The Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775-1848

A major intellectual history of the American Revolution and its influence on later revolutions in Europe and the Americas

The Expanding Blaze is a sweeping history of how the American Revolution inspired revolutions throughout Europe and the Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jonathan Israel, one of the world's leading historians of the Enlightenment, shows how the radical ideas of the American founders set the pattern for democratic revolutions, movements, and constitutions in France, Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Greece, Canada, Haiti, Brazil, and Spanish America. The book traces how American efforts to implement Radical Enlightenment ideas drove revolutions abroad, as foreign leaders followed the American example and espoused American democratic values. The first major new intellectual history of the age of democratic revolution in decades, The Expanding Blaze returns the American Revolution to its global context.

Jonathan Israel is professor emeritus of modern history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His many books include Revolutionary Ideas and A Revolution of the Mind (both Princeton).