Alpaugh’s Friends of Freedom provides an integrated narrative of the rise of social movements, political protest, and revolutionary mobilization in the eighteenth century in the United States, Britain, Ireland, France, and Haiti. The author contrasts his own work with that of Palmer, who undertook a similar project more than half a century ago in The Age of the Democratic Revolution.1 Like Alpaugh, Palmer argued that common ideals motivated eighteenth-century revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic, but as Alpaugh points out, Palmer’s account portrays the American and French Revolutions as “more simultaneous than interrelated” and has little to say about slavery or Haiti. Alpaugh answers these deficiencies, elucidating interconnections between events in various parts of the Atlantic World and highlighting the importance of abolitionism as a precocious protest movement that developed arguments and tactics that would later be adopted by revolutionaries in every place he examines.
Alpaugh has...