ABSTRACT
Colonial revolutionaries embraced the image of the Indian and the name “American” to set themselves apart from the Old World. The American War of Independence initiated an era of political upheaval that transformed the Atlantic World between 1775 and 1825. The common connection between these various revolutionary movements was their ideological foundation in the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement that transformed European science and philosophy between 1680 and 1800. The Enlightenment dealt a fatal blow to the institution of hereditary kingship and made possible the emergence of modern nation states out of the colonial empires that had previously governed the Atlantic World. The chapter examines the intersection of the Enlightenment and the Atlantic revolutions of 1775–1825. The international revolutionary cause in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World had no voice more eloquent than Thomas Paine’s. After the American Revolution, his radicalism drew him to France, where he worked as a member of the revolutionary National Assembly.
