The Atlantic Revolutions: A Reinterpretation

This article argues that the eighteenth and early nineteenth century revolutions, that took place in the Atlantic world, were the culmination of a process that began centuries earlier. It further maintains that Western Europe developed a shared political culture, based on ancient Greek and Roman thought, which emerged in the Middle Ages and which subsequent generations of thinkers refined. The Hispanic neo-scholastic theorists, who advanced the principle of potestas populi (sovereignty of the people), contributed enormously to the development of representative government based on the idea of popular sovereignty. The article then considers sixteenth and seventeenth century upheavals starting with the Rebelión de las Comunidades de Castilla, the Dutch independence movement, and the English civil wars and revolution of 1688. Finally, it examines those revolts, generally described as the Atlantic Revolutions, the American, the French, the Haitian, the Spanish American and the Portuguese American rebellions. It concludes that, with the exception of the Haitian upheaval, those movements were fundamentally political transformations