The Citizenship Experiment: Contesting the Limits of Civic Equality and Participation in the Age of Revolutions

This is a book about the fate of citizenship ideals in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. Often, the significance of this age is told in terms of a transatlantic revolutionary movement seeking to transform citizenship on the basis of the equal rights of man and popular sovereignty. Focusing on the United States, France, and the Dutch Republic in the 1790s, this book tells a different story. While in the early 1790s citizenship ideals in the Atlantic world converged, the twin shocks of the Haitian Revolution and the French Revolutionary Terror led the American, French, and Dutch publics to abandon the notion of a shared, Atlantic, revolutionary vision of citizenship. Instead, they forged conceptions of citizenship that were limited to national contexts, to restricted categories of voters, and to “advanced” stages of civilization.