This panel brings together new approaches to the Age of Revolutions that foreground contingency, local interests, and social differences. The papers examine the old Inka road network and “rival geographies” and their central role mobilizing information, ideas, and resources during times of war and violence in the Andes; contested gender norms and values in Lima’s theater scene; gendered forms of political participation and authority in Chile, particularly through rituals and petitions; the itinerant lives of exiles and the wide yet fragile networks they forged; and the ways natural disasters and emotions shaped people’s understandings of political change. Across these cases, revolutionary politics appear less as a linear struggle over independence or constitutionalism than as a contested process in which autonomy, social mobility, gender relations, and access to power were continuously negotiated.

Together, the panel offers a rethinking of change and continuity during the Age of Revolutions, underscoring the period’s uncertainty, instability, and the shifting motivations of the men and women who lived through it.