Looking at America through the Irish prism and employing a comparative approach, leading and emerging scholars of early American and Atlantic history interrogate anew the relationship between imperial reform and revolution in Ireland and America, offering fascinating insights into the imperial whole of which both places were a part. Revolution would eventually stem from the ways the Irish and Americans looked to each other to make sense of imperial crisis wrought by reform, only to ultimately create two expanding empires in the nineteenth century in which the Irish would play critical roles.

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Ireland and America: Empire and Revolution1. How the Local Can Be Global and the Global Local: Ireland, Irish Catholics, and European Overseas Empires, 1500-19002. The American Revolution and the Uses and Abuses of Ireland3. Empire and Resistance: Reflections on the American and Irish Revolutions4. The Path Not Taken: American Independence and the Irish Counterpoint5. Peasants, Soldiers, and Revolutionaries: Interpreting Irish Manpower in the Age of Revolutions6. Dominant Minorities: Irish and Jamaican White Protestants in the British Empire in the 1780s7. An Empire of Tracts: Mapping Landscapes of Property in the British Atlantic World8. The Reformation in the Age of Jefferson9. The Ideology of Imperial Reform: Enlightened Absolutism and the American Colonies10. A Comparison of the Responses of the Loyal British Colonies to the American Revolution11. The Strange Afterlife of the Declaration of Independence: The State of Franklin, 1784-c. 178912. The Contract for America13. Becoming Co-Imperialists: Anglo-Americans and the First Opium WarEpilogue: Imperial Peoples: America, Ireland, and the Making of the Modern WorldNotes on ContributorsIndex