Prints, Partisans and Peripheries: Global Politics and Visual Culture in Revolutionary France
For good or for bad, the French Revolution occupies a paradigmatic, pivotal space in most histories of modernity, and it is unsurprising that it should also figure prominently in discussion of globalization in the early modern world, one of a range of potential inaugural, or even terminal moments. Unlike the triumphalist, linear narratives traditionally associated with modernity, globalization pluralizes both modernity and its many pasts, with which it inevitably overlaps. In this paper I ask how our understanding of revolutionary history is borne out or challenged by a re-reading in terms of current debates on globalization, and what role we might ascribe to print culture as an active agent in these processes.