Freedom's Empire

Abstract

In The Social Contract (1762), Jean-Jacques Rousseau likens revolution in the state to the rupture of a person's memory -and so gives a hint of the novel's work in Atlantic modernity: just as certain afflictions unhinge men's minds and banish their memory of the past, so there are certain violent epochs and revolutions in states which have the same effects on peoples . . .; only instead of forgetting the past, they look back on it in horror, and then the state after being consumed by civil war, is born again, so to speak, from its own ashes, and leaps from the arms of death to regain the vigour of youth.1 Published before the American and French revolutions, Rousseau's reflections would have recalled for his contemporaries the English Revolution and its aftermath.For in the preceding century all of Europe had stood witness as the English fought a bloody civil war, beheaded their king, swerved from republic to Protectorate to Restoration to "bloodless" revolution and finally fashioned themselves as a youthful "people" of vigorous free spirit, destined to win colonies from their European rivals and build the next western empire.The immensely popular eighteenth-century histories of England written by the Frenchman Paul de Rapin-Thoyras, the Scot David Hume, and the Englishwoman Catharine Macaulay had both intensified and reflected the eighteenth-century Anglo-European preoccupation with English revolutionary history.It is this revolutionary history, I argue, that the English-language novel most

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