VOL. 2 OVERVIEW - AN AGE OF REVOLUTIONS IN EUROPE AND THE AMERICAS

An Age of Revolutions in Europe and the Americas

The eighteenth century was a time of radical, and often violent, change in Europe and the Americas. The fundamental ways in which industry, government, and society worked were changed forever.

The Industrial Revolution

In late-eighteenth-century England, the industrial revolution completely changed the way people lived and worked (in no small part by changing where they lived and worked).
Populations moved from rural farms to growing urban centers.
Partly as an effort to find new markets for its goods and partly in search of natural resources, England began a concentrated effort to acquire territories abroad, especially in North America.
By the mid-nineteenth century, England (a relatively small island nation) had become the hub of a new world economy.
England's industrial economy grew so quickly that it went unregulated in many ways. This gave rise to dangerous and unfair working conditions for the vast majority of people, including children.
Urban population growth usually outpaced any city's ability to provide for its new inhabitants. This meant cramped and unsanitary living conditions for most people.
Industrializing England saw a series of urban epidemics—including typhoid fever and cholera—though it was primarily the lower class that was affected and not the wealthier middle or upper classes who could afford access to better living conditions.
Yet another result of the industrial boom was expansion of the slave trade, which provided much of the labor in England's colonies.
As England became an increasingly important economic power, it began to have greater and greater effect on other national economies. For example, English textiles, produced using innovative new technologies, were cheaper than what India could produce. This led to deindustrialization in India as laborers moved out of the cities and back into agriculture.

Democratic Revolutions

As the industrial revolution changed the way that people worked for so many in England (and abroad), so too did democratic revolutions change the way that people lived at the most fundamental level.
Revolutionaries in North America and in France argued against long traditions of rule by an unelected monarchy. Instead, they rallied for government for the people, by the people.
In 1776, colonists in North America declared their independence from the English king. Political rule would occur, not via hereditary monarchy, but rather by consent of the governed. The people would elect a president. This was a radical shift in how political power would be determined.
In France, the monarchy ruled with absolute power, and with little care for the majority of people. In 1789, a mob stormed the Bastille (a prison and symbol of royalist power). This marked the beginning of the French Revolution, in which the general citizenry would rise up against an oppressive, tyrannical monarchy.
The new revolutionary government in France insisted on political rule based on reason, not royalist heredity.
The French Revolution, a revolt that saw the public execution of the king, had an impact around the globe, as populations saw the possibility for social uprising that could lead to a fundamentally new form of government.
However, ruling classes also learned the lesson that the French Revolution was teaching, and many feared that their own populations would revolt as well. Many nations, including England, went to war against France.
By 1792, France was at war and in disarray. A radical revolutionary group, the Jacobins, took power from 1793-94. This came to be known as the "Reign of Terror" and was, to many, the worst aspects of the absolute monarchy reborn in revolutionary violence taken too far. The Reign of Terror seemed to repeat the very tyranny that the revolution had fought to overthrow in the first place.
Out of this tumultuous time in French history would emerge a soldier of singular importance: Napoleon Bonaparte. He crowned himself emperor in 1804 and his ambition seemed to know no bounds. He sought (but ultimately failed) to conquer vast territories in Russia and Egypt.
Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo in 1815. And while his rule as emperor was relatively short, its impact was considerable. He ruled as a tyrant but his Napoleonic Code established governance systems throughout Europe (and beyond) that were based not on hereditary power or tradition but on merit and ability.
As Napoleonic ideals (which in part reflected ideals of the French Revolution itself) spread across Europe, they began also to have an effect in European colonies abroad. Inspired by the French and American revolutions, colonies in South America began to protest for their freedom and independence.
The year 1848 marked a high point of revolutionary activity in Europe and abroad as the lower classes began to argue, and to organize, for their rights. Marx and Engels published their famous Communist Manifesto in 1848. In it, they analyzed how workers were fundamental to economic prosperity and that, as such, they should enjoy rights and freedoms that had too long been the purview of an elite few.

Literature in the Age of Revolutions

Literature has always played an important role in revolutionary movements either by providing those movements with grounding principles or by reflecting back to society what revolutions have meant.
The French and American revolutions were grounded in the principles of Enlightenment thinkers, especially their belief in reason as the ultimate guiding principle that would lead to a better society.
Literature can form an important part of a revolutionary spirit as artists decry injustice in their works and as they bring to light social problems that need to be addressed.
Some artists take their role as revolutionaries literally. They do not just depict injustice in their works, but some, like the Cuban poet José Martí, fight as revolutionary soldiers.
The revolutionary spirit of the age was echoed by artists as well, in that many took up the charge to reform art's basic principles, to break away from static traditions that they believed had bound art for too long.
The revolutionary period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries fundamentally reshaped societies in England, continental Europe, and ultimately across the globe. Its lasting impacts are still felt today, as are its tensions: can the revolutionary spirit be taken too far? Is violence in the service of revolution just?