Brill The Citizenship Experiment: Contesting the Limits of Civic Equality and Participation in the Age of Revolutions: 15 (Studies in the History of Political Thought, 15)

Review "René Koekkoek has written one of the most important, and most provocative comparative studies of the late eighteenth-century Atlantic Revolutions since R.R. Palmer's The Age of the Democratic Revolution. Based on exhaustive research in original French, Dutch and American sources, and written in exceptionally lucid prose, The Citizen Experiment makes a bold argument about how the reaction to the violence and perceived excesses of the French "reign of Terror" and the Haitian Revolution led revolutionaries throughout the Atlantic world to embrace far more narrowly national and circumscribed ideas of citizenship than they had done at the start of their respective revolutions. All historians of the period will want to read, and engage with this book." - David A. Bell, Princeton University "The Citizenship Experiment presents a highly original study of the American, French and Dutch eighteenth-century revolutions. Instead of a traditional side-by-side comparison of the three revolutions, René Koekkoek demonstrates that political ideas on citizenship and equality circulated in an Atlantic political space and cannot be well understood in national frameworks. Koekkoek identifies a radical-democratic Atlantic historical moment in the early seventeen-nineties, followed by a conservative turn impacted by the Terror in France and the successful slave revolution in Haiti. His book is an inspiring example of intercrossing history, highlighting the entanglement of domestic and colonial politics in the making of citizenship in the Age of Revolutions." - Siep Stuurman, author of The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History (Harvard, 2017) Product Description Focusing on the United States, France and the Dutch Republic in the revolutionary 1790s, The Citizenship Experiment explores the convergence and divergence of Atlantic citizenship ideals in light of the Haitian Revolution and the French revolutionary Terror. About the Author René Koekkoek, Ph.D. (2016) is Assistant Professor in Political History at Utrecht University. His research focuses on the history of political thought and culture in the early-modern Atlantic world. This is his first book.