The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It

by Nathan Perl-Rosenthal

A panoramic new history of the revolutionary decades between 1760 and 1825, from North America and Europe to Haiti and Spanish America, showing how progress and reaction went hand in hand

The revolutions that raged across Europe and the Americas over seven decades, from 1760 to 1825, created the modern world. Revolutionaries shattered empires, toppled social hierarchies, and birthed a world of republics. But old injustices lingered on and the powerful engines of revolutionary change created new and insidious forms of inequality. 
 
In The Age of Revolutions , historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal offers the first narrative history of this entire era. Through a kaleidoscope of lives both familiar and unknown—from John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Napoleon to an ambitious French naturalist and a seditious Peruvian nun—he retells the revolutionary epic as a generational story. The first revolutionary generation, fired by radical ideas, struggled to slip the hierarchical bonds of the old order. Their failures molded a second generation, more adept at mass organizing but with an illiberal tint. The sweeping political transformations they accomplished after 1800 etched social and racial inequalities into the foundations of modern democracy. 
 
A breathtaking history spanning three continents, The Age of Revolutions uncovers how the period’s grand political transformations emerged across oceans and, slowly and unevenly, over generations.

Genres: History, World History, Politics, American, Nonfiction, French Revolution, American Revolution

560 pages, Hardcover

Published February 20, 2024

Reviews

[Tyler Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is really good!

If I have a critique, it is actually a little too short to fully make its point- the sections on how art, urban spaces, literature, and the like were shaped by the Atlantic Revolutionary Period were fascinating, but felt like asides. It's funny to say about a >500 page book, but it really should be a great deal longer.

Recontextualizing the American Revolution in particular was fantastic- I'm reminded of Adrian Goldsworthy reframing Constantine as a fairly typical barracks emperor in the (otherwise deeply uneven) How Rome Fell.

[Noah · Rating 4 out of 5]

(4.5 ✶) The Age of Revolutions is a broad look at the revolutionary years between 1760 and 1825, focusing on the American, French, Haitian, and Spanish-American revolutions, specifically the impact of two main revolutionary generations and how each generation affected the character and durability of the revolutions.

For the first revolutionary generation, the author uses the biographical stories of people involved in the movements to provide an extra narrative dimension to his arguments, ranging from John Adams and Toussaint Louverture to lesser known figures like Madre Maria De La Concepción Rivadeneyra, a Peruvian nun. I found this an effective tool for providing a more individual perspective on the environment of revolution, but wish that this tactic was continued more during the discussion of the second revolutionary generation.

I found this book to be very detailed, and despite the broad geographical range of discussion, the author made connections between each revolution both to each other and to his central arguments effectively.

My thanks to Basic Books and NetGalley for providing an advanced reader copy.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an ambitious project. One of the author's objectives is to extend a thread through a number of revolutions-changes in government in the US, South America and the Caribbean, and Europe. It is apparently well researched, and as much as I am interested in his premise, in my view he does not succeed to the extend it seems he was seeking. He does highlight the essential need to have cross-class-culture cooperation to remove the powers that be.

Dr Perl-Rosenthal does include a number of mini-biographies/life vignettes of people instrumental to his story; those were of significant interest to me.

[Ronald Mann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magisterial discussion of the two generations surrounding the turn of the 18th century. The basic premise is that the revolutions of the first generation failed because they were too elitist and could not gain the support of the masses. It took until the next generation, the second decade of the 19th century, for revolutionary groups to learn both to manage and wield authority and gain the support of the masses. I expect this will be a classic text read widely in college courses twenty years from now as the classic explanation of the period. Distinctive for its use of not-currently-common examples, such as Genoa and so much of South America.

[Yong Feng · Rating 4 out of 5]

A broad look at revolutions in Europe and the Americas from 1760 to 1825, and how many of their outcomes were illiberal ones that largely preserved existing hierarchies. The author argues this is because the successful revolutions were a result of coalitions between elites and ordinary people, who tended to preserve divisions or create new ones e.g. against indigenous and slave populations. The writing combines a focus on individual stories with the broader march of history, making it an engaging read, though the large number of places and events covered means that each is dealt with briefly, and left me slightly lost amidst the many jumps across space and time.

[Erika]

Would definitely consider assigning this to an Age of Revolutions class - an excellent synthesis that also provides new insights and uses biography very effectively as a window into the intimate side of this tumultuous period.

[Jarne Verschraegen · Rating 3 out of 5]

started to bore after a while finished using the audiobook