Le monde va changer de base. When Eugène Pottier wrote the lyrics to the Internationale in 1871, he infused it with the revolutionary desire to substantially alter an order that had begun to take shape about a century earlier. The Paris Commune, the setting in which the socialist anthem was composed, was part of a revolutionary moment in many respects (not only in terms of what it meant to the workers’ movement) that the Western world experienced around the time of the American Civil War and its conclusion.Footnote ¹ The subsequent history of Europe and America did not follow the democratic and integrative path (racially and socially) promoted by the victors of the American conflict. Instead, it changed that course. In the final two decades of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, the Western world, in general terms, leaned instead toward the recovery of a more conservative, classist, and supremacist legacy.

Both possibilities—pursuing democracy and equality, or turning toward elitism and supremacy—were encoded in the origins of the modern world that socialists sought to fundamentally change. The two books I review here provide key insights into understanding how, in the age of the Atlantic revolutions that shaped the world in which we still largely live, a rich and varied ideological deployment took place, one that could give rise to vastly different worlds. That pair of generations transitioning from the Old Regime to liberalism engaged in extensive debates on how to organize representative government, the extent to which power should be limited, which segments of society should be represented in public debate, and how far the long arm of the state could reach to control its citizens, both within and beyond the state’s borders.

Thus the two books under review here help us to understand better the historical processes that over the long nineteenth century led the Western world to choose one of the possible modernities that emerged with the era of revolutions. Viewed with the complexity that historiographical thought requires and that these two historians skillfully apply, it is possible to move beyond a narrative about the origins of the modern world that seems to have its course predetermined before it even begins. Reading Perl-Rosenthal and Polasky reveals that, far from following an already designed path, the direction of modernity is shaped by ideological decisions.

At the same time, these two books differ significantly in their historiographical approach and content even as they remain closely related due to the historical period they examine. The Age of Revolutions offers a broad view of the moment when the old order of the ancien regime was supplanted by constitutional political systems, bourgeois societies, and a new international system among states. Asylum between Nations, in contrast, focuses more narrowly on how certain European cities became refuges for those displaced by the revolutions and the emerging nation-states of the era. Thus both books are highly relevant for understanding part of the complexity of this formative period of modern Western history, spanning from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth.

Perl-Rosenthal’s book examines how, over a span of two generations—from the mid-eighteenth century to the 1820s—a profound transformation unfolded, formally and substantively reshaping the Western world. Where imperial monarchies once ruled, national republics emerged, and where monarchs had been the central source of political power, nations and sovereign peoples arose, either abolishing the monarchy (and eventually the monarch) or constitutionally limiting their political powers. This transformation witnessed another notable change: the rise of “the people” as a relevant and complex political actor, invoked as much as it was feared.

Along with the nation, the revolutionary period in the West also marked the emergence of the state as a structural protagonist. The state was a sophisticated and expensive invention that first had to define and control its own territory. Adapting nations to the discipline of the state was neither easy nor the simple result of writing a constitutional article. Historiography has already highlighted the many difficulties the state faced in asserting its territoriality, one of which was the mobility of people in and between the new spaces of sovereignty.Footnote ² Polasky, focusing on this process and examining several European cities that offered asylum for the displaced, reveals something important for the birth of the modern state: people used migration to evade state power while the states sought to extend their authority over their nationals beyond the limits of territorial sovereignty.

