What the long nineteenth century contains is a period of revolutions in politics, economics, culture, and social life. The word revolution often makes us think of rebellion and war. While that is often part of it, the word really just means “change”—on a pretty epic scale. Some changes were slow. The development of nationalism and its spread around the world was so gradual that its full story goes beyond even the end of this unit, and it has become one of the most powerful forces in the way people act today. As for the more dramatic events of change, there were political revolutions in this period that created the most democratic and liberal nation-states of the age. In this unit, we look at the political transformations that altered the way communities were governed and how people participated in government.

Political change in the Long Nineteenth Century

To understand political change in the long nineteenth century, we must remember that before this era, government pretty much everywhere in the world was a small group of people making decisions for a larger population. Often, these people ruled by right of birth. Nobles, kings, shahs, emperors, sultans, chieftains, and members of the elite never applied for the job – they inherited it from their parents. They made decisions and wrote laws that suited them, and their commands were carried out by clerks, scribes, soldiers, or servants. Most people had no real political rights or role at all. Some small states were governed by councils, of sorts, in which quite a few people participated. But these were rare exceptions. In 1750, the few ruled the many in almost all parts of the world, and the many had little choice in how they were ruled.

After 1750, things began to change. Today’s world of nation-states, where it’s common for many or most of the population to have some say in how they are governed, is a world that started with those changes. The new ideas from this period are generally called liberal political ideas, from the word liberty, suggesting people should have the freedom to govern themselves, as a group and as individual.

Three approaches to studying political change

Enlightenment

In this unit, we look at this change in three ways. First, we examine how intellectual and economic changes leading up to the long nineteenth century set the stage for wider political participation. In the years before 1750, new ideas had been circulating around the world, and the European colonies in the Americas were listening. Trade-hungry European merchants, religious travelers, and others had brought back ideas from around the world, including new concepts about technology, government, religion, and individuality. These moments of bursts of new technologies and ideas have come to be called the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.

Some of this new thinking called for greater personal and group rights. It’s a sad fact that history is full of great ideas that didn’t go anywhere. But this time there were different groups of people who found these concepts useful, even if for different reasons. For starters, those who were economically oppressed, like enslaved people in the Americas and peasants in Europe, had everything to gain. The notion of more individuals getting a say in government seemed to promise liberation and a better life. At the same time, wealthy people saw the revolutions as a chance to take power from the kings and nobles who ruled them. Then there were the business people – plantation owners and merchants in the European empires in the Americas and Europe – who thought they could profit from the changes called for in these new ideas. Economics and politics came together in these revolutions to help these groups of people get a share of government for the first time. But the bright glow of the “Enlightenment” did not fully address the darkness of oppression. Far from it. Many more people – particularly women and the enslaved – still lacked basic political rights and a share in government.

Political revolution

In the second part of this unit, we look more closely four major political revolutions of this era. We see how the Haitian, French, American, and Latin American revolutions were born from the economics and ideas of this era. We follow each one to see their causes and consequences, and how they influenced each other. We also look at the limits of these revolutions – who got to participate in the new politics in each place, and who did not.

Nationalism

Finally, we explore these changes through one of the principal ideas that emerged from them – nationalism. Nationalism is the idea that a people should rule, and govern, a state of their own. It is tied to another important idea from this era: sovereignty, meaning “self-rule”. Nationalism played an important role in the creation of a Haitian nation, a French nation, an American nation, and many new nations in Latin America. Each nation – defined in this context as a community of people – wanted their own state,¹ and each of them got it. But nationalism didn’t end with these revolutions. It found expression in the creation of more nations throughout this era. It played a role in the birth of the nations of Italy and Germany, which had previously been dozens of smaller European states. It led ethnic minorities within large empires to argue that they deserved a state of their own. It led to revolts in the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg Empire, and other big states. In China and India, nationalism played a role in rebellions, though these were ultimately unsuccessful.

Liberal political ideas and nationalism would continue to have an impact well after the long nineteenth century. But we really see their birth in this era. They were among the most consequential types of changes in an era of many revolutions, helping to create the modern world we live in today.

1 Okay, state can be a confusing word. Here it means a country, though it can also mean a province or territory within a country. The United States of America is one state in this sense, but it contains 50 territories that are called states in the other sense of the word. In this course, we only use the word state to mean a country with laws, borders, and self-government.