Revolution, it seems, is once again in the air. In the last decade or two, scholars have rushed to reexamine revolutionary experiences across the Atlantic, through the Americas, and more recently in imperial and global contexts. While Revolution has been a perennial favorite topic of national historians, a new generation of historians have begun to eschew traditional foundation narratives and embrace the insights of Atlantic and transnational history to create a new-old field of studythe Age of Revolutionalready replete with books, articles, collections, texts, workshops, blogs, conference panels, and even its own genealogy. And the topics are diversefrom analyses of honor to the role of international Protestantism across revolutionsand range ever more broadlyfrom the revolutionary reverberations of the Wahhabi movement in the Persian Gulf region to Indian and slave Royalists in the northern Andes. Judging by the buzz, many more, and more diverse, studies are in the works. In historiographical terms, we are in the midst of another kind of "age of Revolutions," as Thomas Paine put it in Age of Reason, "in which everything may be looked for." 1 As Sarah Knott recently noted, the revolution in Revolution scholarship has had a curiously long and somewhat halting gestation period. Despite an oft-ignored call to arms by C.L.R. James in 1938, and a more publicized intervention by R.R. Palmer starting in 1959, the historical profession was too mired in nationalist debates and perhaps too wary of international entanglements to revive wholesale an idea of transnational revolution. Arguably, it was not until the publication of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's landmark book, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic in 2000, that scholars began connecting the concurrent rise in interest in Atlantic history with an Age of Revolution. That connection was cemented with the rediscovery of the importance of the Haitian Revolution starting with Michel-Rolph Trouillot's powerful work Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History in 1995, followed by a spate of new works in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and furthered and extended by contributions from Spanish-American, West African, Indian, British imperial, and global historians. 2 Given the relative infancy of the field of the Age of Revolution, and the explosion of literature, there are of course many definitional questions yet to be explored let alone agreed upon. Even the umbrella term often gets modified as circumstances dictate. Should we call it an Age of Revolution, Age of Revolutions, Age of Atlantic Revolution, Age of Democratic Revolution, or Age of Imperial Revolution? The reasons for these modifiers often lie in how we define this Revolutionary Age and its scope and whether we
