Is nationalism compatible with Islamic belief and practice? Debates on this question began with the rise of modern nationalism in the Muslim world during the nineteenth century and continue in varying forms in the twenty-first century. The middle of the twentieth century marked an important moment in the evolution of these debates. Muslim leaders and activists worked to define the political and cultural identity of the Muslim countries that were becoming independent from European imperialism. They were also defining the possible relationships between Islam and nationalism. The broad spectrum of their views reflects the fundamental issues involved in deciding whether nationalism is compatible with Islam.

This chapter investigates the reverberations of the Oporto liberal revolution and Brazilian independence on the Portuguese colony of Angola in West Central Africa. Angola was the largest supplier of enslaved labor for recently independent Brazil, yet the ties between the two regions stretched well beyond the transatlantic slave trade. A cultural and social continuum connected the South Atlantic World, and the chapter argues that such ties acquired a political dimension in the wake of the Oporto revolution and Brazil’s secession from Portugal. To trace how Angola’s coastal elites responded to the end of Portuguese colonialism in Brazil, the chapter reconstructs the trajectory of a single individual, the Luanda born Domingos Pereira Diniz, who became the president of the Benguela Junta, a governmental body which endorsed a petition in which Benguela’s elite requested the right to become an overseas province of independent Brazil.

Jacques Pierre Brissot founded the Society of the Friends of the Blacks in Paris in early 1788. Although primarily operational in Paris, the society was very much an Atlantic organization. Through superficial examinations of the efforts of the Friends of the Blacks, scholars have categorized the French movement as based solely in the printed word and engagement through revolutionary assemblies. Taken in isolation from other Atlantic philanthropic activity, the movement appears diminutive, sporadic, and ineffectual. Yet, France granted rights to free people of color and abolished slavery – lasting from 1794 to 1802 – before England, the United States, and other countries deeply entangled in the Atlantic struggle over the status of peoples of African descent. The French movement was not a failure; it was part of a longer process of abolition. While late eighteenth-century efforts did not bring about the permanent end to slavery in the French Caribbean – something only achieved in 1848 – those like Brissot advocated for peoples of African descent during the French Revolution, laying the groundwork for the later success of the nineteenth-century abolitionists.

To what extent did the Patriot Revolt of the 1780s and the Batavian Revolution of the 1790s break with the old regime? Recent decades have seen a wide range of responses to this question. This chapter aims to offer a synthesis that takes in multiple perspectives. It considers revolutionary ideas, the contentious repertoire of the Dutch Revolution, and the question which institutions, places, and people were affected by the revolution. I conclude that the revolution had a deep and lasting impact on the political life of Catholics, Jews, Brabanders, and rural dwellers, among other groups, because they were accepted, for the first time since Dutch independence, as full citizens. The higher degree of political participation and the introduction of public access to government entirely changed the dynamics of citizen-ruler interactions. New political practices were not there to stay, but their memory could not be banned from people’s minds. There were also many inhabitants of the Netherlands who largely remained outside the political domain. This could be because they were actively excluded, as was the case for Orangists, women, and those living in the colonies, but it could also be the result of a self-imposed stance of non-involvement.

Both local agency and French intervention created the Helvetic Republic. The events of 1789 in France affected the debate elsewhere in Europe, and the presence of French troops in the Pays de Vaud had a coercive effect, but fundamental political changes were also made according to traditional cantonal norms and responded to ongoing Swiss debates and repertoires of action. Local Swiss patriotic elites’ shaping of a hybrid or blended republicanism adds to the wider discussion on the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. Political actors in the old Swiss Confederation had debated concepts of (Swiss) freedom, individual and collective liberty and liberties since the late seventeenth century. Many who were excluded from the Old Regime hoped to be welcomed with an expansion of a conception of liberty. When this entry was rejected, these spurned local elites often sought to overturn the Old Regime in the Swiss Confederation and elsewhere.

In ‘Göttingen’, the French singer Barbara, who as a Jewish child hid in German-occupied France during the Second World War, celebrated Franco-German reconciliation after the bloodshed and hatred that had marked bilateral relations in the past. The song, recorded in 1964 first in French and later in German, was hailed as a hymn to Franco-German reconciliation and credited for improving post-war Franco-German relations. The song’s melancholic tunes certainly captured the Zeitgeist of an era: it was recorded roughly a year after the signature of the Élysée ‘friendship’ treaty on 22 January 1963. The treaty was instrumental in forging a narrative of how the two countries overcame a shared history of conflict and rivalry to become a driving force of European integration.