Perl-Rosenthal presents an innovative history of the revolutions that, from the Americas to Europe, not only dismantled empires and toppled monarchs but, more importantly and enduringly, redefined the relationship between society and politics. His is a history that involves elites, but is not solely about them; and while it has a strong Atlantic focus, it is not exactly an “Atlantic history.” I would like to further clarify this distinction. Atlantic history has treated the Atlantic as an object of study per se. The issue with this approach is that it either tends to conceptualize Atlantic history primarily as that which occurred in the North Atlantic, or it ends up as a collection of case studies that are only loosely connected. The first of these approaches was more common in the historiography of the late twentieth century and the early years of the present one. The second approach—exemplified by the monumental Cambridge History of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, edited by Wim Klooster—is more representative of current scholarly practice in the field of Atlantic history. On the one hand, this book presents some genuinely Atlantic approaches—such as relevant concepts, social practices, or influences from other Atlantic regions. On the other hand, however, it reproduces a collection of case studies (Mexico, Spain, the Southern Cone, etc.) that commonly constitute the standard index in works on the Ibero-American Atlantic. This strategy, which is quite prevalent in recent historiography, has allowed previously overlooked areas to be regarded as significant. Nonetheless, in my view, such approaches tend not to transcend the scope of individual case studies to genuinely offer a cohesive Atlantic historiographical narrative.

I would say that what Perl-Rosenthal proposes here is something different from either of these other historiographical strategies. The aim is not to provide an exhaustive account of the Atlantic revolutions, but rather to examine how the Age of Revolutions unfolded in different regions of the Americas and Europe. For this reason, it is not imperative for the author to incorporate every historical experience of revolution; instead, these experiences are used selectively to explain the foundations of the revolutionary era. What is decisive, then, is not the geographical space, but the historical process.

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Meanwhile, Polasky’s work explores how, during the age of revolutions—in which both revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries sought to define and control the state—asylum began to take on political significance. It became central to a new paradigm of international relations that, as the nineteenth century progressed, strengthened state power.

A central hypothesis of The Age of Revolutions suggests that between the 1770s and the 1830s, a series of revolutions occurred in the West that profoundly transformed the hierarchical world of the ancien regime. Essential to this was the political revolution that brought constitutionalism, which introduced a new operating system based on legal equality and thus replaced the previous regime based on privilege. Equally critical was the emergence of a new political subject associated with sovereignty—the people or the nation—which replaced the monarch. This reordering of the ancien regime’s hierarchies extended into the social order as well, which now, for the first time, could be conceived as a unified whole and governed uniformly through the ideas of nationality and citizenship. Two new and long-lasting instruments emerged with the era of revolutions: the constitution to control the functioning of the state and the civil code to regulate social relationships. Both were based on the refusal of privilege, though not necessarily on the rejection of hierarchy itself. These legal frameworks simply generated new hierarchies.

Perl-Rosenthal frames this complex process in two phases: a phase of formulation (the first generation) and a phase of culmination (the second generation). Following Perl-Rosenthal, it could be argued that the Age of Revolutions encompasses two distinct processes: the first, led by the generation born in the mid-eighteenth century, involved the dismantling of the old hierarchies and the political and social order that upheld them; the second, carried out by the subsequent generation, focused on the institutionalization of the new order.

While this generational sequence works well as an overall framework, I believe that this broader perspective calls for more nuance—or rather a complementary interpretive approach. In retrospect, looking beyond 1848, it becomes apparent that none of the revolutionary moments truly opened politics to the masses (a process only completed, according to Perl-Rosenthal, by the second generation of revolutionaries). Instead, what followed was a notabilization process; that is, an increasing political exclusivism of upper social elites, which would come to characterize nineteenth-century liberal Europe. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, this process of notabilization marked significant differences between Europe and the United States, where politics came closer to the white and male population at large. On both sides of the Atlantic there was a “de-aristocratization” of politics, but not necessarily a “democratization” of it. Even in the cases where the process of democratization was more advanced, such as those in the Spanish American republics, notables had assumed control of the state by the century’s end.Footnote ³ The politics of the notables, shaped not in two but in four generations, was in fact what most defined the historical trajectory of the postrevolutionary West.

As I noted earlier, Perl-Rosenthal has written not an Atlantic history of the revolutions but rather a history of the revolutions in the Atlantic, moving nimbly between both shores of Euro-America. This gives his book considerable originality, as only few historians manage to work with such a diverse array of sources as those found in The Age of Revolutions. He draws on archival materials from Peru, France, the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Switzerland, and his bibliography includes works produced in multiple languages on both sides of the Atlantic. This breadth is exceptional and rare among scholarly works on the Atlantic revolutions, which are too often limited to Anglo and French perspectives.

