National Identity and the Agrarian Republic: The Transatlantic Commerce of Ideas Between America and France 1750-1830

Abstract

Over the last decade or so, political economy has gained a new centrality among historians interested in the development of political culture during the century of Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions that followed it. Among the many virtues of Manuela Albertone’s new book is that it explicitly conceptualizes the political economy of this period—which was so often written in the polemical contexts surrounding revolution, war and constitution making—as a forum for working out problems of national identity. In adopting this point of departure, Albertone exposes the underlying purpose of so much of the economic literature of this period, which was consumed and produced by a public largely uninterested in the technical arcana specific to finance, demography or long-distance trade. Albertone’s study is devoted to the intellectual exchange between France and the Unites States during the second half of the eighteenth century, a shared Enlightenment that gave rise to the ‘democratic revolutions’ on both sides of the Atlantic—an expression that recalls R. R. Palmer’s classic Age of Democratic Revolution. Decades of revisionist scholarship devoted to deploring the excesses of Jacobin republicanism in France, and a pervasive self-satisfaction among many American historians over the comparatively moderate course that the American Revolution took, have all but severed an historiographical link, which used to seem self-evident, between the sister revolutions in America and France.