The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1850

by Lester D. Langley

Describes the causes and consequences of the American, Haitian, and Spanish American revolutions.

Genres: History, 19th Century, 18th Century

400 pages, Hardcover

First published November 27, 1996

About the author

Lester Danny Langley is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Georgia.

Reviews

[Michael Mingo · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book's primary issue is that it cannot decide whether or not the audience is familiar with the events it is describing; it will recount the base events of each revolution as though to a neophyte, then assume the reader knows the social structures of each pre-revolutionary society going in. On top of that, the prose style gets downright clumsy at times. The result is a book which is far more difficult to follow than it should be.

[Juan Pérez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Langley has produced a huge work, based on a large amount of material, which seeks to compare the three American revolutions, which led to the emergence of the United States, the slave revolution from which Haiti was born, and the revolution in the colonies of the American Spanish Empire. In the first place, it must be highlighted the effort to summarize a dense and complex history throughout some 100 years of history. Personally, I had not the slightest idea about the slave revolution in Haiti, and what Haiti meant both to the United States (basically, a danger), and to Hispanic America (and perhaps also to Brazil). Bolívar had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with Haiti (Bolívar owned slaves), but finally he asked for help (and note: Bolívar requested help from Haiti) and Haiti put at his disposal ships and 6,000 armed men with whom Bolívar was able to restart the momentum of the revolution. One could almost affirm that the intervention of Haiti was essential for the success of the revolution in Spanish America. We must also highlight the history of the United States, a people of European emigrants who displaced the Native Americans from their territories, without there being any attempt, spontaneous or thoughtful, of some kind of miscegenation (on the contrary). This is not particularly emphasized by Langley, but it is clear from his narrative. Probably the most relevant element that develops Langley on the revolution in British America is that with it materialized the homo economicus, the self-concerned subject, willing to produce and compete for a market, which had been doing for a long time, and that finally produced the imperial ideology of "manifest destiny". It is this homo economicus the foundation of the United States.

Either way, Langley stayed on the debit. He proposes at the beginning of his work that history should be understood as a complex system, in the sense that it is given within the Theory of Chaos, or complex dynamic systems. But he fails to articulate the concept well in the rest of the work, except to mention every so often that a common characteristic in the three revolutions was chaos, which some did not know how to manage correctly. Nor does he deliver a unified theory or a comparison of revolutions that goes beyond a somewhat haphazard issue. For example, he does not give a convincing explanation about the different destinations among the three revolutions. He argues that the United States was more successful in integrating "often disparate and conflictive social groups in the postrevolutionary era and in the molding of a citizenry" (page 237), but he comes to nothing very categorical. From my point of view, the United States was more "successful" because, among other things, it did not confront the issue of miscegenation. Nor Langley took into account that the Spanish colonies were a gigantic territory, many times more extensive than the original Thirteen Colonies, which in total did not go beyond having a territory smaller than that of Venezuela, and with an economic development that at that time was already lower than the British colonies. In this gigantic territory, in addition, there were different realities, from the administrative, social, economic and even political point of view, as well as communication difficulties, geographical barriers, giant extensions, "the planetary pampas" (Neruda). In spite of everything, the work of Langley deserves to be read by all those who want to know something more about the history of the conflicting relations between the Americas.