Revolutions: A New History

by Donald Sassoon

Revolutions is a sparkling account of political upheaval and the power of history. We think of revolutions as events, like the Fall of the Bastille or the Storming of the Winter Palace. In reality they take decades to burn out, if they ever do. Donald Sassoon engagingly reappraises some of the most celebrated. The English Civil War that killed a king and inaugurated parliamentary rule. The American War of Independence that ejected the British but ignored slavery. The French Revolution that gave us the Rights of Man and years of instability. The national revolutions that unified Italy and Germany. The Russian and Chinese Revolutions that changed the twentieth century. He adroitly compares these landmarks to the rebellions, coups and tumults that time forgot.

It is a history rich in irony. How 'Yankee Doodle Dandy' was first sung by English troopers to make fun of dishevelled American colonials. How 'revolution' became a word de jour, when no one has convincingly defined what it means. As Sassoon shows in this tour de force account, they usually catch revolutionaries themselves by surprise. and the consequences of them are difficult to fathom. Revolutions will change the way you think about the transformative moments in history, both big and small.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

544 pages, Hardcover

First published November 18, 2025

About the author

Donald Sassoon is Emeritus Professor of Comparative European History at Queen Mary, University of London.

Reviews

[History Today]

Much of the world’s population lives under revolutionary regimes. Cambodia, China, France, Greece, Haiti, Iran, Ireland, Mexico, Nicaragua, the United States, even the United Kingdom, that distant descendant of the Glorious Revolution: all entered their modern histories with a revolution. And that’s not even to speak of decolonisation in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, the post-Soviet sphere after 1991, or the ambiguous aftershocks of the Arab Spring in 2011. Most countries have put their revolution behind them. Others simply cannot stop rehashing it, the US most conspicuously (and not just thanks to the semiquincentennial in 2026). All helped to make revolution a hallmark of what it means to be modern.

For much of the 20th century, revolution’s role in midwifing modernity rendered it a compelling subject for historians, sociologists, and students of politics. Some of social science’s greatest hits treated revolution comparatively, from Crane Brinton’s The Anatomy of Revolution (1938) via Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution (1963) to Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions (1979). But then the field fell strangely quiet. So-called and often self-styled ‘revisionists’ shrank individual revolutions to merely national or local events. Grand causal accounts gave way to histories of accident and contingent conjunctures. And the growing awareness of revolution’s human toll – the Terror and the Great Leap Forward; Stalin and Mao’s famines; the camps and the killing fields – cast a dark shadow over the promises of revolution. As a result, big thinkers moved on to other topics. The great days of revolution – that most future-oriented of collective human projects – seemed to be firmly in the past.

And yet, if Dan Edelstein’s The Revolution to Come and Donald Sassoon’s Revolutions: A New History are anything to go by, revolution is back, and in a major way, spanning two millennia in Edelstein’s case but a mere four centuries or so for Sassoon. Sassoon writes in the great tradition of Brinton and Skocpol, lining up a rollcall of revolutions – English, French, 19th-century European, Russian, Chinese – for comparative inspection. Edelstein, meanwhile, masterfully combines the intellectual history of revolution with the experience of revolution all the way from the Peloponnesian War to our populist present. Sassoon points back to the heyday of revolutionary studies; Edelstein shows the way forward.

You can read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...

David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University. His most recent book is Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (Yale University Press, 2017).

[Rhys Morris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very readable and enjoyable history book that takes a long-term view of the key revolutions in world history - the English Civil War (deposition of Charles I), the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the October revolution and the Chinese revolution (or ascent of the CCP).

Sassoon makes out that each of these revolutions actually takes decades to settle and the effects to be reliably felt. He starts with the English revolution, which doesn’t end until the Glorious Revolution and works his way chronologically to the Chinese Communist Party, who spent decades building a base before eventually controlling China in 1949.

It would be too much to describe where he begins and ends each revolution but the writing is convincing, interesting and very digestible. It gave me a genuinely new perspective on how important each was as a world event, a good observation on how few revolutions have been exported ideologically and a compelling narrative of the actors in these key moments - also acknowledging that the definition of a revolution itself is loose and difficult to pin down.

Recommend to anyone with even a passing interest in history!

[Varad · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here is the review of Revolutions: A New History I wrote for the Washington Examiner:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/pr...


VM
Wednesday 12/31/25

[Wyatt Browdy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book but Verso really needs to clean up the editing. I think the definition of revolution is too loose (see Perry Anderson’s Modernity and Revolution)