Empire of Consuls: Consulship, Sovereignty, and Empire in the Revolutionary Atlantic (1778-1848)

Simeonov, Simeon Andonov

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Year:: 2021
Contributor:: Simeonov, Simeon Andonov (creator); Rockman, Seth (Advisor); Vorenberg, Michael (Reader); Case, Holly (Reader); Echeverri, Marcela (Reader); Brown University. Department of History (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: Slavery; Empire; Sovereignty; Consuls; State-building; Age of Revolution
Extent:: XI, 339 p.

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Abstract:: Historians have characterized the early nineteenth century as the birth of the modern world, pointing to a series of developments—the collapse of European colonialism in the Americas, the rise of modern nation-states, the abolition of slavery, and the emergence of new notions of citizenship—which transformed the old regime of European imperialism into a system of modern nation-states. In accounting for these changes, scholars have largely adopted Max Weber’s model of the nation-state, comprehending these Atlantic transformations as driven by the governmental apparatuses of discrete, territorially bounded nation-states. Focusing on the poorly understood consular institutions which proliferated in the early-nineteenth-century Atlantic world, this dissertation argues that, contrary to Weberian assumptions, agents claiming extraterritorial authority played an integral role in the making of modern notions of sovereignty, citizenship, and universal human rights. The dissertation mobilizes new sources from a dozen archives in the United States, Spain, France, Great Britain, and Cuba to show that such major developments as the standardization of the passport, the invention of the category of undocumented migrants, and the emergence of universal human rights were not the product of centralized policymaking at national capitals but the result of dynamic exchanges between Atlantic consuls and a host of people displaced by revolutionary turmoil. The dissertation deploys an “outside-in” methodology at the intersection of diplomatic history and critical approaches to state formation, migration, and slavery and abolition, to maintain that consuls’ complex interactions with refugees, exiles, deserters, women, indigenous nations, and free and enslaved people of color precipitated a slew of reforms which cohered a set of loosely administered imperial policies into an integrated system of Atlantic governance. With its increasingly important place in Atlantic affairs, the United States became a major site for the negotiation of modern consular authority—from the U.S.-French Consular Convention of 1778-1788, through the interiorization of consular authority by a set of U.S. and foreign consuls in the French revolutionary wars, to the “upstreaming” of slave-based plantation hinterlands on the eve of the U.S.-Mexican War (1846-1848) at the end of the Age of Revolution.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2021

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Simeonov, Simeon Andonov, "Empire of Consuls: Consulship, Sovereignty, and Empire in the Revolutionary Atlantic (1778-1848)" (2021). History Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:6n37y3zt/

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History Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the History department.
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