As several authors have shown, the eighteenth-century Western world was interconnected, and events in one place had repercussions elsewhere.Footnote ⁴ By placing the “American Revolution” and the “Andean Revolutions” in the same analytical frame, the book suggests more than mutual influence. It proposes that the “revolution” in the American hemisphere had not one but two centers in the 1770s and 1780s: Philadelphia and Cuzco. In my view, this provocative claim requires some caution. These were two waves of rebellion, of which only one—the North American—fully became a true “revolution,” in the sense that it fundamentally altered previous imperial hierarchies. Such transformation is evident in North America after 1782, but not in the Tawantinsuyu, where in the 1780s the Spanish metropolis began carefully reconstructing the colonial order, as the author rightly notes.

The chapter on the Andean revolutions is placed immediately after two others, which address the first imperial crisis and the North American Revolution. Perhaps it would have been more appropriate to pair it with the former—the chapter dedicated to the first imperial crisis—rather than with the one that focuses specifically on the North American Revolution. Although it is common in historiography to refer to the movements led by Túpac Amaru and Túpac Katari as “Andean revolutions,” in my view these were more closely related to imperial crisis than to revolutions per se. Perl-Rosenthal’s book provides sufficient contrast and context to have initiated, at this juncture, a reconsideration of the intense movements that challenged imperial order in the Andes by confronting rebellion and revolution. Since Perl-Rosenthal treats both movements as revolutions there is no inquiry about the suggested difference between rebellion and revolution in these two episodes of imperial crisis. Further analysis and interpretive work is definitely needed to explain why the British colonial rebellion became a revolution while the Andean uprisings did not.

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By presenting these two historical processes side by side, the book underscores the rise of “the people” as a decisive political force. It is not that the people were absent from politics before, but rather that their political participation was viewed as a monstrosity, as it lacked the forms recognized by modern political and legal culture to be represented. The political culture of the ancien régime generally understood representation as a corporate phenomenon. Social estates, as well as local, commercial, or ecclesiastical corporations, among others, aligned well with the concept of raepresentatio because they possessed their own legal rights or privileges, a pillar of ancient hierarchies. This was not the case for “the people”—and even less so for “society” as a whole.

One of the most consequential aspects of the revolution lay precisely in the invention of a legal framework for society grounded in juridical equality and the abolition of privilege. It was only then that the concept of popular representation acquired its full meaning. Revolution, then, also meant accepting that the people could be represented, thereby shedding this monstrosity.Footnote ⁵ Emmanuel Sièyes wrote What Is the Third State? partly to invert the comparison: monstrous were the privileged classes of the clergy and the nobility, who formed states within the state—not the people. Perl-Rosenthal’s analysis of the revolutionary era in the Netherlands is instructive here. As in North America, a popular politics emerged in which the people were a central reference, though largely developed by the elites. For this reason, I would argue for a sharper distinction between popular politics (which treated the people as an object of politics) and plebeian politics (which made them the subject).

A major question raised by the author is whether plebeian politics emerged in the revolutionary era or whether what emerged was popular politics mediated by elites. One aspect that Perl-Rosenthal does not fully address is that much of what we might call plebeian politics was not articulated in revolutionary discourses but rather expressed in counterrevolutionary ones, as in the Genoese case studied in the book. The Ligurian Republic, established in 1797 with all the revolutionary enthusiasm of members from educated classes, encountered its greatest obstacle not so much in the magnates who had traditionally controlled the Genoese Republic, but rather in the plebeian classes that allied with the magnates. They trusted their traditional authorities more, expecting them to demand changes that would benefit them, than those whom they believed were conducting the revolution without considering their interests. In my view, counterrevolution should have a more prominent role in our understanding of the Age of Revolutions.Footnote ⁶

