Worlds of Reform

This essay surveys the transnational dimensions of the major reform endeavors that reshaped society and politics in the US in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.  It builds on the work of my Atlantic Crossings (Harvard University Press, 1998) and its extended treatment of social politics in the late-19^th and early-20^th century North Atlantic world.    But it extends that analysis to suggest the essential importance of non-US forces and contexts in understanding the women’s movement, the anti-slavery movement, and the labor movement.  A coda deals with the work of transnational networks of reform, both new left and neoliberal, since the 1960s.  The essay pays particular attention to the networks of transnational reform and (in contrast to studies of diffusion or transfer) to the complex outcomes that they produced.