth century and which will lead in our time to numerous commemorative moments and publications. Broadening our understanding of the American Revolution as a “global” is necessary given the evolution of historiography.
Most scholars based in the US tend to be influenced by the domestic cultural and political divides of their country and have mainly produced US-centered interpretations of the event. At the same time, the historiographical turn placing groups previously considered as marginal, such as women, enslaved and indigenous people, at the heart of the revolutionary narrative has radically altered their approach to the American Revolution. This radical epistemological change has contributed to the renewal of Atlantic history since the 1990s and to the even more recent emergence of the vast early American approach, which both invite us to redefine the “global” in our understanding of the American Revolution as a world event.
A major blind spot in this regard remains the connections between European countries, their American colonies, and the Insurgents. However, reconsidering the American Revolution in connection with European countries (France, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain and Britain) and their colonies (including European ones like Ireland) may help both American and European scholars revise their perspective on the American Revolution. Recent books by European scholars published by Virginia University Press have indeed explored the European dimension of the American Revolution (Paquette and Saravia, 2020; Singerton, 2021). The funding of American insurgents by bankers of the Spanish and French monarchies before and after the official recognition of American Independence, and the networks they mobilized, deserve to be re-examined. The European, Atlantic, hemispheric approach also means developing studies of the impact of the American Revolution on the other British colonies, on the French colonies, such as the Caribbean islands (Covo, 2022), and on the Spanish Empire (Pani, 2013).
Such a transnational take has been initiated by the newly-setup AMERICA2026 (AMerica, Europe, Revolutions, Independence and Commemorations in the Atlantic world) program, sponsored by the French ANR, and this workshop is an invitation to scholars who work on the Americas to contribute to this transatlantic, transeuropean and transamerican conversation on the American Revolution.