Finally, a word about the structure of Perl-Rosenthal’s book. As already mentioned, few works published in English and by American authors demonstrate such a sophisticated grasp of the revolutions in the Hispanic world. The final chapter provides an insightful account of these revolutionary processes in the early nineteenth century. However, placing the Hispanic revolutions at the end the book—while chronologically coherent—produces a couple of unintended effects. First, it may give the impression that the Hispanic world served merely as an epilogue to the revolutionary era. The author tries to counter this impression by describing these revolutions as central to the second revolutionary wave, yet they still appear somewhat removed from the heart of the revolutionary transformation.

Second, by postponing these cases to the end of the book, few comparisons are made between the Hispanic revolutions and the earlier ones of the late eighteenth century—even though, as the author acknowledges, they confronted similar challenges. This would indeed be the appropriate place to delve deeper into the relationship between rebellion and revolution, since in the Hispanic context what occurred from 1808 onward was a sequence of rebellions—not against the Spanish monarchy, but against the Napoleonic imperial project—that transformed into revolutions. The key question posed during this transition was to whom sovereignty belonged, and the answers provided were closely linked to legal concepts such as patrimonial dominion and emancipation.Footnote ⁷

Perl-Rosenthal adheres to chronological logic, as his book is largely structured around the idea of two revolutionary generations. Since the revolutions in the Hispanic world occurred when Napoleonic France was seeking to halt its own revolution, they clearly belong to the second phase. However, this chronological fidelity need not prevent comparisons between the constitutional and political solutions to revolutionary crises in the South (from Greece to Spain and Italy and extending to Ibero-America) and those previously attempted in the North (from the United States to France and the Netherlands, with the distinct case of the United Kingdom). I will highlight only two issues that merit parallel consideration in the revolutions of North America, France, and the Hispanic world: the concept of representation and the relationship between nation and religion. In the case of the Hispanic world, both of these issues conveyed a significantly more communal understanding of politics. In both Spanish America and Spain, early constitutionalism implemented broad electoral bodies (which, particularly in local elections, included Indigenous populations) and assumed that the nation was an exclusively Catholic society. These are aspects that deserve to be analyzed in parallel rather than sequentially. In any case, it remains a difficult methodological problem and a challenge for contemporary historiography: how to integrate the North and South into a shared history of the modern West, especially given the chronological disparity.Footnote ⁸ While Perl-Rosenthal goes as far as almost any historian before in bringing the two regions into one conversation, there is ample room for other historians to follow in his footsteps and explore the comparisons and reciprocal dynamics in more detail.

Polasky’s book, which also invokes the “revolutionary era” in its title, is conceived quite differently from Perl-Rosenthal’s. What interests her about this historical moment is an issue that stems from the revolutionary process and the consolidation of nation-states in the first half of the nineteenth century: the phenomenon of refugees and asylum. To explore this, the author draws on a rich collection of primary sources, including newspapers, periodicals, letters, literature, and diplomatic records. She makes skillful use of her knowledge of German and Flemish alongside English and French materials.

The book begins with an interesting contrast between Enlightenment and revolution grounded in a reference to Hannah Arendt that I will address at the end of this review. Very persuasively, Polasky invokes Kant’s reflections about humanity’s common possession of the earth as the foundation of cosmopolitanism. As she reminds us, this original community of the earth formed the legal foundation (Rechtsgrund) both for the state’s right to control space and for the individual’s right to occupy it.

