In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775–1848 by Jonathan Israel
  • Nancy Vogeley
Jonathan Israel, The Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775–1848 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2017). Pp.768. $39.95 cloth.

Although the word “Enlightenment” does not appear in his book’s title, Jonathan Israel makes clear that he considers that cluster of modernizing ideas in America’s “thought-world” to have been the blaze that Britain’s colonists set. The example of the American Revolution, he says, in the hands of “farmers, artisans, and traders” who were protesting social and economic inequities, was not what resonated abroad. Rather “[in] determining the actual direction and precise objectives of the revolutions of the 1775–1850 era, when justifying American (or Belgian, Greek, or Spanish American) independence, rewriting constitutions, re-shaping institutions, drafting major new legislation, and formulating the ‘rights of mankind,’ it was invariably challenging new ideological frameworks opposing the status quo, not economic forces or culture, that were primary” (14). The distinction is significant because Israel thus elides the physical violence of commoners and their initial dissatisfactions as causes of the conflagration and passes credit for “revolution” [End Page 485] to individuals in the upper classes who shaped revolutionary objectives and struggled to concretize governance in the war’s aftermath.

Israel examines the French Revolution through the eyes of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin as they witnessed the overthrow of that country’s monarchy and aristocracy, eradication of religious authority, and proclamations of civil equality—and tried to extract lessons for an American democracy. However, these events, justified by philosophical abstractions, soon run up against the figure of Napoleon; and “thinking” seems to yield to that maverick’s disruptions in a way that begins to complicate Israel’s assertion that men’s mentalities are what provoke change.

Israel continues to examine the wide-ranging influence of the American form of revolution: “The American Revolution had shown the way in terms of principle and technique, and helped stoke the general revolutionary ferment of 1785–98 in Holland, Switzerland, France, Italy, Poland, and Germany, by infusing Europe’s radical philosophical criticism of the old order with a vigorous practical political dimension” – “technique” and “practical” here suggesting some recognition of America’s instrumental criminality (300). Revolution in British America and France are next shown to have inspired revolt in Haiti, Ireland, Spanish America, Greece, and Italy. In discussing Spanish America, Israel concentrates his argument for influence on the southern continent—Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador, some of whose citizens residing for a time in the U.S. and Britain carried back to their homeland revolutionary ideas. At this point “Enlightenment” begins to seem like a metropolitan monolith with its menu of reforms, denying indigenous reasons for change. Israel focuses on travelers like the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda, while ignoring his compatriot Andrés Bello who also lived in London and returned to the continent to live and write in Chile. Miranda was a revolutionary but Bello was a peaceful scholar, not much interested in politics, so that Israel’s definition of “revolution” in terms of considered debate over self-rule is further complicated. Israel also ignores independence movements in Mexico where U.S. influence entered overland, yet Mexicans acted on their own reasons for change and adopted U.S. ideas and practices selectively. For example, they admired Washington because he was able to leave his military past behind and assume leadership as a civilian president. But they criticized the U.S. practice of periodic elections as unnecessarily disruptive.

By seeing the long-distance transmission of ideas principally via trans-Atlantic travelers, Israel has missed what book history is presently emphasizing. Caitlin Fitz in Our Sister Republics, The Unites States in an Age of American Revolutions and my The Bookrunner: A History of Inter-American Relations—Print, Politics, and Commerce in the United States and Mexico, 1800–1830 rely heavily on this impersonal evidence of cultural spread.

The lessons of Israel’s book are huge. His coverage of the period is astonishingly thorough; one is awed by the extent of his bibliography. His discussion of revolutionary and post-revolutionary U.S...

pdf

Share