Focusing on a comparative study of diverse socio-political movements and rebellions that developed in the Caribbean coast of New Granada and Venezuela during the last decade of the eighteenth century, this chapter will analyze the complex and distinctive reverberations of Saint Domingue’s rebellion in the Spanish American mainland. The vast and exposed Caribbean coast of New Granada and Venezuela with its vibrant port cities and coastal towns allowed for the emergence of multicultural and multilingual hubs for Atlantic encounters and exchange. The open, varied, and dynamic configuration of port societies facilitated the flow of information about the Atlantic Revolutions, but especially about the Haitian Revolution. Of the three Atlantic Revolutions—the American, the French, and the Haitian—the Haitian one became the most tangible for the inhabitants of coastal Venezuela and New Granada, who used the impressions of the turbulent Caribbean insurgency as shared knowledge, an everyday reference point that was exploited by insurgents during negotiations with the colonial state and, at the same time, by those very elites and state agents to justify repression or, alternatively, to make concessions to “calm the spirits” of rebellion in the region.

Chapter nine explores the phenomenon of historical dislocation and displacement in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, focussing on early and later French Romanticism, but also drawing comparisons with other literatures. It shows how the Revolution’s effects extended throughout Europe, encouraging the circulation of people and texts. Opening with the soundscapes of Romanticism, the chapter moves on to aristocratic memoirs and autobiographies by celebrity exiles such as Chateaubriand but also little-known authors. It then develops the themes of errancy, melancholy, and death in prose and poetry, touching on works by Lamartine, Duras, Desbordes-Valmore, Vigny, Hugo, and others. Seth devotes particular attention to another famous writer in exile, Germaine de Staël. Making politics an integral part of literature, Staël and her circle spread their liberal ideas through their novels and essays, but also through translation, which contributed to the circulation of Romantic genres such as Gothic and historical fiction. The chapter concludes with a section on Waterloo, which marked the end of French hegemony, a historical loss mourned in poems and novels by Balzac and Stendhal, but that also opened the way for a sense of shared European identity.

This chapter sets out to conceptualise the institutional and legal evolution of the European Communities (EC) over time from the Treaties of Paris and Rome to the Treaty of Maastricht.

The founding treaties of Paris and Rome were essentially open-ended efforts for integration, despite their undeniable differences in nature. At the moment of negotiating the founding treaties and during the first years of the Communities, it was unforeseeable whether the Communities would go through a process of gradual and increasing federalisation, or whether member states would eventually manage to dominate the Communities. The balance between these contradictory tendencies inherent in the founding treaties was clarified only through the open political battles in the 1960s. In a sense, the battle between federalist and intergovernmentalist streams has continued beyond Maastricht to the present day.

This chapter provides an overview of the conditions and experiences of the 22 million people who lived on farms and who inhabited the villages and small towns in the countryside during the revolution. The relationship between these people and revolutionary legislators in Paris was one of negotiation, confrontation and dialogue. This chapter will highlight how rural dwellers adopted, adapted and resisted change from the capital. It discusses the cahiers de doléances, not only as they represent a decisive moment of mass politicization, but also because they emphasize so very well the concerns, hopes and fears of the majority of the population. The chapter also pays attention to the various waves of peasant insurrection – against feudalism and taxation – during 1789-1793. A balance sheet is drawn up for the outcomes of the French Revolution for the rural population, which reveals that changes in family life, religious practices and socio-economic relations combined to fundamentally alter the mental universe of all French citizens.

On 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo, a young Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated the Austrian heir presumptive, Franz Ferdinand. By killing the archduke (and his wife), Princip set in motion the well-oiled wheels that would, just a month later, lead to the outbreak of what George F. Kennan called “the great seminal catastrophe of [the twentieth] century,”1 the First World War. It resulted in the demise of most European monarchies and empires, and – by extension – triggered the next two global conflicts, the Second World War and the Cold War. Princip was a member of the secret Serbian society the “Black Hand,” which had grown in response to the illegal occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by the Habsburg Monarchy in 1908. He shot Franz Ferdinand to intimidate Austria-Hungary so that it would let go of Bosnia and Herzegovina.2 This assassination demonstrates how terrorism and nationalism can be intertwined and how potent and destructive this mix can be.

In 1921, Marianne Weber published one of the greatest works of her late husband, Max, a book destined to become one of the foundations of modern social theory. Economy and Society was of such a scope and breadth that it touched on almost all aspects of social, economic, and political thought and, inevitably, a section was devoted to the nation. According to Weber, the latter could never be defined unambiguously, in terms of the qualities and traits shared by those who saw themselves as its members. The nation, he argued, meant “above all, that it is proper to expect from certain groups a specific sentiment of solidarity in the face of other groups.” Thus, “the concept belongs in the sphere of values” and there “is no agreement on how these groups should be delimited or about what concerted action should result from such a solidarity.”