From the 1760s to the 1820s, the world lived through several long, anxious, and turbulent decades as a wave of revolutions swept from North America to Haiti. Those who took part in these upheavals shattered familiar orders and class hierarchies, toppled empires, overthrew monarchs, and drew countries into destructive wars. They rewrote reality and laid the foundations of a new world—but the forces that unleashed the revolutions were also giving birth to new forms of inequality.
Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, George Washington and other Founding Fathers of the United States, Robespierre and Madre Maria—a noble abbess of a monastery in Peru, Napoleon and Toussaint Louverture, a former slave and one of the principal leaders of the Haitian Revolution: through a kaleidoscope of their unusual fates, historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal shows both the great revolutions and the uprisings that ended in defeat. Before the reader unfolds a true revolutionary saga, bringing together many people, countries, and peoples.