“Circulating Revolutions: Ideas, Exchange, and the Atlantic Networks in the Revolutionary Era”: A Review Essay

Abstract This review essay examines three recent works that reconsider the Age of Revolutions through imperial, cultural, and material frameworks: Trevor Burnard and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy’s Republic and Empire , Zara Anishanslin’s The Painter’s Fire , and Ashli White’s Revolutionary Things . Read together, these books demonstrate the limits of nationally bounded narratives of the American Revolution and instead locate revolutionary politics within networks of imperial conflict, artistic production, material exchange, and circulation across the Atlantic world. Particular attention is given to their treatment of slavery and race, the loyal colonies of the British Empire, transatlantic artists, and the political lives of objects. The essay argues that these different methodologies collectively reveal an infrastructure of revolution in which people, things, images, and information moved across imperial and national boundaries. Their appearance during the United States semiquincentennial also raises questions about how material culture continues to shape the commemoration and interpretation of revolution.