For Polasky, however, the revolution produced a kind of short circuit of Kant’s view. Rather than realizing the cosmopolitan ideal, the revolution led to the consolidation of the nation and the state as the spaces where individual rights were to be developed—effectively nullifying the possibility of balancing state sovereignty with cosmopolitan principles. National constitutions and state laws absorbed all legitimacy for defining what Kant called the “right of visit.”Footnote ⁹

As Europe’s imperial crises gave way to a new international system of nation-states, rights and citizenship were conceived within the boundaries of the nation-state. States did not consider themselves responsible for upholding the rights of humanity beyond their borders. In contrast to enlightened cosmopolitanism, the constitutional revolutions introduced a conception of territory as a technology in the hands of the state. Territory ceased to be understood as a jurisdictional space and came to be assimilated to an administrative one. Under this new meaning, the state increasingly developed a regulatory framework that was both exclusionary and demanding, aimed at governing nationality and regulating territorial occupation.Footnote ¹⁰ Polasky’s book explores the exceptional and revealing cases when cities and states offered protection to political refugees—that is, those excluded from national territory—between the late eighteenth-century revolutions and those of 1848.

Her first stops are the northern European port cities of Altona (Kingdom of Denmark) and Hamburg (Holy Roman Empire). The French aristocratic emigration caused by the Revolution provides the context for a striking contrast between two moral frameworks that collided in the Age of Revolutions. Rooted in centuries of consolidation of social hierarchies—precisely the social model Perl-Rosenthal sees the revolutions as overturning—the aristocratic mind-set found itself at odds with the prevailing republican mercantile morality of these port cities. The condition of these ports as open cities was the logical consequence of a social and political culture based on commercial freedom, interpersonal contact, and mobility as moral foundations. It is particularly enlightening to observe how those aristocrats—who carried in their cultural DNA a conception of their own exceptionalism as a social class—navigated this Kantian “right-to-visit” paradise. In Altona and Hamburg, they had to adapt to live in a society, not in an estate or as part of a privileged class. They likely had to work for the first time in their family history. This was not because the idea of hierarchy was alien to commercial republicanism. On the contrary, Hamburg’s elites were keenly aware of their own distinction from the rest of the city’s inhabitants. However, as Polasky explains, this sense of distinction was not contradictory to cosmopolitanism as a cultural value.

At this point in Polasky’s study, it would have been interesting to contrast the open, commercial republicanism of port cities like Hamburg with cities whose economic foundations rested on monopolistic trade morality. Take Cádiz, in southern Spain, which retained exclusive trading rights with Spanish America until the opening of other Spanish ports to Atlantic commerce in 1778. Cádiz developed a liberal constitutional ideology compatible with preserving monopolistic trade with the Spanish American dominions, even envisioning the whole Spanish monarchy—including its European, American, and Asian territories—as a single sovereign nation.Footnote ¹¹ The two cities, then, reveal different models of port city political culture: one grounded in open trade and mobility, the other in exclusivity and imperial integration.

Neither of the two books I review here sets out to analyze the conceptual transformation surrounding the nation in the revolutionary era and its constitutional implications. Yet, for both authors, the position of this new political subject is central. Polasky considers the new national spaces of politics as regulated by the state. Her analysis shows how sovereignty was increasingly a matter of the state—not the nation—as the nineteenth century advanced. A key function of the state became to define who belonged to the nation and to establish the conditions for others to enter the national confines. As she explains, nationality, border control, and passports became a crucial part of the state’s functions in order to manage political membership.Footnote ¹²

Were states truly able to effectively control the political activity of their nationals? The answer, as Polasky shows, is both yes and no. Her study of some Swiss cantons in the 1820s and 1830s is especially enlightening for understanding the relationship between exile and the political action of refugees. Cities like Zurich, Geneva, and Bern hosted political refugees like Wilhelm Weitling or Giuseppe Mazzini, who conducted most of their political activities there. In other words, the legal space for their political activity did not match their nationality—just as Karl Marx, whom the book treats in great detail, found political refuge and action in Brussels and London.

