"Corresponding Republics" is a study of how letter writing practices shaped elite political organizing during the early years of the American, Dutch and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth century. The heart of the project is a study of revolutionary leaders' correspondence and epistolary practices. Letters were the lifeblood of all early modern politics--the means to share information, develop strategies and resolve internecine disputes. This was particularly true of the eighteenth-century Atlantic patriot parties, which all faced the challenge of building cohesive movements in the fragmented political landscape of the old regime. Yet even though most studies of revolutionary politics make heavy use of private correspondence, nobody had yet examined the ways in which patriots' reliance on private letters and networks shaped the revolutions' broader political cultures. "Corresponding Republics" argues that the distinctive old regime private correspondence practices of patriots in each region persisted into the revolutionary period. These practices, which played a crucial role in patriots' political self-fashioning, helped produce different kinds of political networks and cultures of patriot organizing. Though by no means the whole explanation for the three revolutions' different courses, epistolary practices are an essential and untold part of that story. The main sources for the project are manuscript letters in American and European archives. The first three chapters of the dissertation examine inter-colonial organizing during the first years of the American Revolution. Chapters One and Two offer a revised view of the efforts by Sons of Liberty, as the patriot leaders called themselves, to build a cohesive inter-colonial patriot party from 1765 to 1772. They document patriots' deep immersion in mercantile correspondence and their persistence in using it after 1765. Yet this style, which raised high barriers to posing questions or engaging in debate, made it difficult for patriot leaders to have tactical discussions and coordinate their activities across the colonies. The Sons instead created a largely symbolic agreement on general principles of resistance. Chapter Three focuses on the developing relationship after 1772 between the patriots' private networks and public committees of correspondence. It shows how private letter writing helped the Sons organize formal inter-colonial corresponding committees in 1773, which reflected the private networks' focus on information transmission rather than discussion. Not until the meeting of the First Continental Congress in 1774 did patriot leaders develop an inter-colonial network whose affective depth enabled tactical and ideological debate. And even then, the patriots' epistolary tools still encouraged them to paper over serious differences about political strategy and ideology in order to maintain the unity of the colonies. The second half of the dissertation uses studies of national organizing in the Dutch and French Revolutions to examine what was distinctive about the Sons of Liberty's organizing efforts. The underlying problems the patriot movements confronted, I argue, were similar: like their American counterparts, Dutch and French patriots sought to build a cohesive political movement on a national scale through correspondence. In practice, however, the process differed significantly. French Jacobin leaders drew on a pre-revolutionary tradition of scholarly epistolarity, which encouraged discussion and dialogue among participants. These qualities helped them develop epistolary communities far more tightly knit than those of their American counterparts. This proved to be both an asset and a liability. It helped them forge a high degree of ideological and tactical unity within the movement. But it also made it more difficult for them to avoid internal disagreements, contributing to the serious internal dissention in 1792 that foreshadowed the eruption of violence among patriot leaders. The Dutch patriot elites, for their part, created highly hierarchical private and public networks. The division between the two types of networks, heightened by their reliance on courtly epistolary habits, inhibited their efforts to forge alliances with the growing popular militia movement. These divisions were a factor in the Dutch patriots' failure, in the short term, to successfully achieve their goal of seizing and holding national political power.

What role did documents play in the governance of the British Empire during an age of unprecedented geopolitical transformation? Paperwork, Governance, and Archive in the British Empire During the Age of Revolutions answers this question by examining the role of paperwork in British imperial governance in the Atlantic World during the eras of the American and French Revolutions. The dissertation argues that paperwork served as the facilitative technology through which administrative interactions between metropolitan officials and their imperial servants were conducted. Through the creation and circulation of particular material forms, late eighteenth century bureaucrats across the different offices involved in imperial administration–including the Board of Trade, the Admiralty, the Secretary of State, and the Customs–articulated and enforced an ‘imperial constitution’ that elevated the power of royal sovereignty in the governance of the British empire. This role of paperwork remained consistent throughout the late eighteenth century despite the pressures of revolution and war that transformed the imperial state in other respects. But at the end of the eighteenth century, imperial administrators developed a new approach to documents that had previously been pronounced only in domestic governance: the transformation of the archive from its role as a container of documents, into an active site of policy-making. Paperwork–meaning any document produced either in response to official demand, or written by bureaucrats in the execution of the processes of administration; and the constellations of practices in which bureaucrats engaged when using them–made Britain’s otherwise ungovernable empire cohere across vast oceanic and territorial expanses. Through the dispatch and circulation of particular forms, the different institutions responsible for exercising authority over imperial possessions in the Atlantic Basin enacted the specific administrative tasks that preserved the political viability of the imperial constitution. Every act of governance involved the seemingly limitless production of paperwork: from collecting taxes (reliant upon keeping account books and receipts) and navigating ships (dependent upon logbooks and geographical atlases), to negotiating treaties (through diplomatic letter writing and drafting) and maintaining order (requiring the composition and circulation of legal codes). The first chapter of the dissertation provides an overview of the structure and growth of imperial bureaucracy and communications in the British empire during the long eighteenth century. The second, third, fourth, and fifth chapters examine how the central institutions involved in governing the British empire in the Atlantic world, including the Board of Trade; the Secretary of State; the Admiralty; and the Customs and Treasury, used documents. While each of these different institutions relied upon different kinds of documents in executing their administrative tasks, in each case the administrative use of paperwork articulated, enforced, and facilitated the relationships of hierarchy and deference between metropolitan and colonial administrators that characterized sovereignty in the British empire. The administrative use of paperwork, these chapters show, centered upon bureaucrats’ use of documents to demonstrate to their superiors that they understood expectations for proper official conduct, and were acting accordingly. This constitutional and facilitative role of documents, the dissertation argues, continued to inhere in administrative culture during the late eighteenth century despite a set of significant political challenges–notably the American and French Revolutions–to British imperial power. Yet, in one key respect, the material practices of imperial bureaucracy changed in this period. Beginning in the 1790s, administrators began to systematically use the vast archives of paperwork accumulating in the offices and repositories of the British state as sources of knowledge and evidence to inform the development of imperial strategy against the French in Asia, Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. These practices of archival use revived modes of bureaucratic governance that had been developed centuries earlier, and were characteristics of a distinctively ‘early modern’ style of administration. The dissertation concludes by suggesting the complications that this history of the bureaucratic archive introduces for extant accounts of British ‘modernity.’ For over a century, scholarship has fruitfully attended to the ideological origins, political development, and administrative history of the British empire in the long eighteenth century. But virtually all of this research has looked through paperwork for evidence of other phenomena, rather than attempting to understand the significance that contemporaries ascribed to the material forms they used. By accounting for the role of documents in the history of British imperial governance, the dissertation also models an approach to writing the histories of states and empires that departs from both structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives on governance by attending instead to the specificities of bureaucratic practice.

