When I first arrived in the United States on a Fulbright fellowship in 1995, the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island, was my new academic home. An unrivaled repository of books published on the Americas from Columbus's days to those of Bolívar, the JCB also offered a superb environment for intellectual exchange with fellow Americanists and Atlanticists. It was therefore no punishment to return to Providence during the academic year 2006-07 on a Mellon InterAmericas fellowship.

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... I would like to thank Director and Librarian Ted Widmer and his staff for providing all the conditions in which scholarship can thrive. Most of this book was written at the library, upstairs and downstairs, inspired by conversations with other scholars using the collection. Particularly stimulating were the discussions I had with Guillaume Aubert and Lyman Johnson, experts respectively on French and Spanish America. Outside of Providence, Mark Peterson and one of the manuscript's anonymous reviewers helped me tremendously with their comments and insights. Last but not least, I have benefited from the support of Aviva Ben-Ur, Alison Games, and Philip Morgan. This book also bears the imprint of Clark University, where I teach a seminar every other year on the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. Different cohorts of students have thus contributed to my ideas about the individual revolutions and their connections. I am grateful as well to my colleague Thomas Kühne for inviting me to speak about the revolutions in our department's colloquium, which offered plenty of food for thought. Finally, my thanks to Debbie Gershenowitz, the history editor at NYU Press and herself a Clark alumna, for approaching me about this book project and then sheperding it through the publication process.