Can the story of a pear help us understand the rise of democracy in the West? This talk uses the career of Louis-Augustin Bosc, a French revolutionary and botanist—and namesake of the familiar pear—to explore the ambiguous political legacy of the Atlantic revolutions. The talk argues that revolutionary movements in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were united not just by a set of similar political structures and ideologies but by their reliance on a matrix of old regime, eighteenth-century cultural practices. These old regime practices left a common and illiberal stamp on the polities and political traditions that they helped to create.

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is a historian of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. He focuses on the political and cultural history of Europe and the Americas in the age of revolution, with particular attention to the transnational influences that shaped modern national politics. He received his PhD in history from Columbia University in 2011, with a dissertation on epistolarity and revolutionary organizing, and then in 2015 published a first book on a different topic: "Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution" (Belknap/Harvard). His current book project is a wide-angle cultural history of the Atlantic age of revolutions, from the 1760s through the 1820s, which rethinks the era’s role in creating modern democratic politics. Nathan also maintains interests in early modern legal history; historical methods and historiography; and histories of material culture.

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