My dissertation examines the question of how the incorporation of literary forms and techniques into written denunciations radicalizes the discursive practices of accusation during the French Revolution. I explore how the exploitation of literary elements such as genre and rhetorical strategies by revolutionary writers increases the scope and virulence of their attacks and contributes to the radicalization in the text of three key figures: the author-narrator, the imagined reader, and the object of denunciation. In the first part, I study the use of these strategies and their impacts on tone and the communication of meaning in two forms of the popular press: the ephemeral newspapers of 1789 (journals with under twenty issues) and the Private Lives (scandalous biographies of important public figures). In part two I show how writers with first-hand knowledge of recent violence and the deadliness of denunciation become confronted with the problem of how to condemn the worst aspects of the Revolution without partaking in incendiary speech themselves. Although still denouncing to a certain extent, these writers also try to resolve this dilemma through plays with perspective and parody. I examine this phenomenon in case studies of three authors who lived through the Revolution and whose writings were impacted to varying degrees by the events of 1789 to 1795: Nicolas Edme Restif de La Bretonne, Louis Sebation Mercier, and the Marquis de Sade. My study is situated at the crossroads of previous historical and literary scholarship on denunciation. Historians examining the practice of denunciation have investigated contemporary debates over calumny and the limits of free speech, the de individualization of the object of attack, and the impact of the period's obsession with transparency on the conceptualization of the denounced individual. These studies concentrate for the most part on political discourses and debates, laws, and the mechanics of the press and print culture. Scholarship analyzing rhetorical and literary aspects of revolutionary texts has slowly begun to emerge, and these literary analyses by historians on clandestine literature have identified important trends and have performed key case studies. My study supplements this existing work by focusing on such neglected areas as the relationship between the author and his imagined reader, while presenting a wider examination of the circulation of discourses between these texts to begin to grasp how these writers responded to, attacked, and adopted the denunciatory culture of their time.

This dissertation examines the architecture of the French, American, and Haitian revolutions as well as the French 1848 Revolution and the Paris Commune. The traditional historiography of neoclassical and Beaux-Arts architecture considers it as coextensive with the establishment of the nation-state, culminating in the institution building of the French Second Empire and postbellum United States under the banner of liberal nationalism. By examining moments of insurrection against the state and spaces outside of the conventional construal of the nation, I complicate this interpretation by highlighting its slippages and crises. My hypothesis is that democracy, as a form of social and political life, is intrinsically anarchic and paradigmatically revolutionary, and that architecture cultivates the aims and paradoxes of revolution. Revolutionary conditions, I argue, render this radical capacity of architecture salient, showing the ultimate incommensurability between architecture and the regimes that determine and delimit it.

In “Translating Revolution in Twentieth-Century China and France,” I examine how the two countries translated each other’s revolutions during critical moments of political and cultural crisis (the 1911 Revolution, the May Fourth Movement (1919), the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), and May 1968 in France), and subsequently (or simultaneously), how that knowledge was mobilized in practice and shaped the historical contexts in which it was produced. Drawing upon a broad range of discourses including political journals, travel narratives, films and novels in French, English and Chinese, I argue that translation served as a key site of knowledge production, shaping the formulation of various political and cultural projects from constructing a Chinese national identity to articulating women’s rights to thinking about radical emancipation in an era of decolonization. While there have been isolated studies on the influence of the French Revolution in early twentieth-century China, and the impact of the Chinese Cultural Revolution on the development of French Maoism and French theory in the sixties, there have been few studies that examine the circulation of revolutionary ideas and practices across multiple historical moments and cultural contexts. In addition, the tendency of much current scholarship to focus exclusively on the texts of prominent French or Chinese intellectuals overlooks the vital role played by translation, and by non-elite thinkers, writers, students and migrant workers in the cross-fertilization of revolutionary discourses and practices. Given that potential solutions to social and political problems associated with modernity were debated through the recurring circulation of translations (and retranslations) of ideas such as “democracy”, “natural rights,” “women’s rights,” and so on, I examine: who was translating whom, and for what purposes? What specific concepts and values are privileged, and why? Taking translation and translingual contact as my point of departure, I illuminate how French and Chinese intermediaries envisioned and attempted to create a just society under fraught historical conditions.