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— three — State Formation, Resistance, and the Creation of Revolutionary Traditions in the Early Modern Era I The 1997 sears symposium, “Transatlantic Revolutionary Traditions 1688–1824,” at Purdue University seems to have been a response to two historiographical trends, an older and by now quite venerable, not to say antique, interest in revolutionary ideology and the newer and more trendy interest in the transatlantic context of historical developments around the Atlantic rim. Particularly evident in the English-speaking world and stimulated by the pioneering works of Bernard Bailyn, Gordon S. Wood, J. G. A. Pocock, and many other students of the history of early modern and Enlightenment political thought, the interest in revolutionary ideology has, over the past thirty years, generated a vast, if relatively narrowly focused, literature on conflicting ideologies used to sustain—or explain—the revolutionary and nation-building projects from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Dating back at least as far as R. R. Palmer’s seminal transatlantic comparative studies of late eighteenth-century revolutions in North America and Europe, the rising interest in Atlantic studies calls attention to the possibilities for comparative studies and the interconnectedness of developments within the larger Atlantic world. On November 1, 1997, the Purdue University Department of History brought four scholars together for a symposium, “Transatlantic Revolutionary Traditions 1688–1824,” with papers devoted to the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Mexican Revolution. The organizers subsequently asked me to provide a lecture to put those revolutions into a general framework, and this chapter is the result. Originally entitled “Transatlantic Revolutionary Traditions: A Retrospective,” this chapter was written to be delivered as the Biennial Louis Martin Sears Lecture at Purdue on April 6, 1999. It is here reprinted with permission and corrections from “State Formation, Resistance, and the Creation of Revolutionary Traditions in the Early Modern Era: A Retrospective,” in Michael A. Morrison and Melinda Zook, eds., Revolutionary Currents: Nation Building in the Transatlantic World, 1688–1821 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 1–34. Greene, final pages 33 Greene, final pages 33 2/12/13 2:27 PM 2/12/13 2:27 PM 34 Perspectives But there is still a third historiography that is relevant to understanding the emergence and character of revolutionary traditions in the early modern world: the historiography growing out of the new literature on state formation (and, to a lesser extent, nation building) that began to appear in the early 1990s and has since been proliferating rapidly. By showing that the unitary nation state was principally a development of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this historiography has called attention to the rather different—what might be called, the premodern—character of early modern states and empires, to the structural tensions inherent within those polities, and to the relationship between those tensions and the emergence of “revolutionary” movements and traditions in several areas of the Atlantic world between the mid-sixteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. With the objective of teasing out some of the most important commonalities and variations among these revolutionary movements and the traditions that both informed and grew out of them, this chapter focuses principally upon these subjects. The contest over what the nature of state and empire should be, it suggests, was the principal underlying issue that linked together all early modern “revolutions” and the traditions associated with them. II That early modern polities differed radically from modern states is perhaps the central conclusion of the recent literature on state formation. As Charles Tilly and other contributors to this literature have shown, the organization of Europe into “a small number of unitary and integrated nation states” is relatively recent. “It took a long time,” Tilly writes, “for national states—relatively centralized, differentiated, and autonomous organizations successfully claiming priority in the use of force within large, contiguous, and clearly defined territories—to dominate the European map.”¹ In 1490, on the eve of Europe’s expansion across the Atlantic, “Europe’s political structure,” as Mark Greengrass notes, was still “dominated by a multiplicity of regional political entities,” just under five hundred in all, with “a rich variety of [political and constitutional ] traditions.” These included “large old-established states, new principalities , dynastic empires, city states, confederations,” the Holy Roman Empire, representing “the ideal of universal world monarchy,” and the papacy, with its claims to worldwide spiritual and temporal jurisdiction.² 1. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990), 43–44, 224. 2. Mark Greengrass...

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