Reframing the Age of Revolutions: Constitutionalism, Legal Culture, and Plebeians in the Global Iberian World, 1750–1850

Despite advances in the scholarship on the age of revolutions, the place of the Iberian experience in global context remains subject to debate. Should the revolutions of Latin America and the Peninsula be considered as part of the same genealogy as the French and Anglo-American revolutions? Should they be considered revolutions in their own right? To what extent does the study of developments in Iberian Asia complicate the Atlantic framework of the revolutionary era? Historians have given diverse answers to these questions, driving the characterisation of the revolutionary phenomenon in the Iberian world in of much recent literature, especially in the historiography produced in Spanish and Portuguese. This session will analyse the inter-section between legal culture, everyday politics, and social groups, showing the fundamental changes introduced in Iberian societies as a result of revolutionary experiences.