REBECCA J. SCOTT and JEAN M. HEBRARD. Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation.

Abstract

Historians in recent years have returned to serious consideration of an idea promulgated by French historian Jacques Godechot in his 1947 work, Histoire de l'Atlantique, and by American historian R. R. Palmer in his 1958 classic, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800. Godechot and Palmer argued that the revolutionary events of the Atlantic world have to be viewed collectively as an outgrowth of intellectual, political, economic, and social developments. Palmer traced direct connections among revolutions in the English colonies, France, and the Netherlands—in short, in the Atlantic world, as he viewed it. Together, in 1955, Palmer and Godechot collaborated to present a joint paper on “The Problem of Atlantic History” at the 10th International Congress of Historical Sciences in Rome. Neither scholar, however, thoroughly examined the roles that race, slavery, slave revolts, and gender played in shaping the dynamics of the revolutionary-era Atlantic community. They largely ignored the obvious connections among the struggle for black emancipation, ideas of liberty and equality in the Caribbean, and the evolving pursuit of human rights in France, England, and other parts of Europe.