The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760-1840

by David Armitage, Sanjay Subrahmanyam

A distinguished international team of historians examines the dynamics of global and regional change in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Providing uniquely broad coverage, encompassing North and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and China, the chapters shed new light on this pivotal period of world history.

Offering fresh perspectives
- The American, French, and Haitian Revolutions
- The break-up of the Iberian empires
- The Napoleonic Wars

The volume also presents ground-breaking treatments of world history from an African perspective, of South Asia's age of revolutions, and of stability and instability in China. The first truly global account of the causes and consequences of the transformative 'Age of Revolutions', this collection presents a strikingly novel and comprehensive view of the revolutionary era as well as rich examples of global history in practice.

Genres: History, World History, European History, Politics, American History

301 pages, Paperback

First published December 18, 2009

About the author

David Armitage is an English historian known for his writings on international and intellectual history. He is chair of the history department and Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University.

Reviews

[Robert Jeens · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a decent attempt to expand upon Eric Hobsbawm’s “The Age of Revolution.” Hobsbawm concentrated upon the British Industrial Revolution and French Revolution, how they were generated, their course, and their effects. He saw them as European phenomena which spread to the rest of the world. This volume, on the other hand, expands that to global history, the "Age of Revolutions” in terms of comparisons and “connections, both long-term and long-range" across the world. From the Seven Years’ War to the beginning of the British – Chinese Opium War. Rather than purely European events, some of their causes lay outside Europe, and rather than looking at them from a purely European perspective, it looks at events from the perspectives of non-European indigenous elites and commoners.
This is not a consistent narrative, but a series of papers that were given at a conference on Global History. Also, the authors are not lucky graduate students but major historians in their fields, including C. A. Bayly, who wrote “The Birth of the Modern World”, Gary Nash, an outstanding expert on the American Revolution, and Kenneth Pomeranz, a China expert and author of “The Great Divergence”. We are shown, variously, how French debts and ideas from the American Revolution helped lead to the crisis that led to the French Revolution, how profits from Britain’s colonies helped boost wages in Britain, which helped lead to the Industrial Revolution, and how the wars that accompanied the French Revolution affected states and empires in Java. There is much more. The prose depends upon the author. It ranges from straightforward to overly convoluted intellectual babble. Choose what you want to read and ignore the rest.
While I think that trying to put the Age of Revolution into a global context is useful, I wonder if the definition of “revolution” is too broad? By writing about momentous events in the rest of the world, we are left to wonder if they are as momentous as the Industrial and French Revolutions. The fall of the Mughal Empire, the breakup into independent Hindu states and the subsequent conquest by the British of India was momentous, but did it have world-wide effects like the Industrial Revolution? The independence of the Spanish colonies in the Americas was surely important for the people who lived through it but was a result of the French Revolution and its effects were not nearly as broad. The idea of “concept creep” which has happened to words like racism and genocide might be applicable here too.
I learned new things from this book. I did not know about the connections between the French philosophes and Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, and how they tried to bring those men around to abolitionism. There was an excellent comparison of the treatment of refugees from the French and American Revolutions. How did Napoleon’s regime present itself to the people in Egypt? Compared to the wave of crises that rippled through the world in this period, the Ottoman and Chinese Empires were relatively stable.
Any idea can be brought too far and that includes global history. I think it is useless and mistaken to deny the centrality of the Industrial and French Revolutions that Hobsbawm wrote about, or their European character. This book does not do that. It is merely trying to add to the story using the methods of Global History and mostly does so usefully.

[Another Old Man Historian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book although I would say it does presuppose you are familiar with this period already.

I liked having chapters written by different specialists, Napoleon dealing with Muslim culture was interesting, and if I enjoyed the specialist enough I looked into their sources later.

Not for someone who doesn’t study history or like it at a high level.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not intended for undergraduates—at least not mine! Historiographical and assumes a lot of knowledge.

[Stephen Harrison · Rating 3 out of 5]

This books looks at the "Age of Revolution" from a variety of angles. Each chapter is by a different author and looking at a different aspect of the era. The time period is largely built around the French Revolution. The starting point is the winding down of the Seven War, which was a long-term catalyst for the French Revolution. The ending point looks at its long-term repercussions. Like an edited compilation, the results are mixed.

The first two chapters look at the revolutions in North America and France and largely look at the issue of slavery. The first chapter distinguishes the "War for American Independence" and the subsequent "American Revolution", putting the latter as a time more ripe for abolition. It looks at Washington having the opportunity to set the precedent of presidents freeing their slaves before taking office, but backing off just before pulling the trigger. It also talks about criticism from Europe about the hypocrisy of "universal rights" in a country that allows slavery. It includes Lafayette's bitterness that Washington did not do more to work for abolition. The chapter on the French Revolution looked at the twists and turns of abolitionism in France and its colonies. Both chapters highlight missed opportunities for the talk about rights to be implemented in a universal way.

Another interesting chapter was on Napoleon in Egypt pretending to be a Muslim. It had a lot of interesting angles, focusing on how little the French understood Islam and how awkward their creolization of Islam and European Enlightenment ended up being. They perceived of Islam as easily translatable from Christianity, seeing Imams as natural correlations to French priests and philosophes, because of their scholarly training. But they didn't understand that imams didn't view Islam as a vocation but as a way of life. The secularism of educated French just didn't translate to imams. The French also struggled reaching the common Egyptians who tended towards more mystical forms of Islams, while Enlightened French revolutionaries disdained superstition. End result, the attempt to portray themselves as Muslim was unsuccessful (although with some minor benefits) as was the overall occupation. And Napoleon disavowed the attempt when he returned to France.

The last substantive chapter dealt with China, which was odd because it essentially said that the international situation wasn't that important for China in this period. It mentions some issues of the opium trade and silver supply, but most of the chapter looks at the Qing government dealing with internal problems, especially financial ones.

Overall, this book felt more like a gimmick to get a bunch of top historians together to write on issues that were only nominally connected. I was interested, but non-history nerds would hate it.

[Flynn Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good historiographical primer.

[Al Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The collection of various perspectives of the major revolutions during the time period gives enough variance of various 3rd and 4th generation revolutionary theory that the reader will better understand the period in Europe with regards to revolutionary trends, causes, and outcomes. However, the book is Eurocentric and follows a 3rd Generation Revolutionary contextualization in that it omits many revolutions outside of a European context. This was of course the apparent focus of the book, to look at revolutions in terms of the Englightenment paradigm.

But the reader should be aware that there were many other revolutions in the Middle East, East Asia, and Southeast Asia that were omitted even as the editors did well to put in Java, China, etc by authors such as Robert Travers and Peter Carey. But this is acknowledged not as a fault of the book, but on available material, as mention that "convergent revolutions" of agrarian based societies in Asia have yet to be studied and are only now being brought into study next to the European revolutions. "Yet what still remains a fundamentally synthetic account of these global upheavals has not been systematially tested against specific regional historiographis." (xxiii)

Nevertheless Armitage and Subrahmanyam have edited a good cross section from 1760-1840, including the Palmer debates on the understanding of the American Revolution within this era of "World Crisis" 1760-1840. Overall this is a good stand alone book for an understanding of the overall trends of the era for Europe and the ideological, social, and economic factors that created it.

[Jur · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice collection of articles putting the revolution in a broader context, eg effects on slavery and the Caribbean, colonies in Africa, South America and the Far East, Napoleon's army in the Middle East

[Erica]

Excellent collection of essays. I was a bit surprised that there's nothing here on the significant precursors to the German uprising of 1848.