Robin Blackburn contends that the familiar framing of an age of democratic revolution, drawn from R. R. Palmer and repeated across national histories, collapses once Haiti is left out. Ranging over the American, French, Haitian and Spanish American upheavals, and drawing on diplomatic manoeuvring, abolitionist argument and the responses of writers and artists, he traces how each rising radicalised the next. The decisive break in New World slavery came from Jacobin revolutionaries acting together with the black insurgents of Saint Domingue, and the survival of the Haitian state then shaped policy in Washington, London, Paris and Bolivar's campaigns. Slaveholders in Cuba, Brazil and the United States answered with new political alignments and a broader social base for slavery, while opponents took urgency from the same events, hastening the closure of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807. Blackburn's wider claim is that historiography organised by nation cannot register a period when nations themselves were unstable and intensely entangled.