Introduction to the Documents, Chapter 22

Beginning with the American Revolution in 1775, the intellectual projects of the Enlightenment in Europe intersected with the economic logic of overseas colonial empires to generate optimism and upheaval in the Atlantic world. Colonists in British North America, members of the third estate in France, and slaves in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (Haiti) all used Enlightenment values to justify rebellion. The bloody expression of notions of freedom, equality, and national integrity in the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, along with the Napoleonic wars of conquest in Europe, challenged many aspects of traditional European society at home and in the colonies. However, the endurance of sexual, class-based, and ethnic discrimination and the recurrence of violence and war complicate the era’s story of egalitarianism and democracy.