Age of Revolutions
The Age of Revolutions denotes the wave of political upheavals between roughly 1760 and 1840 that overturned monarchies and empires and reshaped ideas of sovereignty, rights, and nationhood.
Definition
The period of roughly 1760 to 1840 marked by a connected series of political revolutions and independence movements across the Atlantic world and beyond.
Scope
This area surveys the interconnected revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment, the American and French Revolutions, the Haitian and Latin American independence movements, and their global reverberations. It treats these as linked events in an Atlantic and global context, examining their causes, ideologies, and contested legacies, and the historiographical frameworks—democratic, social, and global—through which historians have interpreted them.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- What linked the American, French, Haitian, and Latin American revolutions?
- How did Enlightenment ideas relate to revolutionary action?
- Were these revolutions primarily political, social, or both?
- How did the revolutions reshape ideas of citizenship, rights, and the nation?
Key concepts
- popular sovereignty
- rights of man
- nationalism
- Atlantic revolutions
- the dual revolution
Key theories
- The dual revolution
- Eric Hobsbawm argued that the period was defined by a 'dual revolution'—the political French Revolution and the economic British Industrial Revolution—that together created the modern world.
- The democratic revolution thesis
- R. R. Palmer interpreted the era as a single transatlantic 'democratic revolution' driven by a shared struggle over popular sovereignty and aristocratic privilege across Europe and America.
History
The notion of an 'age of revolutions' was developed by mid-twentieth-century historians such as Palmer and Hobsbawm, who linked previously separate national revolutions into a single transatlantic story. More recent scholarship by Armitage, Subrahmanyam, and Bayly has placed the revolutions in a global frame.
Debates
- Atlantic versus global framing
- Historians debate whether the revolutions are best understood within an Atlantic world or within a wider global context including Asian and African developments.
- Political versus social interpretation
- Scholars dispute whether the revolutions were chiefly contests over political rights and sovereignty or were driven by class and social conflict.
Key figures
- Eric Hobsbawm
- R. R. Palmer
- David Armitage
- C. A. Bayly
- Lynn Hunt
Related topics
Seminal works
- hobsbawm1962
- palmer1959
- bayly2004
Frequently asked questions
- Which revolutions does this period include?
- Most commonly the American, French, Haitian, and Spanish American independence revolutions, along with related upheavals; historians increasingly include events beyond the Atlantic as well.
- Why group these revolutions together?
- Because they shared ideas about sovereignty and rights, influenced one another, and unfolded in an interconnected world; the grouping is an interpretive frame that historians continue to debate.