The North Atlantic Revolution, 1775-1787
Chapter 17 Notes
I. Comparing Atlantic Revolutions
A. The North American Revolution, 1775-1787
The Declaration of Independence in 1776 , resulted in an unlikely military victory by 1781 , and generated a federal constitution in 1787 , joining thirteen formerly separate colonies into a new nation.
B. The French Revolution, 1789-1815
That revolution was quite different from its North American predecessor. Whereas the American Revolution expressed the tensions of a colonial relationship with a distant imperial power, the French insurrection was driven by sharp conflicts within French society.
C. The Haitian Revolution, 1791-1804
Nowhere did the example of the French Revolution echo more loudly than in the French Caribbean colony of Saint Domingue, later renamed Haiti Widely regarded as the richest colony in the world, Saint Domingue boasted 8,000 plantations, which in the late eighteenth century produced some 40 percent of the world’s sugar and perhaps half of its coffee. A slave labor force of About 500,000 people made up the …show more content…
Their revolutions were shaped by future events in North America, Haiti, and France as well as by their own distinctive societies and historical experience. As in British North America, native-born elites in the Spanish colonies were offended and insulted by the Spanish monarchy’s efforts during the eighteenth century to exercise greater power over its colonies and to subject them to heavier taxes and tariffs. Creole intellectuals also had become familiar with ideas of popular sovereignty, republican government, and personal liberty derived from the European Enlightenment. But these conditions, similar to those in North America, led initially only to scattered and uncoordinated protests rather than to outrage, declarations of independence, war, and unity, as had occurred in the British
I. Comparing Atlantic Revolutions
A. The North American Revolution, 1775-1787
The Declaration of Independence in 1776 , resulted in an unlikely military victory by 1781 , and generated a federal constitution in 1787 , joining thirteen formerly separate colonies into a new nation.
B. The French Revolution, 1789-1815
That revolution was quite different from its North American predecessor. Whereas the American Revolution expressed the tensions of a colonial relationship with a distant imperial power, the French insurrection was driven by sharp conflicts within French society.
C. The Haitian Revolution, 1791-1804
Nowhere did the example of the French Revolution echo more loudly than in the French Caribbean colony of Saint Domingue, later renamed Haiti Widely regarded as the richest colony in the world, Saint Domingue boasted 8,000 plantations, which in the late eighteenth century produced some 40 percent of the world’s sugar and perhaps half of its coffee. A slave labor force of About 500,000 people made up the …show more content…
Their revolutions were shaped by future events in North America, Haiti, and France as well as by their own distinctive societies and historical experience. As in British North America, native-born elites in the Spanish colonies were offended and insulted by the Spanish monarchy’s efforts during the eighteenth century to exercise greater power over its colonies and to subject them to heavier taxes and tariffs. Creole intellectuals also had become familiar with ideas of popular sovereignty, republican government, and personal liberty derived from the European Enlightenment. But these conditions, similar to those in North America, led initially only to scattered and uncoordinated protests rather than to outrage, declarations of independence, war, and unity, as had occurred in the British