A Turbulent Time - The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Paperback)

This volume examines developments within several societies in the Greater Caribbean during the revolutionary period to illustrate the pervasive and multi-layered impact of the revolutions on the region. People who lived through the age of the French Revolution often felt the world had entered a chaotic new era. Welding a dynamic ideology of liberty and equality, a new concept of state power, and a nascent sense of nationalism, revolutionary France and its Napoleonic successor plunged Europe into a quarter-century of warfare and tumultuous change. Outside of Europe, the region most threatened and in some ways most affected by this upheaval was the plantation zone surrounding the Caribbean sea, which was then of extreme importance to the European and North American economies. Built precariously on the massive exploitation of slave labour, organized according to the doctrine of racial discrimination, they were peculiarly vulnerable to the libertarian message of the French Revolution. That message proved all the more potent because it coincided with the emergence of the antislavery movement in the Atlantic world and interacted with local traditions of resistance among the region's slav