This disconnect destabilizes the presumed theoretical equivalence between nationality, state control, and the political rights of nationals. In fact, in some parts of Europe, that very equivalence was the central problem of statehood.Footnote ¹³ It is at this crossroads that another process, to which Polasky gives sustained attention, emerges: the capacity of states to project influence beyond their own borders and into foreign national spaces. Though present throughout the book, this historical problem gains particular relevance in the revolutionary context of 1848. In my view, Polasky’s analysis of this phenomenon stands as one of the book’s greatest contributions. On the one hand, it helps clarify to what extent the state—not the nation—became the fundamental actor of European politics. True, in cases such as those of Marx or Weitling, the acting power was Prussia, which in the 1840s had become a paradigm of a sovereign power in Europe. What Prussia attempted in Belgium—pressuring a foreign state to limit the activities of its exiled nationals—was later mirrored by Austria, France, and other European states as they sought to extend state power beyond national borders through diplomatic influence and coercive pressure.

On the other hand, Polasky’s analysis sheds light on the functioning of the international order that emerged in postrevolutionary Europe: an order in which the “quality” of a state became essential. While Prussia rose to the status of a first-order power, Spain, following the loss of most of its American colonies, fell to a second-tier position. There was no official ranking of powers, but rather a new international political culture that allowed certain states to exert what was euphemistically called “influence” over others.

Such influence was persuasive enough to compel a young state like Belgium, founded in 1831, eventually to comply with Prussian demands, or Zurich to bend to Austrian ones. Through this leverage, first-order powers could project their sovereignty into the state space of other European nations. But just as states were able to transgress the equivalence between the nation’s domain and the reach of state power through “influence,” so too could refugees carry their own sense of nationality to other regions. The 1848 revolutionaries who settled in the United States are a vivid example of this creative and portable sense of nationality—a theme Polasky explores with care at the end of her book. Earlier parallels can be found in the more fluid contexts of the nascent Latin American republics where figures like Vicente Rocafuerte or Andrés Bello embodied this transnational character of identity.Footnote ¹⁴

As Polasky tells us at the book’s outset, Asylum between Nations began to take shape decades ago, when she, then a student, dined with Hannah Arendt after a seminar. Beyond my envy for that encounter with a giant of contemporary philosophy, I notice the constant presence of Arendt’s thought throughout the book. The idea that the refugee loses, among many other things, the right to have rights informs much of Polasky’s reflection. Her book does not close with 1848 but rather reaches into our present, where refugees, exiles, and the displaced are once again multiplying. Venezuela, Bosnia, Syria, Ukraine, or Gaza—these are the countries we immediately associate with the mass displacement of human beings. And governments, such as those of the United States or Italy, often take pride in blocking or repelling migrants. We continue to live, then, in the cycle Arendt described. With this book, Polasky offers a powerful lesson in how historiographical thought helps us understand the world that we live in.

We are, ultimately, confronted with two books that address the same historical moment while raising different historiographical questions. The Age of Revolutions offers the reader a complex interpretation of this period, spanning from the 1770s to the 1820s. The complexity arises from several factors, but, in my view, primarily from two. First, it avoids completing a checklist of cases, treating each as an exception to the others. Instead, it uses cases to illustrate and interpret historiographical issues (for instance, the political invention and role of the people). Second, and in line with the first point, it does not presuppose the existence of a historical canon of revolution to which the various regions where it occurred must conform.

Asylum between Nations allows the reader to examine a practical case of the relationship between the state and society, particularly the control of populations that, for various reasons, but now significantly due to political factors, began to move in increasing numbers during the era of revolutions. Polasky’s analysis is especially instructive regarding the various solutions to the dilemmas of modernity that were proposed from the very outset. Of course, there was the most visible one (which, in general terms, proved most successful and which you can find in history textbooks): the strength of the state and its absolute control over its nationals (a situation that, in part, would not be rectified until the Nuremberg Trials—if then). However, the modernity resulting from the dismantling of the Old Regime and the revolution could also be interpreted through the obligations and limitations of the state. It was an interpretation of modernity that connected less with Hegel and more with Kant. In sum, these two books, each addressing its own specific issues, demonstrate that the modern world, from its very origins, encompasses different versions of itself.